Happy Birthday, Larry Kramer! Picture: Kramer, New York City, 1991. Photo by @billbytsura. Larry Kra
Happy Birthday, Larry Kramer! Picture: Kramer, New York City, 1991. Photo by @billbytsura. Larry Kramer introduced moral and intellectual outrage to the gay liberation movement. In 1978, Kramer published “Faggots,” his controversial novel about the sex- and drug-heavy culture of gay men on Fire Island and Manhattan. “‘Faggots’ struck a chord,” Andrew Sullivan wrote. “It exuded a sense that gay men could do better if they understood themselves as fully human, if they shed their self-loathing and self-deception…” Although not previously politically active, when friends began to get sick in 1980, Kramer gathered other influential gay men at his apartment to discuss this new disease, and, in early 1982, the group formed the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (@gmhc). From the outset, as opposed to the approach preferred by other GMHC members, Kramer insisted on confronting government officials (namely Mayor Ed Koch, Kramer’s nemesis) and the behavior of the gay community itself. By 1983, Kramer’s confrontational style proved too much, and he was ousted from GMHC; he retreated to Europe for an extended vacation. During that trip, while touring Dachau concentration camp, Kramer learned that the camp had opened as early as 1933 and nothing had been done to stop it; seeing the parallels with the growing AIDS epidemic in America, Kramer was inspired to write “The Normal Heart,” which opened in 1985. In March 1987, Kramer spoke at the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center in New York City, and he asked the audience if there was any interest in starting a civil disobedience action group to protest the lack of a response to AIDS; two days later, three hundred people met and formed the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP). Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, later said that “ACT UP put medical treatment in the hands of the patients…In American medicine there are two eras: Before Larry and After Larry.” Larry Kramer, who married David Webster in July 2013, turns eighty-one today. #lgbthistory #lgbtherstory #lgbttheirstory #lgbtpride #actup #fightback #fightaids #queerhistorymatters #haveprideinhistory (at New York, New York) -- source link
#lgbthistory#haveprideinhistory#lgbtpride#queerhistorymatters#lgbttheirstory#lgbtherstory#actup#fightaids#fightback