Larry Kramer was a brutally effective and enduring warrior of the AIDS crisis. MatthewSchneier writes on the world that Kramer helped to make
Larry Kramer, at home in New York in 1993. Photo: Getty Images I read Faggots for the first time earlier this year — guiltily, belatedly. Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel is an acknowledged classic of gay literature, but most of the gay men I know knew of it but hadn’t read it. It was a prerequisite that no longer seemed entirely required.
If it is an odyssey, Larry Kramer , is Odysseus. Or he is Cassandra, wailing her warnings to a deaf world. Or he is Perseus, the monster slayer. Those who describe Kramer always reach for Greek myth; that felt like his natural line. He spent decades railing at an unlistening world. He slew more monsters than any one man should be expected to. His odyssey was from an unhappy childhood and the closet to the frontlines of the bloody battleground of HIV and AIDS.
The author’s copy of Faggots. “No one can be neutral!” Photo: Matthew Schneier Kramer got angry; as time went on, and the death count went up, more and more gay men became angry. Kramer stayed angry. It was a righteous, impatient anger, and it never let up, even as it earned him as many enemies as friends. “When it comes to being an asshole, Larry is a virtuoso with no peer,” Rodger McFarlane, a former lover of his, told The New Yorker.
We live in a world Kramer helped to make. My first HIV test, and some of my subsequent ones, were administered free, confidentially, at GHMC’s clinics, when I was panicked and terrified, knew only the family pediatrician, and had nowhere else to go. That you could speak about AIDS in the New York of my childhood — when the “Decision” comic strips appeared on the subway, the HIV melodrama of Julio and Marisol, when Rent played to packed houses every night — Kramer has a part of that.
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