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So, I thought we'd begin by casting, as far back as your memory serves, to the very earliest
days when, in fact, we didn't even call it AIDS. If you could just give people who weren't
around then, a sense of what you were feeling, what you were discovering and what life was
like. Oh, I, It's just an era of the history of the world for anyone who lived through
it, was able to live through it, was just the worst. All your friends were dead or dying.
I would make speeches and I would say to the kids," Twothirds of the room, stand up. You
are going to be dead in four months, in four years." It was that intense of how many people
were dying. You could not walk down a street in Manhattan without not only seeing people
who were sick, but learning about people who had died, literally in the last week. It was
and still is a plague. And, it was, they were very harsh times. This was not in any way
helped by anyone; certainly the government didn't want to know. The mayor of New York
didn't want to know. President Reagan certainly didn't want to know. And, gay people who were
terrified, with good reason, didn't want to know. It was interesting to watch the denial
that setin amongst so many of us, and very hard to break through that. The virus had
not been discovered, and would not be discovered for a few years, after '81. Without the actual
causative proof of a virus, a lot of gay people, a lot of gay men chose not to believe that
that's what the problem was, or to change their way of living. For those of us who were
there in the beginning, and who were saying not so much give up sex, but just cool it,
be careful. We were the pariahs among our own people, and it was very hard, personally,
for me to overcome that. To literally have people cross the street, rather than to say
hello to me. It was a number of years before that changed. I have learned so much about
everything, the world, human nature not only just gay people; being involved in all this,
so much, as I have over these years. In many ways, the irony of it all is that it gave
me my life work as a writer. And, quite frankly, I think I was intelligent enough to realize
that I had been given a great story that no one else wanted to write or that few people
wanted to write and few people still want to write. And like a foreign correspondent
who's parachuted down behind enemy lines and sees what a great story he's got. I don't
think I have ever seen anything so sad, so awful, so tragic and so indicative of how
we are as people that's reflected in every aspect of *** and still is. That's has gone
on too long No, it's great. Thank you. Can you recall the literal first time that you
realized that there was something afoot? Before we, before any CDC notices, before any of
that? What was that like? Well, the back story on that is that we were an exceedingly promiscuous
population, with good reason. We had been imprisoned, if you were, for so many centuries.
Shunned by everything, we only had each other. And when the *** revolution for gay and
straight people came into being, and remember this is the Playboy era, Hugh Hefner, and
all of that. Which was giving men and people everywhere really, permission to enjoy your
body? But that led, in the case of the gay population, to an enormous rise in STDs, sexually
transmitted diseases. And in true stall work fashion, we sort of made a game of it. In
the sense that you would, everybody we talk about "Oh, what have you had lately?" But
no one was noticing that what was happening was escalating in virulence. It's one thing
to have a dose of the clap, and then the amoebas which everybody had amoebas and you would
trade secrets about which doctor you went to was able to get rid of them in the least
obnoxious way. Then there were doctors who could do it faster than others. Those medicines
were quite harsh, but you know, it was really conversation fodder for Sunday brunches. Then
there was, then Hepatitis began and they weren't as differentiated then, as they are now. There
was basically just Hepatitis and then I think Hepatitis B came along somewhere along then.
But, that was more serious. A very good friend of mine, Dr. Lawrence Mass, who was one of
the six of us who founded Gay Men's Health Crisis. I had known him since he was a young
man. He went to Harvard Medical School and had a practice in New York. One of the great
unrecognized heroes of all of this, who wrote a health column for the New York Native, which
was a gay newspaper then. Which wasn't, I wouldn't say, read widely, but it was read.
