THE STUFF OF LEGENDS
LARRY KRAMER, RIP. PHOTO BY DAVID SHANKBONE
“I am one of the hundreds of thousands of gay men who would not be alive today if not for Larry Kramer.” Brenden Shucart on author, essayist, playwright and activist Larry Kramer, who passed away last month.
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efore I eulogize Larry Kramer I feel obligated to state up front that I never met the great man in person. Yet I feel intimately acquainted with him, because I wouldn’t be who I am today without his guiding hand. His activism sets the standard for all who come after, his novels shape our shared view of the Golden Age of Gay Culture, and to be Gay in this antediluvian age is to live in a world Larry Kramer built with his sweat, tears, and—most of all—his anger. Anyone who’s heard of Kramer, knows his anger was the stuff of legends. It had the power to shame the mighty, energize movements, and change the course of history. And, speaking from first hand experience, finding one’s self on the receiving end of that righteous fury is both a memo2 2 T H E F IGH T | www.thefightmag.com
BY BRENDEN SHUCART
rable and unpleasant experience—but I’m getting ahead of myself. We were talking about his anger. Kramer’s writing crackles with the stuff. In his first great novel, Faggots, (a bitingly hilarious and often quite sad satire of Gay life in the late ‘70s), his anger is a simmering frustration for the shallow decadence he perceives in Gay culture on the eve of the AIDS crisis. In The Normal Heart, that anger burns blue hot, fueled by a grief born from the loss of literally everyone and everything that he loved and the indifference of a world that let it happen. Together they are practically the definitive narrative of Gay life immediately before and after AIDS swept through our community. That anger would act as fuel, carry-
ing him forward as he tried to save that which was left of his shattered world. When the medical landscape proves unwilling and unable to care for his plague stricken brothers, he used it to found to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis: an institution whichwould become a model for HIV care replicated around the Western world. Then he turned that fire on the glacial indifference of the Reagan administration, creating ACT UP to shame the federal government into action. Larry Kramer’s righteous fury—for all of its power and effectiveness—made him few friends. The unrelenting heat caused him to be forced out of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and made him not always a welcome presence at ACT UP. Now keep in mind, I didn’t know Larry
