Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer
Larry Krameris an American playwright, author, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for the 1969 film Women in Loveand earned an Academy Award nomination for his work. Kramer introduced a controversial and confrontational style in his novel Faggots, which book earned mixed reviews but emphatic denunciations from elements within the gay community...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth25 June 1935
CityBridgeport, CT
CountryUnited States of America
You'll see more and more becoming available on the Web, mostly in cases where networks are convinced it supports and helps the show,
Being gay is a natural normal beautiful variation on being human. Period. End of subject. Therefore, any argument which says differently is an immoral supremacist one. Call it out as such. ... Be outraged, offended, angry and intolerant of any discussion or any one who describes you as unequal, undeserving or unnatural for being just as you are.
You'd think one day we'd learn. You don't get anything unless you fight for it, united and with visible numbers. If ACT UP taught us anything, it taught us that.
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 totally do. I really do think all of these things. And I try very hard to remember all this.
The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there--all throughhistory we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organise ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed.
Too many people hate the people that AIDS most affects: gay people and people of color. I do not mean dislike, or feel uncomfortable with. I mean hate. Downright hate. Down and dirty hate.
Some reporter called me 'the angriest gay man in the world' or some such. Well, it stuck, but I realized it was very useful.
AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.
I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don't like that feeling.
Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn't take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn't exist. I don't even think the word 'gay' was in existence.
Activism is very seductive, and writing is painful and hard. It's very scary to have a death threat living over your head. Activism is very sustaining. But I don't view myself as a political person. I'm just someone who desperately wants to stay alive.
Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.
I don't mind about the dead ones. They're dead. The worst of it is, they cling to the living and won't let go.
The point about L-O-V-E is that we hate the word. Because we vulgarize it. It should be taboo, forbidden from utterance for many years, till we've found a new and a better idea.