Sex panic

Veteran AIDS activist and playwright Larry Kramer is still denouncing young gay men for spreading HIV through reckless sex and drug use. He needs to drop the angry-prophet pose and start talking to the people on the front lines.

By Richard Kim

May 7, 2005 | AIDS activist and playwright Larry Kramer has a lot in common with the late Andrea Dworkin: a Manichaean worldview, a penchant for hyperbolic speech and dowdy dress, a murky relationship with empirical truth, a quixotic tribalism that manifests all at once as genuine love and venomous contempt for their respective kin -- women and gay men. Like Dworkin, whose screeds against pornography were so laden with pornographic content and style that they were banned by the very anti-porn ordinances she helped author, Kramer possesses an uncanny ability to mime the putative object of criticism -- in his case, homophobia.

To some, Kramer is a narcissistic gadfly whose passion for controversy and flagellation undermines the causes -- AIDS and the gay movement -- to which he so passionately devotes himself. To others, he's a brilliant and misunderstood prophet who dares to speak the hard truth nobody wants to hear. Indeed, this is how Kramer styles himself, as a Cassandra in the desert whose warnings in 1981 about a mysterious, unnamed plague went unheeded, whose call to arms in 1987 to fight the criminal lack of funding for AIDS prevention and treatment rallied precious few, and whose current campaign -- laid out in his new book, "The Tragedy of Today's Gays" -- to reinvigorate a gay movement he sees as "completely inept," "powerless" and "disposable" will, he predicts, fall on the deaf ears of today's "tragic," "fucked up," "blind" and "ignorant" gays who "richly deserve" their fate.

Anyone familiar with Kramer's overheated polemics knows to take such fatalistic rebukes lightly, or at best as a kind of provocation. But why -- this time around -- do they come wrapped in such false modesty? After all, his early alarms about AIDS laid the groundwork for the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), an organization started in his living room that has since become one of the country's largest AIDS service providers. His 1987 speech at the Gay and Lesbian Center in New York sparked ACT UP, the radical collective whose spiky tactics are now imitated by activists of all stripes. Along with Tony Kushner -- who generously blurbs Kramer's book -- he is one of the most celebrated chroniclers of gay issues in America. He publishes in the editorial pages of the New York Times. His autobiographical play-cum-jeremiad "The Normal Heart" continues to be canonized in classrooms across the country and was recently revived at the Public Theater in New York. A speech he gave shortly after the 2004 election in the Great Hall at Cooper Union -- and which provides the basis for this new book -- drew 700 rapt listeners and several hundred more were turned away.

Indeed, this public embrace of Kramer seems so at odds with his persona that it's hard to explain. How can someone who's such a self-professed pain in the ass to both the gay movement and the mainstream establishment receive such accommodation? Perhaps it's because, as Naomi Wolf unwittingly hits upon in her introduction to "The Tragedy of Today's Gays," Kramer is a "humanist writer in the humanist tradition," someone who "reclaims the language and consciousness of morality" and transcends "identity politics" to speak of "universal love." Wolf intends these as compliments, but they might be considered indictments as well.

Although Kramer claims several times in "The Tragedy of Today's Gays" to "love gay people," to think them "better," "smarter," "more aware" and "more talented" than other people, it quickly becomes clear that he doesn't know a whole lot about them. He recycles the kind of harangues about gay men (and young gay men in particular) that institutions like the Times so love to print -- that they are buffoonish, disengaged Peter Pans dancing, drugging and fucking their lives away while the world and the disco burn down around them. Sure, Kramer occasionally mentions a young gay man he finds laudable, like the playwright Jeff Whitty, who wrote a musical about plushy puppets finding themselves on the subway ("Avenue Q"). But really, must we all be marionettes singing the same tune night after night? In Kramer's view, today's gays are a lot like yesterday's gays. "Does it ever occur to you that we brought this plague of AIDS upon ourselves?" Kramer asks in "The Tragedy of Today's Gays," but this rhetorical question is virtually identical to the invectives spewed by Ned Weeks, hero of "The Normal Heart," in 1985. And now, 20 years later, according to Kramer, "You are still doing it. You are still murdering each other."

It's a shame that Kramer's attempt to address young gay men ultimately devolves into the same pathological, self-destructive plot that has guided all of his writing on AIDS, for there is a glimmer of sympathy in this book that deserves consideration. Kramer writes that there's "a big empty space" in young gay men's lives; "America let these men who should have been your role models die." So, according to Kramer, this "big empty space" leads today's gays to "disdain anyone older who was there" and "condemn [our] predecessors to nonexistence."

Next Page: Kramer conflates the very worst possible future with the uncertain present

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