40 THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020
PROFILES M AY 13, 2002
PUBLIC NUISANCE
Larry Kramer, the man who warned America about AIDS, can’t stop fighting hard—and loudly.BY MICHAELSPECTER
A
long and vituperative essay ap-
peared on the front page of the
March 14, 1983, issue of a bi-
weekly newspaper called the New York
Native. The Native was the city’s only
significant gay publication at the time,
and anything printed there was guaran-
teed to attract attention. This piece did
considerably more than that. Entitled
“1,112 and Counting,” it was a five-thou-
sand-word screed that accused nearly
everyone connected with health care in
America—officials at the Centers for
Disease Control, in Atlanta, researchers
at the National Institutes of Health, in
Washington, doctors at Memorial Sloan-
Kettering Cancer Center, in Manhat-
tan, and local politicians (particularly
Mayor Ed Koch)—of refusing to ac-
knowledge the implications of the na-
scent aids epidemic. The article’s harsh-
est condemnation was directed at those
gay men who seemed to think that if
they ignored the new disease it would
simply go away.
“If this article doesn’t scare the shit
out of you, we’re in real trouble,’’ its au-
thor, Larry Kramer, began. “If this arti-
cle doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage
and action, gay men have no future on
this earth. Our continued existence de-
pends on just how angry you can get....
Unless we fight for our lives we shall
die.’’ The piece became perhaps the most
widely reprinted article ever published
in a gay newspaper. “I am sick of clos-
eted gay doctors who won’t come out
to help us fight.... I am sick of gay men
who won’t support gay charities. Go give
your bucks to straight charities, fellows,
while we die.” He went on, “Every gay
man who is unable to come forward
now and fight to save his own life is
truly helping to kill the rest of us.”
Kramer was also sick of the way he
was treated within New York’s gay com-
munity. For years, the Greenwich Village
and Fire Island swells had considered
him a nebbishy interloper—a puritan
who often wondered in print why gay
life had to be defined by sexual promis-
cuity rather than by fidelity or love. His
views were routinely rejected. Gay men
had battled hard for sexual freedom, and
for many of them the unfettered pursuit
of sex was exactly what that freedom was
all about; they certainly didn’t want to be
told what to do with their bodies by a
homosexual who seemed chronically un-
able to enjoy himself. In 1980, not long
after Kramer’s novel “Faggots” was pub-
lished, the playwright Robert Chesley
wrote, “Read anything by Kramer closely,
and I think you’ll find the subtext is al-
ways: the wages of gay sin are death.”
That was indeed a central theme of “Fag-
gots,” which appeared three years before
AIDS, and which lampooned the sexual
adventures of upper-middle-class gay
New York. “Faggots” turned Kramer into
a pariah. The book was removed from
the shelves of New York’s only gay book-
store, and he even found himself banned
from the grocery near his vacation home
on Fire Island. “I became a hermit for
three years after that book was published,’’
Kramer told me not long ago, still sur-
prised by the condemnation he received
from people he thought he was going to
impress. “The straight world thought I
was repulsive, and the gay world treated
me like a traitor. People would literally
turn their back when I walked by. You
know what my real crime was? I put the
truth in writing. That’s what I do: I have
told the fucking truth to everyone I have
ever met.’’
That is one way to put it. Rodger
McFarlane, a former lover, and a com-
rade in the AIDS wars from the begin-
ning of the epidemic, suggested another:
“When it comes to being an asshole,
Larry is a virtuoso with no peer. No-
body can alienate people quicker, better,
or more completely.” “Faggots” has been
attacked as coarse, prudish, and polem-
ical, but it has sold something like a mil-
lion copies, which places it high amongthe best-selling works of gay fiction.
“Faggots” has never been out of print.
By the end of the book, Kramer had all
but predicted the AIDS epidemic, just a
few years before it would ruin his world.
At the time, people were too busy en-
joying themselves to care. The late sev-
enties and early eighties were a sexual
Weimar in New York City. Cocaine and
poppers were plentiful and excess was
expected—particularly in the West Vil-
lage. There was also an endless stream of
activity in the bathhouses and along the
rotting piers from Christopher Street to
Chelsea, where gay men congregated by
the score for the kind of obsessive and
anonymous sex that Kramer warned could
someday kill them. “How many of us
have to die before you get scared off your
ass and into action?” Kramer wrote in the
Native piece. “Aren’t 195 dead New York-
ers enough?” In his first article on the
subject, published two years earlier and
less widely read, Kramer noted, “If I had
written this a month ago, I would have
used the figure ‘40.’ If I had written this
last week I would have needed ‘80.’ Today
I must tell you that 120 gay men in the
United States... are suffering from an
often lethal form of cancer called Kaposi’s
sarcoma or from a virulent form of pneu-
monia that may be associated with it.
More than thirty have died.”T
wenty years later, with AIDS es-
tablished as the worst epidemic in
human history, with no cure, with as
many as fifty million infected, and with
people dying every day throughout the
world in numbers that cannot easily be
absorbed, Kramer’s distant cries seem
almost meek. Yet the fear that he un-
leashed helped transform gay life; men
who had always insisted that the govern-
ment stay out of their lives took to the
streets by the thousand to demand vigor-
ous federal intervention on their behalf.
No longer was it enough to press for the
repeal of sodomy laws; homosexuals