Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer with Molly, his Wheaten Terrier, New York City, 1989. Credit: ©Robert Giard, Courtesy of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. Episode Notes
Until 1981, Larry Kramer was best known for his Academy Award-nominated screenplay for Women in Love and Faggots, his controversial novel about New York City’s gay subculture in the post-Stonewall 1970s. And then he picked up the New York Times on the morning of July 3, 1981 and read about a rare cancer found in 41 gay men.
It was in that moment that Larry Kramer was radicalized. Larry went on to cofound GMHC (originally known as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis) and ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power), two of the leading organizations that responded to the AIDS epidemic.
To learn more about Larry Kramer’s activism and his career as a writer, have a look at the information, links, photos, and episode transcript below.
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Larry Kramer died on May 27, 2020. For an overview of his life and work, read his New York Times obituary here.
In 1970, the New York Times reviewed the movie Women in Love, which was written and produced by Larry Kramer.
You can find a copy of Larry Kramer’s 1978 book Faggots here. In 2000, the Los Angeles Times published an essay about Faggots by Reynolds Price, a version of which appeared as a forward to the book’s new edition.
Read the July 3, 1981 New York Times article that made Larry Kramer—and plenty of other people—sit up and take notice.
In his Making Gay History interview, Larry mentions the three men he called to organize the first meeting of what later became the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Read about Larry Mass here, Donald Krintzman here, and Paul Rapoport here. Larry also mentions Dr. Friedman-Kien.
For more information about GMHC (the Gay Men’s Health Crisis), please visit their website. And to read about Larry’s reconciliation with GMHC, have a look at this 2017 Poz magazine article.
To learn more about ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), please visit their website. The New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division houses ACT UP’s papers.
We recommend the following two books for a detailed understanding of the AIDS epidemic: And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts and How to Survive a Plague by David France. David France also directed a documentary of the same name. You can also find the documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP on YouTube.
Making Gay History featured another ACT UP cofounder, Vito Russo, in this episode. You can also listen to the Making Gay History episode featuring CNN business anchor, Tom Cassidy, in which Tom discusses his AIDS diagnosis and its impact on his life.
HBO produced a feature-length documentary about Larry Kramer in 2015 titled Larry Kramer in Love and Anger. You can also find Larry Kramer’s oral history in Eric Marcus’s book Making Gay History.
Larry Kramer’s papers are housed at the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
In his Making Gay History interview, Larry talks about how he thought he was the only gay student at Yale when he was a freshman in 1953. Today, Yale maintains an Office of LGBTQ Resources. To learn about the history of LGBT studies at Yale, click here.
Larry Kramer attempted suicide in 1953 when he was a freshman at Yale University. For more information about LGBTQ suicide and/or to seek support in a crisis, contact The Trevor Project.
New York Times theater critic Frank Rich reviewed Larry Kramer’s landmark play about the AIDS crisis, The Normal Heart. The play was adapted for a 2014 star-studded film of the same name, which you can read about here.
Larry Kramer married his long-time partner, David Webster, in a hospital ceremony in 2013, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act.
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Episode Transcript
Eric Marcus Narration: I’m Eric Marcus and this is Making Gay History!
If you’ve heard of Larry Kramer, then his reputation as a passionate activist with high expectations and a short fuse probably precedes him.
If you don’t know him, Larry is famous for being one of the first civilians to sound the alarm even before AIDS was called AIDS and became a catastrophic worldwide epidemic that has swept away millions of lives.
Back in the early ‘80s, Larry earned more than a few enemies because of his calls for gay men to cool it with their sex lives. Even before the virus that causes AIDS was discovered, it was clear to Larry and many others that it was a sexually transmitted disease. Coming on the heels of 1970s gay liberation and newfound sexual freedom, almost no one wanted to hear an angry middle-aged man tell them that they had to stop having sex—that it was a matter of life and death.
Before the AIDS crisis, Larry was best known for his work as a screenwriter and author. He wrote the Oscar-nominated 1969 screenplay for Women in Love. And he wrote the controversial 1978 novel, Faggots, which pulled back the curtain on a world of promiscuous sex and drug use in New York’s post-Stonewall gay subculture.
It was AIDS that propelled Larry Kramer into the movement. His friends were dying and he had to do something. In 1982 he co-founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, now known as GMHC. Five years later he co-founded—along with Vito Russo and others—ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. ACT UP came to be known for its brilliant use of public protests to bring attention to the epidemic. By early 1989, when I first met Larry, AIDS had taken more than 60,000 lives, most of them gay men.
Given all that, I knew Larry was someone I needed to interview. But I wasn’t looking forward to it. I only knew Larry from press reports and television appearances and from what I could see, he had more than earned his reputation as an uncompromising, angry, outspoken firebrand who was unafraid to offend.
