asked few questions about it, and Fal-
loon was amazed at how docile her new
patient was. “He does nothing like what
you might expect,’’ she told me. “He
doesn’t yell. He doesn’t scream. He is
not even involved to the extent that is
desirable.’’ Still, she convinced Kramer
that the drug was his only route to a
transplant, and a transplant was his only
chance to live.
Kramer struggled to get back in
shape. The day I was with him in Con-
necticut, an ex-Marine drill instructor
stopped by to work out with him in a
gym he had installed in the basement.
He ate as if he were making a serious
run at the Tour de France—weighing
every morsel of food so that he could
be sure to get the most energy out of
each calorie. As Kramer inched his way
up the waiting list, the possibility of
death no longer seemed remote. “Some-
how I never thought it would be me,’’
he said. “That is what my activism has
always been about, really. Me. I wanted
to live, and I expected to be saved.” Now
he wasn’t so sure. Kramer told me tear-
fully that he wanted more time with
David Webster, and that he needed at
least two more years to finish his book,
which he feels will redeem him in the
eyes of literary critics who he believes
have often been unfair. He became ag-
itated easily and on several occasions
grew impatient with me because he didn’t
think I was paying enough attention to
him. The events of September 11th had
delayed my plans to visit, and Kramer
had besieged me with e-mails suggest-
ing that I was backing out, that I wasn’t
worthy and didn’t understand the im-
portance of his writing or his life. “I
don’t want a once-over-lightly charac-
ter sketch with a few anecdotes about
the more outrageous things I might
have said or done,’’ he wrote in one mes-
sage. “You want to write something im-
portant about me that hasn’t been writ-
ten before, fine and great. Otherwise I
don’t think you’re my man.’’L
arry Kramer was born in Bridge-
port, Connecticut, in 1935. His
grandparents on both sides ran grocery
stores. He grew up mostly near Wash-
ington, D.C., the younger of two sons.(His older brother, Arthur, is a success-
ful lawyer in New York.) Kramer’s fa-
ther, George, was a government attor-
ney who never hid his dislike for his
younger son. “The first person who ever
called me a sissy was my father,’’ Kramer
told me. “He called me that all the time.
He would hit me and scream at me; he
just couldn’t stand what I had become.’’
Kramer had a more complicated, but
loving, relationship with his mother,
Rea, who was a social worker for the
Red Cross. He attended Woodrow Wil-
son High School in Washington, which
was the best public school in the city.
Kramer intended to go to Harvard, but
when his father saw the application
lying on the dining-room table he ripped
it in two, saying that no son of his was
going there. George Kramer was a Yale
man. Larry’s brother Arthur was a Yale
man. “And, God damn it, I was going
to be one, too,’’ Kramer recalled.
He felt even more detached and alone
at Yale than he had in Washington, and
in 1953, his freshman year, after a sui-
cide attempt in which he swallowed two
hundred aspirin (and then called the
campus police), he told his brother that
he was gay. Arthur helped find him a
psychiatrist. (“He tried to change me
back from being a fag,’’ Kramer recalled.
“That was what they did then.”) After
Yale, he was required to enlist in the
Army, where he and some other friends
were assigned to work on Governors
Island. “It was a lark,” he said, because
they were able to visit Manhattan every
week. It was the end of the nine-
teen-fifties, a time of bohemian plea-
sure in the Village, and the true begin-
ning of his gay life.
Kramer had been in the Glee Club
at Yale, and it helped confirm a deci-
sion to make a living on or around the
stage. After the Army, he got his first
job, as a messenger in the mail room at
the William Morris Agency in New
York. He earned thirty-five dollars a
week. “God, how I loved that job,’’ he
told me one day. “You could read ev-
erybody’s mail. I read each teletype, and
I knew how much Frank Sinatra was
making in Vegas. I knew who was fuck-
ing whom. It was an unbelievable dream
for a guy like me.”
Kramer answered an ad in the Times
for a “motion-picture trainee,’’ which
“Kids, use your inside-for-who-the-#!@*-knows-how-long voice, please.” turned out to be a job running another