He would fill me in on things that were happening and where. A lot of things were happening
earlier on in various places, particularly the arrival of Pneumocystis Pneumonia, which
was something that had not happened. Basically, been something that was something for kids,
for babies. Sort of strange things that no one quite knew and he would write about of
all this. And prior to that July 1981, article in the New York Times, which was the true
alarm call. Gay cancer found in 41 homosexuals buried on an inside page but, nevertheless
there. Quite frankly scared a lot, not enough people, but it certainly scared me. I just
said, it's the beginning of something. I just knew it instinctively. And I went, and Larry
arranged for me to meet the doctors at NYU, which was the only hospital, the only medical
center that would touch it with a barge pole. Largely because of Dr. Alvin FriedmanKien,
who was the dermatologist that first saw the Kaposi lesions on his patients. And the incredible
woman that I used as a character in my play, Linda Laubenstein was, in fact, in a wheelchair.
Larry, let us dig into a little bit the question of gay people's initial suspicion of AIDS
and whether it was real. I remember maybe in '83 listening to Quentin Crisp talk. One
of the things that Quentin Crisp said was, in the way that Quentin could spin anything
he said, "I do not believe in this AIDS thing. They've always been trying to get us to stop
having sex, and now they have just found a new way of doing so." So could you sort of
talk about what challenges, right AIDS represented, and how in some sense felt familiar to be
told that your sex is killing you. In some cases what? It felt very familiar to be told
that your sex is killing you. Well, I got a keep with the thing that really set me off.
The one thing that happened that made me an activist, more than any other thing was a
playwright friend who in quotes called Robert Chesley. Who after I wrote my first big article
in the New York Native "1,112 and Counting", which was sort of cry for alarm, and it was
published all over the country. He then answered me by saying, "Oh, there goes Larry Kramer
again; he thinks the wages of *** are death." And that's how a lot of people chose
to react. Instead of listening to the doctors who, quite sensibly, said it's a virus. We
haven't found it, but it is a virus. It's acting like a virus, Hepatitis acts the same
way. We didn't know what caused Hepatitis, but we knew it was there. So you've got important
doctors, and important medical centers basically saying that. So, I would choose to believe
them rather than Quentin Crisp. But, that is what you were up against. When did it occur
to you that a medical battle was a political battle? When did that first, when did you
first realize that the response had to be a broad activist engagement? Well, the development
of our response falls into sort of two eras. There's the what game itself the Crisis Era
and the Act up Era. We started six of us, what became Gay Man's Health Crisis in literally
the end of '81. There were very few of us, very few who would show up. It was hard to
know who was going to come from meeting to meeting. Slowly as friends died or as lovers
died or you visited enough people, we grew. But, the first time I had to try and find,
no one would rent us office space, at all, because of who we were and what we were about.
I had been very successful in the film industry, I had achieved, I had an Oscar nomination.
I had a certain prominence and I had money. I will never forget when I tried to get through
to Mayor Kotch, whom we knew and know to be a closeted gay man, how awful I was treated
by his openly gay assistant, a man called Herb Rickman. If any of you have seen The
Normal Heart, everything in The Normal Heart is true. Every incident is true every character
is real. Everything that I dramatized, there is nothing fictional in there. There is a
scene between that man Herb Rickman and those of us from Gay Man's Health Crisis who came
there begging him for an office because we had no office. At the same time San Francisco's
mayor had given their population, I don't remember $15 million. Finally we got out of
Ed Kotch no office but but $9,000. I mean it was just an insult. Finally some gay guy
gave us rent free an office. But that call, I'll never forget that, "*** you, you son
of a ***. I am not going to be treated like this." Thank God I felt that way and was able
to keep that anger through all those years because not only was the city not doing anything
no one else was doing anything either. Dr. Laubenstein was there yelling at me, "I can't
get anybody at NIH to pay any attention. I can't get any medical journal to publish any
of our reports, literally." By the time, again, this is in The Normal Heart too when she makes
that monologue speech in the second act every word of which came out of her own mouth. It
was three years from the first case by the time the NIH showed up for a site visit at
NYU. Which again was the only medical center that would openly deal with this. Not that
they were happy about it, Saul Farber who was head at the hospital medical center hated
it and he used to yell at Linda. And fortunately, I mean, you didn't yell at Linda. She was
in a wheelchair and she was, "Don't you tell me I can only have 20 patients in this hospital.
