In memoriam: Larry Kramer (June 25, 1935 – May 27, 2020) was a prominent AIDS activist and LGBT rights advocate, as well as a playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, novelist, and film producer. He co-founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis organization and ACT UP. Here is a short selection of works by and about Larry Kramer.
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The American People, Vol. 1: Search for My Heart by
The long-awaited new novel by America's master playwright and activist-a radical reimagining of our history and our hopes and fears Forty years in the making,The American People embodies Larry Kramer's vision of his beloved and accursed homeland. As the founder of ACT UP and the author ofFaggots andThe Normal Heart, Kramer has decisively affected American lives and letters. Here, as only he can, he tells the heartbreaking and heroic story of one nation under a plague, contaminated by greed, hate, and disease yet host to transcendent acts of courage and kindness. In this magisterial novel's sweeping first volume, which runs up to the 1950s, we meet prehistoric monkeys who spread a peculiar virus, a Native American shaman whose sexual explorations mutate into occult visions, and early English settlers who live as loving same-sex couples only to fall victim to the forces of bigotry. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton revel in unexpected intimacies, and John Wilkes Booth's motives for assassinating Abraham Lincoln are thoroughly revised. In the twentieth century, the nightmare of history deepens as a religious sect conspires with eugenicists, McCarthyites, and Ivy Leaguers to exterminate homosexuals, and the AIDS virus begins to spread. Against all this, Kramer sets the tender story of a middle-class family outside Washington, D.C., trying to get along in the darkest of times. The American People is a work of ribald satire, prophetic anger, and dazzling imagination. It is an encyclopedic indictment written with outrageous love.
The American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact by
InThe American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact, Larry Kramer completes his radical reimagining of his country's history. Ranging from the brothels of 1950s Washington, D.C., to the activism of the 1980s and beyond, Kramer offers an elaborate phantasmagoria of bigoted conspiracists in the halls of power and ordinary individuals suffering their consequences. With wit and bite, Kramer explores (among other things) the sex lives of every recent president; the complicated behavior of America's two greatest spies, J. Edgar Hoover and James Jesus Angleton; the rise ofSexopolis, the country's favorite magazine; and the genocidal activities of every branch of our health-care and drug-delivery systems. The American People: Volume 2 is narrated by (among others) the writer Fred Lemish and his two friends--Dr. Daniel Jerusalem, who works for America's preeminent health-care institution, and his twin brother, David Jerusalem, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp who was abused by many powerful men. Together they track a terrible plague that intensifies as the government ignores it and depict the bold and imaginative activists who set out to shock the nation's conscience. In Kramer's telling, the United States is dedicated to the proposition that very few men are created equal, and those who love other men may be destined for death. Here is a historical novel like no other--satiric and impassioned and driven by an uncompromising moral and literary vision.
Bearing Witness: Gay Men's Health Crisis and the politics of AIDS by
The untold story in the AIDS crisis is that of the mobilization of the gay community. Bearing Witness is a compelling study of how a community-based initiative--Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York--neutralized the immobilizing power of homophobia and fear of AIDS. From his unique perspective as both a sociologist and volunteer at Gay Men's Health Crisis, Philip Kayal illuminates the social and political meanings of volunteerism by showing how gay/AIDS volunteerism is radical political and religious work.
Faggots by
Larry Kramer's Faggots has been in print since its original publication in 1978 and has become one of the best-selling novels about gay life ever written. The book is a fierce satire of the gay ghetto and a touching story of one man's desperate search for love there, and reading it today is a fascinating look at how much, and how little, has changed.
Fighting Back: What Some People are Doing about AIDS by
Interviews and profiles of people who individually or in organizations like the Gay Men's Health Crisis of New York City are responding positively to the AIDS problem.
Just Say No: A Play about a Farce by
A satirical play that suggests that much of the public indifference to AIDS is due to hypocrisy on the part of people in high places who are either unacknowledged homosexuals or heterosexuals with unconventional sexual pasts.
Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS by
In the late 1980s, after a decade spent engaged in more routine interest-group politics, thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to the AIDS crisis by defiantly and dramatically taking to the streets. But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no more--even as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author's time as a member of the organization, Moving Politics is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory: emotion. Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism. From anger to hope, pride to shame, and solidarity to despair, feelings played a significant part in ACT UP's provocative style of protest, which included raucous demonstrations, die-ins, and other kinds of street theater. Detailing the movement's public triumphs and private setbacks, Moving Politics is the definitive account of ACT UP's origin, development, and decline as well as a searching look at the role of emotion in contentious politics.
The Normal Heart by
The Normal Heart, set during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, is the impassioned indictment of a society that allowed the plague to happen, a moving denunciation of the ignorance and fear that helped kill an entire generation. It has been produced and taught all over the world. Its companion play, The Destiny of Me, is the stirring story of an AIDS activist forced to put his life in the hands of the very doctor he has been denouncing.
Rebel Rebels, 1979-1989: AIDS, art, and activism New York, 1979-1989 by
Rebels Rebel looks at the history of AIDS activism undertaken by various artistic collectives in New York between 1979 and 1989. Among these once-controversial, now-legendary collectives were Gran Fury (who scandalized the 1990 Venice Biennale with their billboards juxtaposing the pope and his anti-contraception stance with a two-foot high penis), the Silence = Death Project (who appropriated and inverted the Nazis' pink triangle), Gang and DIVA TV. These collectives addressed concrete social problems using unconventional media, and in doing so helped to shift the public and political perception of the AIDS crisis. Collating a wealth of materials and perspectives, from graphic design to art works, and from sociopolitical to art-historical reflections, Rebel Rebels is an important and thorough examination of a rare overlap between art and activism during a time of heightened conservativism in America. It includes a full-color poster.
Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist by
This is an expanded version of a book by a leading AIDS critic and founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis. It contains new material from the author's letters, speeches and articles from 1988 to 1993 on the AIDS crisis.
The Tragedy of Today's Gays by
Discusses the current situation of gay men and women in the United States, maintaining that the current conservative agenda and the gay community's own lack of political involvement have eroded their legal rights.