That’s not the Larry Kramer I found on a winter afternoon at his apartment in New York City. I had braced myself for a tornado and I found a teddy bear.
So here’s the scene. I’m sitting opposite Larry in his Greenwich Village living room. We’re separated by his broad desk in a room that’s all white. Out the window I can see Washington Square Park and in the distance, the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
As I set up my tape recorder and attach the lapel mic to Larry’s shirt, we chat about how we both had wanted to find a husband early in life and settle down. And that leads us back in time to Larry’s memories as a confused and unhappy college student in the early 1950s. I press record.
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Eric Marcus: Interview with Larry Kramer, Thursday, January 26, 1989, at the home of Larry Kramer in New York City. Interviewer is Eric Marcus. Tape one, side one.
Larry Kramer: When I went to Yale, I thought I was the only gay person in the world, and tried to kill myself because it was so lonely.
EM: Actually did try to kill yourself?
LK: Yeah.
EM: What year was that, that you…
LK: And I think that was ’53 was the year, my freshman year at Yale. Oh, it was awful. I mean I—do you want to go back that far?
EM: Well, I’m also curious, because I was a college student in ’76, desperately unhappy.
LK: Where?
EM: At Vassar College.
LK: Where there were a lot of gays.
EM: There weren’t that many. People think there were a lot. I always said, if there were so many gays, why was I so unhappy? But I was a miserably unhappy person, and death seemed very appealing at moments during my freshman year, when I was dating a woman and sneaking off with a man behind… And life in ’53 at Yale must have been much more difficult than ’76 at Vassar.
LK: Well, I don’t know if you could even start in ’53. I knew I was gay, I think, from the day I was born. And I think there have been—I now know that there were experiences all through, before I even got to Yale, and they were all covert and guilt-inducing on everybody’s part.
So it seemed as if all those early years were spent trying to deny these feelings. The feelings would sort of get too strong and erupt, and I would have an experience which would always make me feel guilty in one way or another, and then you’d put it—you’d be calm, Vesuvius would calm down for a while.
EM: A week.
LK: A week or two. And Yale was awful. There was a gay bar called Pirelli’s. It was just awful, when I finally had the courage to go there. It was only two blocks from campus. But it was a million years away. It was very dark and gray inside, and smoky, and filled with older men, and I only went the once. And somebody picked me up in a car and drove for what seemed like hours before we found a place that was quiet, to do it, and then he drove me back, where you didn’t say a word, all of that.
EM: How did you try to kill yourself?
LK: I ate 200 aspirin.
EM: Oh, my god, talk about slow and miserable death. You must have been pretty miserable to swallow 200—and you must have been even more miserable after. Did you just, you wanted out? Was that…?
LK: Who knows? It’s a scene I’ll never forget.
EM: The scene of taking the pills? Or the scene of waking up and finding you’re still there?
LK: I didn’t wake up. I went to bed and I got scared and I called the campus police, and they came and took me to the hospital and pumped my stomach. And I was in a—then I fell asleep and I woke up in a room with bars. And… at the Grace New Haven Hospital, and it was this very unpleasant hospital psychiatrist who said, “Alright, Mr. Kramer, why did you do it?” And I said, “Go fuck yourself,” or words to that…
And he said, “You’re not going to be let out of this hospital until you tell us why you did it.” And I said, you know, I just had a—he rubbed me the wrong way, and I wouldn’t have told him. Who knew why I did it, anyway?
So my brother, who’s always sort of looked after me, came and got me out, and he was friends with the dean of freshman. My brother had been to Yale before me. And it was, you know, ordinarily when something like that happened, you were shipped off to go join the Army.
EM: Really?
LK: In those days, yeah. And then you’d come back to Yale when you’d sort of grown up. But they let me stay if I went to the university psychiatrist. His name was Dr. Fry, Clement Fry, and he was about, in his 60s. He had silver hair, and he was a good-looking man, he wore his rep tie and his button-down shirt. And you just knew that he cared more about Yale than he ever did about you.
And I told him of this experience that I had had of—I had been invited to go to the room of two of my freshman year, two guys freshman year that I had met. And they somehow mercifully had found each other, and they were living in this room, and I was invited for tea or something. And I walked into this room and the room—you know how awful freshman year rooms are—well, they had done their room, and it was painted all black. And there was, everything had been taken out of the room except, you know, a low mattress, which was black, and there was a perfect coffee table with a rose in a vase, that was spotlit, and…
EM: Gay men are born…
LK: And Mabel Mercer is playing on the phonograph, right? So I described this all to Dr. Fry, and Dr. Fry’s reaction was, “I wouldn’t see those guys anymore if I were you.” And that’s what Yale was like, and that’s what going to a psychiatrist was like, so…
EM: And there wasn’t, there wasn’t a local gay student group for you to call.