What do you want me to do put them up in my room in my apartment?" I mean, she gave as
good as she got. It was like that. You have to also remember the first decent drug didn't
come into being until 1997. So from '81 to '97 you have got a population now all over
the world that is not only infecting each other constantly which is still going on but
dying like flies. Gay Men's Health Crisis did not want to be an activist organization.
The first group of guys were too concerned with the dying and they couldn't do what I
wanted them to do which was do what these kids are doing in Zuccotti Square. They wanted
to to be caregivers. It was hard for me because we needed caregivers and to keep criticizing
this struggling organization as I continued to do didn't help them. So I wrote The Normal
Heart which was put on in '85. You started in what year? When did you start writing The
Normal Heat? We had a fight at Gay Men's Health Crisis and I was thrown off of the board in
'83. I didn't know what to do. I was just beside myself and I went on a trip to Europe.
I went to Dachau, by chance, and I saw a sign that said, "Dachau opened in 1933." 1933?
They had a concentration camp for Jews in 1933? I never knew that and I said, "Hey."
It just seemed to be so relevant to what we were going through. I came back to America
and bought a little dog. We moved up to a little house in Wall Fleet and I wrote the
play. It took a while to get it on. I couldn't get any major director to do it. I can't tell
you how many places it was turned down and finally Joe Papp took it on. Then it was delayed
again for various theatrical reasons. But by the time it opened it made a certain stir.
What were the initial reviews like? I think the play was treated as agitprop which is
sort of a dirty word in the theater, in this country anyway. The New York Times which is
criticized mightily in the play sent lawyers to the previews who would sit there with their
flashlights writing down what I was saying about them. And when Frank Rich's review came
out, which had enough quotes that wereuseful, the Times for the only time in it's history
put an addendum at the bottom of his review saying that they denied all the charges that
I made. The play ran for about a year, mostly because Joe came to love it so much and kept
it going. The comparison of the responses to the two productions has been very moving,
if I could jump ahead. This last production on Broadway the play was taken very seriously
as a piece of theater, as a piece of writing. We won a lot of Tony's and got great reviews.
The first reviews were good enough. The second production with Raul Julia in whatever year
that was, they've always managed to get "written by loudmouth Larry Kramer but you leave crying."
I'll take that because I wrote the play to make people cry. I still cry. Then the second
chapter in all of this was ACT UP. Do you want to jump to that? I want to jump to it
but I have one other question before we get there, and that is that it strikes me that
AIDS may very well have been the first illness, at least in modern times, that was fought
in part through different representations competing representations. I'm remembering
back to when I first saw The Normal Heart early on in it's first incarnation and it
felt like a glass of water in the desert because all there were at the time were representations
that made us out to be quasianimalistic. Still do. Yeah absolutely. I wanted you to reflect
on the place of The Normal Heart within the context of AIDS and how people were talking
about AIDS at the time. Because I think us old folks have forgotten what it was like
and younger people, of course, never knew. Can you cast back that far? That is too academic
a question for me. Rephrase it. OK, broadly all I want to know is when The Normal Heart
first came out... When who? When The Normal Heart first came out it struck me as very
different from the way AIDS had been talked about, had been addressed previously. I wanted
you to talk about what it was like before the play emerged. How people were talking
about AIDS and whether you saw any change after the play was produced. I am not very
good at questions like this. I don't think in many respects things have changed that
much or enough. When I turn on my computer and have to watch stories about these Congress
people who are saying these just awful things about gay people to this day. It's legal for
them to say that. You can't talk that way about Jews, or Black people but you can about
gays. I identify more with that as a lack of progress then when things got rosy. I'm
not a negative person and I'm amazingly hopeful but I am a glass is half full or half empty.
Half empty. Half empty. Half empty. Yeah. Does that answer anything? Yeah, far enough.
