With his debut novel, Faggots, the legendary AIDS activist, who died yesterday, demonstrated the profane morality that would define his career.
It’s not easy to quote from Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel, Faggots, without losing the horrible fun of it. The sentences are mostly humongous, clause-cragged lists involving genitalia and scatology and hard-fleshed crowds of seemingly indistinguishable men with names—so many names!—such as Billy Boner and Dinky Adams and Cunard Rancé Evin Dildough. You can only grab at certain clumps of incident and imagery as they whiz by. I hate how often I laugh at the thought of the protagonist, Fred Lemish, trying to sponge off some sexual frustration late one night at a Manhattan bathhouse. In the putrid water, Kramer writes, Fred spots a “cockroach up-ended, probably fucked to death, glad somebody got something, he thought.”
How fitting that Kramer’s death from pneumonia at age 84 has already sparked a controversy over rhetoric, tone, and respectability. A New York Timesarticle originally said that the author and HIV/AIDS activist’s “often abusive approach could overshadow his achievements,” which is a hilariously provocative dig to put in this particular man’s obituary. Abusive adds a violent tint to what others less hysterically call confrontational or brave or no-fucks-given. But overshadowed his achievements? To know Kramer’s achievements is to know they happened venomously.
Angry that too few people seemed to be doing anything about the mysterious illness sweeping through the gay community, in 1982 he founded the volunteer group Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Angry that group wasn’t doing enough to shame the government into addressing the crisis, he—as memorialized in his enduring play The Normal Heart—resigned and founded ACT UP, whose agitprop (slogan: “Silence = Death”) helped push the Food and Drug Administration to speed up its drug approval processes. A legendary 1983 op-ed on the underrecognized AIDS emergency was typical of his style when it came to thrashing against complacency. It began, “If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble.”
Amid present debates over whether battles against bigotry should be tempered with civility, and over whether a pandemic can be fought with status-quo-friendly half measures, Kramer’s legacy points in a clear direction: away from compromise. But it’d do him a disservice to treat his impoliteness and extremity as mere PR strategies to achieve particular ends. One might call his foul mouthedness an aesthetic if that didn’t seem too fancy a word for telling the truth.
