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Widely admired, frequently reviled, but one who never shies away from the bald, bold truth, Larry Kramer stands alone in queer history as one of those important people who tirelessly works to further the cause of his "brothers and sisters," a term he admits may be corny, but nevertheless the most appropriate term for the homos he has long championed and challenged. In the forward to this book Naomi Wolf recounts an email from old-school queer activist Virginia Apuzzo, in which she expresses an idea Kramer must agree with: "I feel we have a moral obligation to create havoc, to generate outrage, to reignite our belief in our capacity to do whatever your ACT UP kids did, 'change history.'"
This book-his latest attempt at changing the history of the gay community-is the text of a speech given five days after the re-election of George W Bush and is an answer to its title, "The Tragedy of Today's Gays." Kramer, never one to mince words or avoid hyperbole, is purely electric here. The language is raw and you can see his blood boil and hear his screams ring across the lecture hall. And he is tough. He begins by excoriating two of his longtime friends, both now in middle age and one finding he recently seroconverted and the other now a crystal addict. That he bravely (stupidly?) takes on people so close to him is classic Kramer and it also perfectly illustrates what he has been hammering home for years: that gay men are murdering ourselves and each other. He quite literally means murder and finds the outrage that is the equivalent for such a crime. Kramer does not go in for much queer theory or complicated explanations. He wants us to quit using crystal, quit fucking without condoms and quit rolling over and letting others and ourselves fuck us over. Simple ideas that, since 1981, he has been taken to task for.
But unlike some other writers with simplistic and moralistic ideas about sex in the gay community, Kramer has an apparent and abiding love for gay men. "I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do. I think we're smarter and more talented and more aware. I do, I do, I totally do. I really do think all of these things. And I try very hard to remember all this." But seeing the ever-rising HIV rates and the alarming crystal meth problem makes believing hard for Kramer.
Kramer, like all truly great activists and revolutionaries, rarely believes what he does or says is anything beyond what anyone else could do or say, but instead sees himself as one voice in what he hopes will be a worldwide chorus. "People come up to me now on the street and say thank you for what you do for us," he writes near the end of the speech. "My response quite often has been a curt 'Fuck you! Why aren't you doing it, too?' I don't do anything that anyone else can't do." Indeed. And what a different world we'd be in right now if just a fraction of us did just that.
This speech takes about an hour to read, a few days to process, and a lifetime of commitment to live out. Required reading for every gay man-and anyone else who fears the survival of the gay community. -Eric Hildebrandt
Ed. Katherine V. Forrest
Cleis Press, $18.95
A
The ‘50s were a great decade for repression and nowhere was this more evident than in lesbian pulp novels. Heck, this was a time when the very word “lesbian” reeked of scandal. But as seen in this anthology, which has excerpts from 22 books, there were certain conventions to be followed: the sex couldn’t be too explicit, and the endings tended to be unhappy. Fire and water metaphors prove to be especially popular in dealing with the former, while some descriptions sound rather like an acid trip: “Striving together, they had reached that bright land where the sunshine was a white fire and the flowers were neon-colored, blinding.” In fact, you can open this book just about anywhere and find a gem: “Bisexual—that’s sort of like succotash, isn’t it? Only this succotash hasn’t got any corn in it. It’s straight beans!” As one of the back cover blurbs would put it, “delicate yet unblushingly frank.” —Gillian G Gaar