Talk to us about the founding of ACT UP. Well, I know ACT UP was the greatest thing that
any gay population has ever achieved, ever in history. That any population has ever achieved
in history. Every single *** drug that is out there is out there because of ACT UP and
the template for activism that ACT UP set and was then followed by places like Project
Inform in San Francisco. I will never go through such a miraculous six or seven years of feeling
this strange dichotomy of feeling useful, well used. Couldn't get up early enough in
the morning at the same time, "everybody is dying still, like flies." But we had a cause,
and we had a target, and we had troops, and we had smart people all working together.
We knew what we had to do and we did it. We had meetings in New York City alone that would
vary between 500 and 1000 people every week that showed up and they went to meetings every
other night of the week. This was men and women, gay men and lesbians for the first
time in our history working together. These are not two groups that previously had paid
much attention to each other. We had really smart people lawyers, and doctors, statisticians,
and scientists. The very early on a straight woman had shown up at a meeting, Iris Long,
she was a biochemist that had worked in the fields. She was essentially a Queens housewife
now and who was moved by all of this. She got up and said in no uncertain terms, "You
guys don't know *** and I'll teach you. I'll teach you. You don't know about the system,
you don't know about grants, you don't know about science. You don't know about pharmacology,
you don't know about statistics. You don't know how the government works. You don't know
about the NIH." She listed all of these things. She's right we didn't know. From that day
on we learned. The ones who wanted to would meet with Iris, we formed this thing called
the Treatment and Data Committee. We educated ourselves so effectively that I could take
some of these kids to meetings with the drug companies whom we came to confront. The doctors
from the drug companies would turn to me and say, "That Harrington. That's Dr. Harrington,
isn't it?" Because they were so impressed with him and we had a lot of those people.
We had committees that dealt every pharmaceutical manufacturer. We had committees that dealt
with every branch of anything. Just like we knew more about what was going on than they
did. When the time came to set up the trials for the drugs we had doctors who were able
to prove to government, the biostatisticians, that were running the trials, they were doing
them all wrong and that's why they were turning out so bad. We showed them how to set up an
effective clinical trial. These were basically dying kids who are doing all of this. That's
why Dr. Fauci who was the man at NIH who has been presumably the head of all this since
he took office at the NIAID, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the
National Institute of Health in 1985. He had to let us in because he didn't have any ideas.
All of his ideas and all of his principal investigators were coming up with nothing.
Failure after failure on every clinical trial. I took a group of our smartest kids. It started
in Montreal, whatever year the conference in Montreal was. I made Fauci meet with us
for lunch. Then we came back and I took this group to Bethesda. They presented a program
which they have laid out at Montreal. A very thick report on what everybody was doing wrong
and how it could be righted. An exceedingly, exceedingly impressive piece of work. It was
60, 70 pages and you could not fault any of it. No scientist could fault to any of it.
Fauci saw that, and Fauci saw that we knew more than they did. So slowly he let us begin
to participate in the system. He got in a lot of trouble because of that. That was by
then it was sort of '91, '92. It was those years from '92 to '97 or eight when the first
drug came out that all, the first decent drug because there were some earlier ones that
weren't any good. AZT was just awful and that was where all our work bore fruit. Larry, can you give us a sense of what the
people on the other side of the fence were thinking? In other words, I remember those
days and I remember those protests. I remember thinking these are evil *** that were
protesting. But now as I'm older I'm trying to figure out why there was such resistance
to what we were doing. Do you have a sense? Listen, I mean look at the resistance to these
kids now. Activism is, you're either liberal and understanding or you're not and most people
aren't. We did not give a good *** about what anybody else thought. That is very important
for activism, you have to be angry and you have to be afraid. You only had to come to
a weekly meeting and look around at the audience and see how sick people were and yet they
were there to go to a meeting, yet they were there to go to a protest. There wasn't a meeting
were somebody wouldn't come up to me and say, "Tell me, don't you know anything about something
that I'm going to be able to take soon that you can't talk about?" Because this guy didn't
have long and that was major motivation for everybody, the straight people who worked
for us as well. That's again why we're successful, you didn't like us tying up the bridges and
tunnels, tough ***. You know? We handed out fact sheets about all of what was not happening
to the cars as they went through, or wherever we were protesting. You have to also realize
that newspapers wouldn't write about this. You want to talk about the New York Times?
