5 minute read
Craig´s Thoughts: #BeMoreLarry
By Craig Hanlon-Smith @Craigscontinuum
Larry Kramer died on May 27, 2020 aged 84 and upon hearing the news and in the days since I’ve found myself to be self-described, disproportionately bereft. The sense of disproportion comes in the middle of a pandemic in which more than 40,000 have died in the UK alone, and yet I feel the loss of Kramer as acutely as the loss of a father or brother, when of course he was in fact neither to me. If Larry Kramer is unfamiliar to you then do your homework, I’m certainly not going to do it for you here. Whatever derivative of the LGBTQ+ communities you claim to belong to he is a key figure in our varied and sometime difficult histories. It’s imperative to know our histories to make any sense of the present and to know Larry was important, IS important in who we are in the present because of what he gave us in the past. In short, Larry Kramer saw the world around him and Larry got mad. In getting mad he took action and in taking action set up a number of organisations that have been instrumental in making life better for people like me. Larry did it for me and Larry did it for you.
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The recent Netflix series Hollywood, produced by gay of the moment Ryan Murphy, has been a runaway success with many in our broadening communities singing its praises across social media platforms. I applaud much of Murphy’s work, particularly his adaptation of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, and of course Pose, both of which portray a social truth. Interesting to note: both of these were written decades before they were produced for broadcast. However, I consider the remembering of history in Hollywood to be extremely dangerous. Portraying Rock Hudson as both stupid and a pioneering gay man, who fought all manner of personal and professional challenges to become an inspired advocate of our communities, is a lie. In the real world, Hudson’s sexual orientation, although rumoured, was exposed to the world when he died from AIDS related complications in 1985 and the heteronormative masses were horrified. I remember it well. That week some boys in my class stole my bag and upon returning it I discovered they had replaced my name on my exercise books with the two words. Rock Hudson. It wasn’t a compliment. I appreciate Hollywood is a retelling, a deliberately inverted ‘but what if it was this way’ celebration of women producers and black actors who not only secured leading roles in movies but were allowed to sit in the front row at the Oscars. They did not and they could not. It is a lie. The 2015 film Stonewall has a goodlooking Hollywood studio acceptable white gay boy throwing the first brick that sparked three days of rioting inspiring the gay rights movement. It is a lie. That brick was thrown by a black trans activist. The runaway musical success Hamilton reimagines the founding fathers of the United States and the birth of the constitution. It does so with a completely black cast and contemporary hip-hop musical score. The unusually diverse (for the West End) audience leave feeling great about the universe and head off back to their segregated suburbs congratulating themselves that they now know black history. They do not. It is a lie. We know it to be a lie because hundreds of years after the birth of the constitution we watch a black man murdered on the streets in daylight by white law enforcement officers And the masses want to know “why are they setting fire to their own neighbourhoods? It makes no sense”. Because they are angry. They are angry because they see that everyone sees and it makes little difference.
In the same way Larry Kramer was angry. Angry when hundreds, then thousands, of gay and bisexual men were dying of a virus as the world watched but did nothing. Angry because he saw that to those in authority we did not matter. And who were Larry’s greatest enemies? The authorities? The conservatives or Republican politicians? The Christian right? No. Gay men. His greatest enemies were gay men who didn’t like his shouting. Who felt that in making a show of himself he was drawing unnecessary attention to them and they were embarrassed. Gay men who were uncomfortable with Larry Kramer outing closeted politicians on television who, while allegedly secretly gay, took an active role in denying healthcare to gay men dying in their districts. His enemies were gay men who didn’t want the word “GAY” to appear in the name of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis organisation. Gay men who had elected conservative politicians to their seats, gay men who worked for government departments but who did not want to rock the boat. Gay men who were journalists for newspapers burying the AIDS crisis on page 17. Gay men who could not shake their shame and would not use their privilege for progress. And here we sit in the shadow of a government lying to our faces on national television. A government who did not dither in February or March but who took a decision led by advisors that the plague among us would only kill the weak and old. Natural selection and dispensable fodder. Whose only inspiration to take action at all was when some of their number began to fall ill. Heterosexual and white people. A government whose arrogance is so great they want you to believe a man drove 30 miles up a busy ‘A’ road to test his eyesight. If we lie to your faces and do not crack a smile you will believe us eventually. And, like those governments in the 1980s across the world and here in the UK, this behaviour is anything but incompetent. It is their ideology and you should be aware of that. They want it like this. The economic crash that will hide the economic toll of Brexit and be blamed on a virus. Covid-19 is an opportunity for those people in the way that some believed AIDS had been sent by God. Get angry and then get up and do something. Act up. Fight back. #BeMoreLarry.