LK: There was not, I mean, I love going back to Yale now, and this is my real yardstick of how far we’ve come, even though I’m always yelling about how we’ve not come far enough. I go back to Yale and Yale is like the gay college now. And there’s a dance every year for, you know, well over a thousand gay men and women, you know, across the campus from where I tried to kill myself because I thought I was the only one.
EM: So that is your yardstick for change.
LK: It certainly is, yeah.
EM: That in 30 years’ time… You were completely alone.
LK: Thirty years it is. God. It’s a long time. So, where does that leave us? A lot of change and no change.
EM: Well, yeah.
LK: Well, I guess, it’s in my nature to be impatient. And I only got politically involved because of AIDS. And there’s no question that we have lost the war to AIDS, and that we have lost and will continue to lose a great many people whom we did not have to lose, and that the speed of research, treatment, education, you name it, has been tragically and inhumanely slow. It’s an epidemic that need not have happened. And that we should have listened. There’s no question that enough people knew what was happening.
EM: Who should have listened? Are there people specifically who should have listened?
LK: Well, the community. I mean, the gay press, the gay leaders.
EM: You were there before it was an epidemic, or just as it was becoming…
LK: Well, I think now we know that even when we found out in ’81, it was much bigger than we thought, but we thought it was just beginning. Right. ’81, in this very room, in August ’81, 80 men sat with Dr. Friedman-Kien from NYU, who told us, in no uncertain terms, exactly what was happening. And, uh, and he was right.
EM: In ’81.
LK: In August of ’81. The New York Times article that alerted everybody, really, was July 3, ’81. The New York Times headline was something like, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” and it said that all the guys had the same history, which was the history of having had all of these sexual diseases: amoebas, hepatitis A and B, and mononucleosis, and syphilis, and gonorrhea, and you name it.
When I saw that in the New York Times, I was scared. Because I’d had all of that, and I guess a penny dropped, as the English say, or the bell rang, or something. And I called Larry Mass, who was and is my friend, who is a doctor and who had written some articles. He wrote a health column for the Native, and had written about it before the Times had. And I guess I’d spoken to him peripherally about it, but not—it had, the bell hadn’t rung, I guess, until the Times—the Times has a way of making you really sit up and say wow.
EM: Well, if the Times covers it, it has to be real.
LK: So he said, “Go talk to Alvin, to Dr. Friedman-Kien,” which I did. And Alvin, who turned out to be gay, and we turned out to have mutual friends, said, “This is what’s happening, you gotta stop fucking. You’re someone well-known in the gay community. You have to do something about it. Somebody’s gotta go out there and tell them.” And it was because of that, that I invited Larry Mass and I and two other guys now dead, Donald Krintzman and Paul Rappaport, invited everyone we knew to come to this first meeting in August.
EM: Did that include people from political groups, gay political groups?
LK: We got on the phone and we called everybody. We called anyone we could think of. Political people, rich people, media people, doctors—none of whom showed up—and it was a good cross-section. And it was, you know, a lot of people didn’t believe ’em.
EM: Did you know this was a hot political football when you picked it up? Or did you expect people would respond to you, or to what you had to say?
LK: You know, that very meeting that night, with—it was in the early evening, with Alvin, so that, I mean, there were a lot of very nasty questions put to him. There were a lot of people saying, you know, you’re a born-again. How can you make all of these assumptions on the basis of so few cases? And how can you expect the whole community to stop fucking? And, you know, there was no virus then. I mean, people say there’s no virus now, but there certainly was no virus then, and that didn’t come for another couple of years, and people could say, “You have no evidence to base this on.”
EM: But didn’t anyone say, even if there’s the slightest possibility?
LK: Well, that’s what he was saying and that’s what I was saying. And it wasn’t so much the people that Paul Popham and Nathan Fain, who came to be my big adversaries in Gay Men’s Health Crisis… It wasn’t so much that they didn’t believe or not believe what was happening. Paul had of course lost a couple of friends by then, and a lover. It was that he didn’t think it was GMHC’s, or anybody’s position to tell anybody else how to live their lives, and that people had to make up their own minds.
And so a lot of valuable time was lost not being the conduit. I thought I was setting up or fighting to help set up with others, an organization that was going to do one thing, and that organization became, and still is another.
EM: What was it…?
LK: It was set up to spread information and to fight. To fight to make the system accountable and to spread the word of what was happening, and that, you know, we gotta cool it. It was not that at all. It became very quickly—it was taken over by the social workers, and it is now what it is then, it’s a social service, and a very good social service organization.