The history of the New York Times is heinous. Starting with I don't even know when. I mean,
they didn't even report Stalin starving all of his people to death in Russia in the '30s.
The New York Times writer who was stationed over there won a Pulitzer Prize for completely
ignoring all of this. The first New York Times article on ***, after the first one was a
year and half later. Abe Rosenthal, notoriously, vitriolically homophobic. He fired gay reporters
rather than having them there. This is a known fact. The managing editor of the New York
Times didn't want this written about. So if he's not writing about it no other paper in
America or the world is writing about it because that's the New York Times. You couldn't get
television, if I got a story on the radio I was lucky. Tom Brokaw to this day gives
me the credit for finally practically, well, we have mutual friends, we go to the same
parties and I finally just gave it to him. That is what you had to do. Remember the days
when we would look through obituaries to determine cause of death? Because they wouldn't even
say the word AIDS in the obituary. Yes, while still there is a little bit of that now too.
It wouldn't say it would always say, "died from pneumonia," which was the buzzword for
AIDS. There are drugs out there and we are of course, "Hey I'm alive right?" But just
this past week The Global Fund for AIDS, which has been trumpeting their great successes,
announced that the money has run out and all the countries who had pledged so much money
to it are not giving the money and that they will not be able to make any more grants until
the year 2014. So all these people in Africa who were supposed to be getting all of these
drugs now and Obama, not my favorite person, has made a speech today or tomorrow about
was telling the world how wonderful America has been giving so much money, that these
people are going to get drugs in Africa. Lies. Read, well I don't know where you'd read it
but Bob Bazell on his blog for NBC News has written a brilliant piece about it. Laurie
Garrett has written a piece at the Council on Foreign Relations, but you are not seeing
it again in the New York Times. There is no one objecting to this. There has never been
anyone in charge of this, which has always been a problem. Fauci is like the Jew who
is put in charge of the ghetto and has to somehow keep these people alive but keep the
Germans from murdering everybody. I never made that analogy and it's much too kind to
him. But he had to walk many tightropes literally to stay in office. You have President Regan
literally saying that he would not endorse anything that could be remotely connected
to homosexuality. If his people said it once they said it a thousand times. He did not
say the word AIDS in public for seven years. We are an expendable population; gay people,
black people, not so much Jews anymore but certainly they were. We are expendable, they
don't care about us. They don't. One of the major lessons that I have learned is that
we refuse to face up to the fact that we are hated. I do not mean disliked. I do not mean
"make people uncomfortable". We are tangibly hated, when you come to the bottom line, still
and continuing as are black people. Until we learn to absorb that fact into our being
and respond to it we will continue to be expendable and be denied the rights that the Bill of
Rights presumably entitled us to. Thank you Larry. I thought we'd open it up to the audience.
If anybody has any questions or comments that they would like to ask Larry. OK. Can you
all hear me now? My name is Barry and I'm not happened to be gay, which is the same
is true with the disease AIDS. We can't hear you very well. I'm Barry. I'm not gay but
the disease is no longer gay. AIDS is no longer and when you're talking about those poor people
in Africa, this is no longer a gay disease. It's changed dramatically to be a disease
mostly of heterosexuals passed on in brothels. It should also, therefore, change because
the gay population reacted properly. They've done safe sex and has a very small part of
the ongoing gay crisis now. Why is your thinking changed because of this? Now you have millions
of people, nongay people who are in the danger zone and the gay people aren't. It's no longer
gay. What you are talking about is only a gay problem and I want you to address that.
