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Heeb Issue #8 : InterviewKvetching and Screaming
(excerpted from original article)
I was a college anti-war activist at Ohio University in 1991 when I discovered Larry Kramer’s book, Reports from the holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist. During the first few years of the AIDS epidemic, Kramer, a Brooklyn-born writer, was the loudest and most persistent voice on behalf of gay men. He took on New York City Mayor Ed Koch and the Reagan administration, demanding immediate action against a condition that would end up infecting more than 40 million people worldwide and killing over 20 million. I bought 10 copies of the remaindered British Edition, a buck each in a used bookstore, and handed them out to my young activist comrades. Even straight lefties in Ohio had heard of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the new style of social protest they pioneered. Their passion and pageantry inspired us and suggested that being an activist meant being committed to audacious and bold campaigns, not simply religiously reading The Nation.
Kramer is not without his activist critics who claim he is too gay-male focused, too ad hominem, and too much of a kvetcher, lowering the quality of discourse by raising his voice to a shriek. Just during our interview, his laundry list of dis included PBS, Foucault, Michael Chabon, Ron Reagan, Jr., Kafka, and the states of Idaho and Montana. Despite the anger of his rhetoric, his writings—whether satirizing the promiscuity and superficiality of the New York gay scene in the novel Faggots or dramatizing the struggle of the early days of AIDS activism in his semi-autobiographical play, The Normal Heart —have always centered on the search for love and justice.
Over the years, I have read countless interviews that Kramer has done about being gay in America, but have never heard him discuss being Jewish. Outfitted in his signature OshKosh-and-turtleneck combo in his apartment overlooking Washington Square Park in Manhattan, the king of identity politics takes a break from writing The American People —his mammoth chronicle of the hidden history of gay and lesbian Americans—to reluctantly discuss his Jewish identity with Heeb.
I was a college anti-war activist at Ohio University in 1991 when I discovered Larry Kramer’s book, Reports from the holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist. During the first few years of the AIDS epidemic, Kramer, a Brooklyn-born writer, was the loudest and most persistent voice on behalf of gay men. He took on New York City Mayor Ed Koch and the Reagan administration, demanding immediate action against a condition that would end up infecting more than 40 million people worldwide and killing over 20 million. I bought 10 copies of the remaindered British Edition, a buck each in a used bookstore, and handed them out to my young activist comrades. Even straight lefties in Ohio had heard of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the new style of social protest they pioneered. Their passion and pageantry inspired us and suggested that being an activist meant being committed to audacious and bold campaigns, not simply religiously reading The Nation.
Kramer is not without his activist critics who claim he is too gay-male focused, too ad hominem, and too much of a kvetcher, lowering the quality of discourse by raising his voice to a shriek. Just during our interview, his laundry list of dis included PBS, Foucault, Michael Chabon, Ron Reagan, Jr., Kafka, and the states of Idaho and Montana. Despite the anger of his rhetoric, his writings—whether satirizing the promiscuity and superficiality of the New York gay scene in the novel Faggots or dramatizing the struggle of the early days of AIDS activism in his semi-autobiographical play, The Normal Heart —have always centered on the search for love and justice.
Over the years, I have read countless interviews that Kramer has done about being gay in America, but have never heard him discuss being Jewish. Outfitted in his signature OshKosh-and-turtleneck combo in his apartment overlooking Washington Square Park in Manhattan, the king of identity politics takes a break from writing The American People —his mammoth chronicle of the hidden history of gay and lesbian Americans—to reluctantly discuss his Jewish identity with Heeb.
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