But it, again, that’s our tragedy. It’s an organization that helps people to die, it is not an organization that helps the living go on living. And we still don’t have an organization to do that. You know, except maybe ACT UP, which came along much too late. Better late than never, but much too late.
I blame myself. I am very cognizant of a great failing on my part that I did not have the ability to be a leader, that I did not have the ability to deal with my adversaries and still be friends. God didn’t, if there is a God, did not give the gay community a leader when the gay community needed a leader. And it still hasn’t.
EM: And you failed in that role.
LK: And I failed in that role. I feel very strongly, I failed in that role.
EM: What does the future hold, then?
LK: I think AIDS is going to get much, much worse and a lot more people are going to die, and I hope that one of these drugs is going to do something about it, but… I never seem to hear of any letup in the number of people who seem to be getting sick, and that’s very scary. And I’m HIV-positive myself, which I’ve just discovered and, uh…
EM: You just were tested. For the first time?
LK: For the first time, yeah. And I… you know, for the first time it’s come home to me in an even more personal way that my days may be numbered, in a way that I didn’t think of before. And that’s made me real sad, more than angry.
I find myself going back to ACT UP, which I haven’t done in a long time, because I got fed up with it.
EM: Well, there must be a renewed personal… There’s a greater personal interest than before, I would think.
LK: Their fighting takes me out of my negativity. Makes me, just sort of being touched by their positivism helps me.
EM: There are a lot of things I haven’t asked you. Is there anything that you would like to comment on…
LK: I don’t feel like I’ve been at my best today with you.
EM: I’ll come back.
LK: I feel a little specious in what—not specious. I feel a little…
EM: Scattered?
LK: Buck scattered in what I’ve said. So I don’t know if I’ve said what I’ve… I love being gay. And if I have been, and am critical, it’s only because I think we are very special people and capable of so much more. And it’s taken me a long time to be able to say that, because I’m of a different generation than many, you know…
EM: You were born what year?
LK: ’35. And I’m the generation that was sent off to shrinks because shrinks then thought they could change you, and you were expected to change. And it took a long time for me to come to terms with my homosexuality, and a lot of shrinks. Now, having come to terms with it, and liking it, and then having to face AIDS, is almost like a bum rap. Nevertheless, it’s… You know, I think we are very lucky.
I just, I think being a gay man, even today, with AIDS, is a wonderful thing. I love being gay.
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EM Narration: After I turned off my tape recorder, Larry Kramer and I talked about his health, which hadn’t been great. Besides being HIV-positive, two thirds of his liver had been destroyed by the Hepatitis B virus. His doctor told him that he had maybe three years to live. But Larry is still alive today. Experimental drugs and a liver transplant in 2001 saved his life. Larry also got his wish to find a husband, settling down with David Webster in 1991. They married on July 24, 2013.
Larry and I talked about how he’d like to be remembered. He told me that he sees his work, like the landmark play “The Normal Heart,” as his legacy. But at the risk of disagreeing with Larry, I think his biggest legacy was saving lives through the activism he inspired and his warnings about AIDS, which were heard by more than a few of us, including me. A lot of us owe our lives to Larry Kramer.
We’ve really appreciated all your emails telling us how much you love the Making Gay History podcast.
This note came to us from Jason Clark on Facebook:
I just wanted to say thank you for the countless hours that you have put into making these recordings and the podcast. I am a 32-year-old gay man, and before I was a teenager, I knew I was gay, and I lost an uncle due to AIDS back then, but he was never out and I didn’t learn that last fact about him until I came out to my grandmother. I feel like I missed a lot of his life because of that. I never understood why he never came out, and your podcast helps me realize that I have taken a lot of freedoms that I have today for granted that my uncle and millions of others never had. I can’t thank you enough for making me realize this.
We’d like to include some of your thoughts in your own voices in future episodes, so email a voice memo to us at hello@makinggayhistory.com.
And congratulations to Fran Tirado from the podcast Food 4 Thot for his winning entry into the inaugural “Baking Gay History” competition at our live event, which we held upstairs at the historic Stonewall Inn earlier this month. Food 4 Thot’s new season is out very soon—find out more at food4thotpodcast.com.
Thank you to everyone who helps Sara Burningham and me make Making Gay History each week. We couldn’t do it without you: Anne Pope, Josh Gwynn, Michael Green, Bronwen Pardes, and Zachary Seltzer. Our theme music was composed by Fritz Myers. Thank you, also, to social media strategist Will Coley and our webmaster, Jonathan Dozier-Ezell. A very special thank you to our guardian angel Jenna Weiss-Berman.
The Making Gay History podcast is a co-production of Pineapple Street Media, with assistance from the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division and ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.
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So long! Until next time!
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