I'm not sure I understand. But, yes, it is still perceived primarily as a gay problem
by people who don't want to do anything to help us and we have never been able to escape
that. If it's not the biggest percentage of cases of AIDS in America now are in black
men, who are both figures keep rising. So that's the figure they gets put out. That
it's happening in Africa and the rest of the world. Let me tell you. It's not a major concern
to many people here. They take great pride on saying that drugs are now being provided,
not free of charge but at low cost to, up to three million people when there are 20
billion people who need it. You want to talk about greedy drug companies? They've all made
fortunes out of these drugs. They could afford to give them out for free to dying people,
to starving people. The only drugs they'll give out free are the ones that we've long
discarded, which are hard to take. There's not a good word to be said about anybody,
for anybody in all of this. Of course, this is what they all wanted. That's why it's even
more important that those of us who are alive and capable of fighting, have too. I was just
going to say in the same way that, of course, gay people are considered expendable so too
are other parts of the world, so the metaphors are the same. It's a population that's not
worth fighting. You don't know what's going on against gay people all over the world?
The mayor of Moscow and Saint Petersburg have issued that gay anything can be written about.
They call it propaganda. Every time there's a gay protest or gay pride they all wind up
in jail. In Russia where the people who take drugs constitute the majority of cases is
so overwhelmed with AIDS. I was in Moscow a couple years ago and you can't get anybody
to talk about it. A huge percentage of the population, they don't know what to do about
it, the same with China. The war has been lost. The war was lost a long time ago. It
advances faster than we can prevent what's happening. Now, there have been in the last
months some scientific discoveries toward the cure. It's gonna be a long time before
any of it can be approved. But they have discovered certain things that have given them hope that
if they can continue along these lines. There are several people have survived bone marrow
transplants in genetic transportation of certain cells lines that prohibit replication of ***.
It's needless to say enormously complicated, enormously expensive, but they have lived.
How they can take that to the next step, I don't know. But our wonderful generous National
Institute of Health or National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Fauchi
has allotted the grand sum of some five million dollars a year toward were looking for a cure.
Other questions? Hi my name is Ann. You've brought back so much of this time back to
me. I have to tell you Mr. Kramer I was working at the public theater in another show when
your show was up. I was doing the human comedy at the public theater when show your was playing
there. I was 14 years old. Oh OK. I remember at the time, I mean I was 14. At the time
two of the actors in my company were sick. The stage manager of the play I followed was
sick. The marginalization that was happening and the infighting that was going on within
the gay community and even that company of actors in that theater where your play was
taking place. The debate between as is which that was the warm and fuzzy play compared
to your play which had such passion and such anger in it. It was such a flashpoint at that
time. Then the next thing we knew you had left ACT UP and you alluded to this argument
and I just want to know what that was. Because when you departed, I remember that time. I
mean, I was 14 years old, but I remember that and I'm so honored that I actually get to
ask you what happened? What was it? Can you talk about that? What happened? When? When
you left ACT UP. When I left? I never left ACT UP. I'm sorry. When you left the board.
When you when you got your dog and went to Dauchau. When what? When you left Gay Men's
Health Crisis. I'm sorry, Gay Men's Health Crisis. They threw me out. But what was it,
what was it? What had happened? Well, because I was calling the mayor gay publicly for start,
and [laughter] I was criticizing Reagan and I was criticizing the New York Times. The
big three and I wasn't. They were just guys they were uncomfortable with this. The irony
is my brother law firm incorporated the Gay Men's Health Crisis. I had to find a board
to put on the papers so I pulled in my friends. Knowing nothing about boards and knowing not
what you put on the boards, not your friends but the people who will support you when push
comes to shove. I terrified them, I truly terrified them. I tried to the letter that
was read to me in play word for word is the letter that was read to me. They didn't want
me. It was, talk about painful, talk about having 15 messages on your answering machine
one day and none the next day. It hurt. I can't believe that was actually was real.
