Larry Kramer (1) (1935–2020)

As a young gay man, recently come out to my family (Thanksgiving Break, how cliche, right) & having then graduated in May; I found I wasn't the carefree "gay" I thought I was going to feel-like. I decided on a break year (which I would need to fund myself...eek!). I got a job, turned it into a successful launch for various positions & industries I would later hold. However, sexually I was socially isolated, virtually everyone I was close to graduated and moved away. When I was given the book show more via USPS, I thought it was meant to be a lighthearted ribbing from a close female dorm mate. After thanking her for the gift (ha-ha), she told me to READ the book, it wasn't meant as a gag. She went to the Village, found a bookstore and talked with the manager & staff about how she could help her friend wandering lost in his rumpled oxfords, chinos, & Topsiders in DC.
The book was a like looking through a window at a world that looked familar, but spoke a different language. I still can quote lines from the book. When finished, I put on my Calvins & grabbed my favorite Lacoste (pre-RL polo) and headed to the gay bookstore that actually sold books. I found an approachable sales guy & tried to explain my situation and if he had any suggestions for further reading?
Quick escape ending, he was done for the day & asked me to dinner. He told me, like college, I was done reading and needed to start doing! I'll leave it there, but 3 yrs later I met the one and just celebrated our 41st Anniversary (11 legal). Oh, ironically, he was a visiting college friend of one of my DC friend and was currently living in Manhattan. show less

Larry Kramer was an outspoken advocate in the 1980s, the early days of the AIDS epidemic. While many in the gay community were caught up in celebrating hard-fought sexual freedoms, Kramer argued that these freedoms must be curtailed somehow to protect against biological disease. This position, unfortunately, won him scorn from many fellow gays. However, he wrote this award-winning play in 1985 to advocate for his position while shining the light on what it was like to be gay in this era. show more Without a doubt, this play humanized the entire confusing experience and teaches us still how to live under threat of disease.

In this work, Ned Weeks, the main protagonist, symbolizes Kramer’s work in the gay community. Ned is a writer who organizes to bring the AIDS agenda to the public’s mind. He shines a light on the hypocrisy of how few resources and publicity are devoted to this epidemic when compared to other recent healthcare scares (like the 1982 Tylenol crisis). Though his organizing efforts are successful, he is pushed out of leadership because he is seen as too radical. Ned simply advocates that the value of life amidst disease should trump any freedoms.

The characters in the play are based on historical figures in Kramer’s life experiences. There is love. There is death. The characters stand out. Ever-moving, they humanize the conflicting cultural forces at play. In 2011, HBO filmed this play and put it on the television. This film version even won kudos from then-president Obama. If you prefer to see plays instead of read them, this film is still available for rental.

It is simultaneously an engaging play and a piece of history. Kramer went on to continue to organize his advocacy and won hard-fought recognition of the AIDS crisis. (Remember, Reagan famously didn’t utter the word “AIDS” until the seventh year of his presidency.) He wrote a follow-up play The Destiny of Me which also won awards. The AIDS epidemic still rages globally despite vaccine and pharmacological efforts. The gay community has continued to win hard-fought rights and acceptance into wider American society.

The play closes on a moving note. It calls us to remember our common humanity amidst crisis – something too easy to forget. I write this review in the midst of another pandemic, and many of the lessons of the AIDS pandemic have been forgotten today. We still attack each other because masks – gasp! – are too restrictive to save human lives. As with Ned, people are pushed away for advocating sane public health measures. We cannot and should not forget the last scene in this book, for it repeats itself in our present history. Likewise, we cannot and should not forget the lives of a marginalized group targeted by biologic agents, for one day, it might be all of us. All this to say, this play has broad relevance to present readers, not just the LGBTQ+ community. show less

It must be going on for twenty years since the last time I read this - I got it down off the shelf again after seeing Larry Kramer talking about the 70s in a TV programme. It's very much a book that could only have been written at one moment in history: an ironic, satirical, but also very affectionate account of the excesses of gay life in New York in the years between Stonewall and AIDS, with a group of characters looking for love, but finding sex.

I was going to write "don't read this book show more if you're easily shocked," but on reflection, that's wrong. The whole point of the book is épater la bourgeoisie. If you're not shocked, ask for your money back. Kramer gleefully depicts in detail almost every imaginable kind of sex act (and some you probably prefer not to imagine), in all the classic settings (the Piers, the Baths, Fire Island, ...) and takes a pot shot at pretty much every sacred cow he can think of — religion, race, family, marriage, youth, politics, literature: nothing is safe. The book created a new spirit of harmony and understanding between gay and straight critics when it was first published: they all hated it equally. Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the dance, published the same year, claimed a mystical, liberating, transformative beauty for the New York gay disco culture; Kramer depicts it as selfish, vain, dirty, hedonistic, profitable and dangerous. Not surprisingly, many gay men who were part of that culture felt that Kramer had let them down.

From the distance of thirty years we don't really have to engage with the politics any more. Hindsight has called off all bets. But we can take pleasure in Kramer's powers of observation and description, and in particular his eccentric, ironic stylistic mix - two parts Damon Runyon, one part underground porn film, two parts Woody-Allenesque cod psychology, and an occasional shot of Henry James. There are some great lists, some delightfully bogus statistics and citations from scientific articles, and of course lots of poor-taste jokes. Suffice it to say that one of the principal characters is called Randy Dildough, a name "combining ... allusions to the American Big Three: sex, money, and food". show less

However lost on critics, not to mention members of the gay establishment at the time, "Faggots" is a brilliant Mepinnean satire that takes as the object of its satire the intellectual conceit of gay sexual liberation, and the notion that gay culture would occupy a leadership position in showing America how to overcome its sexual prudery and commitment to values such as fidelity, monogamy, and true love. In fact, Kramer explores a subculture is which nothing is taboo except for the concept of show more monogamous love between men, which everyone says they want and no one does anything positive to achieve.
The central protagonist in this epic sexual-cultural-historical novel is the screenwriter Ned Lemish, who is a stand in for Larry Kramer. He descends into an underground sex world in New York City, as in Fire Island, in which no position, combination of positions, times and places for sex, or sexual behaviors are off limits. The grand scene occurs when a drop dead gorgeous young man who wants to be a model comes to New York, is given drugs, and is gradually swooped upon by an army of vulturous men, who gang rape him and others until the point of unconsciousness. There is a scene, in Fire Island, of the ultimate sexual masochism, in which a man who refuses to love Fred submits himself to anal fist sex administered by a horde of men who participate in and watch this spectacle as if it has the sacred meaning of a transformational ritual. Kramer deplores the taboo on faithful love, as he deplores the situation where the only way gay men can communicate is through sex and more sex. show less