48 THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020
today. It’s something like forty or fifty
million people have H.I.V. I’m respon-
sible? I mean, people who know they
shouldn’t fuck without a rubber and
nevertheless do—I’m responsible for that?”
Koch continued, “His position is that
the reason I didn’t want to see him at the
beginning of the epidemic or have any-
thing to do with AIDS is that people would
think I was gay and it would injure my
reputation. That is such bullshit: I have
a record on this issue that goes back to
the year Gimel. There has never been
anybody else that has such a record....
For Kramer, it doesn’t make a difference
whether you are a friend of his or not.
Ultimately, he attacks you, and he seeks
to destroy you. He is brilliant. I say that
without reservation. But he is deadly.’’
Koch did say that he regretted not
having met with Kramer in the early days
of the epidemic. When I told Kramer
that, he spat; he still loathes Koch and
takes delight in his own childish rude-
ness toward him. “One day after he was
out of office, I was in the lobby getting
the mail and suddenly I looked up and
Ed Koch was standing in the lobby right
in front of me. He was trying to pet my
dog Molly and he started to tell me how
beautiful she was. I yanked her away so
hard she yelped, and I said, ‘Molly, you
can’t talk to him. That is the man who
killed all of Daddy’s friends.’”
Kramer alienated virtually everyone:
he even publicly attacked Rodger Mc-
Farlane, one of his closest friends. Kram-
er’s eruptions were too much for the emo-
tionally burdened people of Gay Men’s
Health Crisis; he constantly threatened
to quit, and, finally, when his anger boiled
over at not being included in a long-
sought meeting with Koch, his offer was
accepted by the board.
“My lowest moment was at a get-
together at a gay bar of all the G.M.H.C.
volunteers,” Kramer said. “It was a so-
cial thing at a place called Uncle Char-
lie’s South. I knew the d.j. I got myself
into his booth and I took the micro-
phone. I said, ‘This is Larry Kramer. I
started this organization and I want to
return and they won’t let me and you
must make them take me back.’ I was
screaming. I said they were cowards.
“It went down like a ton of lead. Peo-ple looked at me like I was pathetic.
That was when I got bitter. It seemed
to me that everybody was just lining up
to die. Rodger maintains it was my sub-
conscious talking because I wanted to
go away and write ‘The Normal Heart.’
But I should have kept my power base.
I went from coming home and my an-
swering machine had fifty messages to
coming home and there was nothing.
Before, people listened to my anger be-
cause I was Larry Kramer of G.M.H.C.
Then, in one day, I was just nobody.”K
ramer’s most furious journey—the
founding of ACT UP—began in 1987,
after a visit to an AIDS hospital in Hous-
ton. By chance, he was scheduled to de-
liver a speech the following week at New
York’s Lesbian and Gay Community
Center, on West Thirteenth Street. “That
day, or the day before, there had been an
article in the Times about two thousand
Catholics who marched on Albany be-
cause they weren’t getting something
they wanted,’’ Kramer recalled. “And I
said to these people, that night, ‘How
can two thousand Catholics go to Al-
bany and you are dying and you can’t
even get off your asses except to go to
the gym?’ And for the first time I did
my famous shtick”—something he would
repeat, with undiminished effect, for years.
“I said, ‘O.K., I want this half of the room
to stand up.’ And they did. I looked
around at those kids and I said to the
people standing up, ‘You are all going to
be dead in five years. Every one of you
fuckers.’ I was livid. I said, ‘How about
doing something about it? Why just line
up for the cattle cars? Why don’t you go
out and make some fucking history?’”
Two weeks later, a piece by Kramer
appeared on the Times Op-Ed page—
arguing that the F.D.A. was the biggest
obstacle to developing new drugs. Some
of those who had heard Kramer’s speech
decided to demonstrate on Wall Street.
The crowds were huge, and Burroughs
Wellcome quickly cut the price of AZT,
which at the time was the only drug
available to treat the virus itself. “We
got going on a real high,” Kramer re-
called. “What was interesting about ACT
UP and a main reason for its success was
that everyone was really getting scared.
The people getting AIDS were all the
cool people, the men who were all part
of the scene. Good-looking hot guys.