That's why I ran away. I didn't run away. I went to Europe and that was the birthing
of the play. I tried four times, three times to get back on the board and they didn't want
me. Never. That's life. Well, we got a great play out of it and that has endured. Thank
you. Other questions? Hi. I'm fascinated by this point in history where the artist and
the activists knew what you said the scientists were doing all the clinical trials wrong.
You went in there with a group of artists and activist and they were able to tell the
scientists how to do a clinical trial. Since that's sort of like a point of hope for me.
That an artist or activist could tell scientists what to do. To say I'm going into where the
crisis is in Africa right now. So I was wondering if you could give us a specific example of
what you told those scientists. How did they run that clinical trial? What particularly
in terms of the scientists when you were first having your meetings with ACT UP did you tell
them to do? Well I told you we had prepared these smart kids had prepared this 50 to 60
page report that we gave out. It was very detailed, scientific, statistics, things that
had to be studied in terms of what we knew about Tcells and they weren't studying any
of these things. It was very specific. Drug testing protocols that were. The protocols
that would prove such thing. Yeah. And we also got rid of the, for the first time in
history the placebo in a clinical trial. Every clinical trial always, some people got a placebo
and we said uh,uh. People who are dying aren't going to take placebos because what we would
do was the moment you got your drugs on a clinical trial you first thing you what did
you went to the pharmacy or a chemist and he studied whether you're getting the real
thing or not. If you weren't you stop taking the drugs so the trial was worth ***. In
the trials were showing up very poorly. Pardon my French. That kind of thing. Go ahead. So
I'm not the person to talk. I don't know an antibody froma a whatever. It's interesting
when you don't know and that your exposed to a lot of people who presumably do. It's
interesting how you can often tell who's full of *** and who isn't. Jonathan and I had
wanted to talk about something a little different if we have time for that. SureIt might be
a bit of a long one, but it was kind of very fitting. Its about this hatred idea about
that's still happening and it's continued and about how you say that you know you're
not allowed and politicians aren't allowed to talk like that about Jews now or about
black people. I wanted to ask if you could hash out some of the ideas about why it is
like that. What are the roots of some of those issues of hatred that exist so much? Why do
you think it is or what sort of roots? What are the roots of homophobia? What? What are
the roots of homophobia? Why? People don't like people who are different. I think it's
as simple as that. I've been working for the last 30 years or whatever on a book called
the American People, which is my attempt to write a history of America putting gays in
it from the get go because we were here from the beginning whether we had names or not.
It's about 3,000 pages long now, down from 4,000. Farrah Strauss has bought it and we're
editing it. It's appalling what you discover when you go back to early American history.
The great men like John Winthrop, or the great preachers like the Mathers and the Hookers
were as bigoted as they come. John Winthrop hung gay men. Hung them and that was 16something.
That law stayed on the books. George Washington, who was gay himself, had several officers
hung for being gay. I like to think he did it uncomfortably, but he did it. People don't
like different people. I think it's as simple as that. We scare them somehow. I think gay
men scare straight men because it's some kind of challenge to their masculinity. It's amazing
how many politicians who are so rabidly antigay are found in men's toilets, and get picked
up. With widelegged stances. Hmm? With widelegged stances, yeah. Did you read about this Sheriff
of the Year, in Arkansas? Who's retired, who was literally chosen the Sheriff of the Year?
[laughs] Of all America, the Sheriff of the Year. He's retired, and he's just been thrown
into jail for trying to buy sex from guys, with methamphetamines. Jonathan and I first
came to know each other around the year. When did we start it? 2000. 2000. My brother, Arthur
Kramer, the most wonderful of brothers said he would give $1,000,000 to Yale to do whatever
I wanted them to do. We come from a long line of people who had gone to Yale, which was
a big deal because we were all Jews. When my father and uncle, in 1912 and 1916, went
there as Jews, it was a big deal. Anyway, it took a long time to get Yale to agree to
doing any of a number of things gay that I suggested to them, a long time. It was, finally,
because of my straight friend, Calvin Trillin who was a beloved Yale alumnus, who literally
called up the president and said, in essence, "Grow up," nicely that we sat down and talked.
It took, I would say, two years until we arranged this plan for, they wouldn't even call it
a "center." We weren't allowed to call it the "Larry Kramer Center for Lesbian and Gay"
anything. Alice Trillin came up, finally, with the word "initiative," which I guess
means nothing, the Larry Kramer Initiative for Late Gay and Lesbian Studies. What I wanted
and what they wanted, it became increasingly obvious for different things. In this book
I had discovered George Washington was gay and I had discovered Abraham Lincoln was gay.
I hadn't discovered that others before me had but, I had become convinced that they
were, along with many, many other people like J. Edgar Hoover. This new movie is so full
of ***. I wanted that, that's my idea of gay studies. You should learn who we were.
Black history was changed overnight when it could be proved that Thomas Jefferson really
did have a black mistress. It was no longer just gossip. The minute that happened you
could start talking about black people. You could start talking about their history in
ways that had simply not been allowed before there, anywhere. Well, I wanted that to be
at Yale. Fortunately, the provost with whom I did become, after calling her many names,
a good friendfound Jonathan Katz to be the first head of LKI. How that happened I don't
know because you were so, in their terms, unsafe in big letters but somehow you got
the job. Then began our journey into hell, basically, where we discovered no matter what
we wanted to do they didn't like it. Somebody didn't like it and that somebody who didn't
like it was always invisible. You didn't know who it was. They watched when Jonathan went
to the toilet he had to practically get permission anytime he wanted to go on a trip anywhere.
This did not happen for any other department at all. He wanted to go to a gay conference
somewhere. Of course, he should be there. They had to know everything. One of the first
things that we discoveredthere's another Jonathan Katz in addition to this Jonathan Katz, whom
Jonathan gave a fellowship to early on discovered that one of the great benefactors of Yale,
John Sterling, the founder of the famous law firm Sherman and Sterling, half the things
at Yale are called Sterling this and Sterling that was gay and had been gay all his life
and lived with a gay lover and left everything to the gay lover. Not only did he discover
this but he discovered it in the Yale library where Sterling's papers had been there all
these years. It was a gay librarian who said to him "I want to show you something" [laughter]
. The minute we found it Jonathan, this Jonathan,put it out to the world. You have no idea the
hell that caused from Sherman and Sterling on up or down. People would threaten to stop
giving money to Yale. The Yale alumni magazine was filled with hateful mail. They certainly
were not about to teach that Abraham Lincoln and George Washington were gay. They were
going to teach *** studies and *** theory and all this stuff that is incomprehensible
to me. Theory is very safe. Jonathan, is indescribable in his greatnesshow hard he has fought. This
exhibition upstairs of gay art. That exhibition in an embryonic form was presented at Yale
on the night before his departure after having been fired. He presented this unbelievably
brilliant lecture at the Yale Art Gallery with a lot of these artists on display. The
discovery about Sterling and other things were then put up on an exhibition that we
did in the Yale library called the pink and the blue, blue being the color of Yale. One
of the objects that we discovered and investigated in the archives of Yale for evidence of same
sex life going back from the very earliest days was a book from 1843 about Yale men,
off course in those days there were only Yale men. It said, on page 57, that one of the
great concerns of the administration was the flourishing of the vices of the Greeks and
that the Yale administration was working very hard to stamp that out and I just think they
haven't changed all that much. Anyway, I have found out even equally damning things about
my alma mater which I will deal with in my book basically having to do with the cold war and where the philosophical permission
to behave as we did all started at Yale. All those professors who went over and became
OSS men during the war promulgated America first. Many of them were gay. Most of the
major spies were gayanyway all those Brits. James Jesus Eagleton, who was head of the
new CIA, gay as a coot. Anyway, I don't even know if coots are gay but whatever. What's
a coot? I have no idea. We're out of time but I want to ask everybody to join me in
thanking Larry Kramer.