The Curse of the Prophet

Having known Kramer only as a firebrand, I was first surprised by how long and delicate his eyelashes were, perched above his bright, brown eyes. He widened those eyes once for effect during our conversation, to punctuate a point, and in that charming gesture I got a glimmer of what they would look like ablaze in anger.

If you ever want to glimpse that anger yourself, watch the extraordinary opening scene of the 2015 documentary Larry Kramer in Love and Anger. He sits at a table collecting his thoughts, not a trace of trouble on his face. Several placid seconds pass before his face contorts into fury and he begins shouting, “PLAGUE!”

“What’s really required to get attention in this country, I’ve learned, is being extreme,” he told The New York Times in 1995. “If you write a calm letter and fax it to nobody, it sinks like a brick in the Hudson.” Understand this lesson, and one could take the White House.

“Nobody listens to you unless you’re loud,” he told me. “I learned that early on.” And loud he was. If rage was what the world wanted, rage was what he would give it: rage at Ed Koch, with whom he somewhat notoriously shared a building; rage at Ronald Reagan (“a monster,“ “responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler”); rage at Anthony Fauci and the medical establishment (then in the midst of responding to a different plague), for not rushing experimental treatments into clinical use; rage at the gay community, for a thousand failures; and rage, beneath it all, at his own failure.

Read: Creating the first visual history of American queer life before Stonewall

It may seem strange that a man who co-founded two thriving civil-rights organizations, was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and a Pulitzer-finalist playwright, wrote a best-selling novel that has remained in print for more than 40 years, and had his play become a successful film 30 years after it was written would consider himself a failure, but Kramer has long been consistent on the point. “I am very cognizant of a great failing on my part,” he told the oral historian Eric Marcus in 1989: “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.”

He faulted himself for letting his pugilism thwart the leadership required to grow a movement. “One of my role models as an activist is a woman called Virginia Apuzzo,” he told me. “She has this uncanny ability to say what she meant and to deal with people who opposed her with such skill and sometimes humor, sometimes just sheer intelligence, without herself getting angry. You always loved Ginny, even if she told you you were full of shit. And that’s a rare gift. I’ve never been able to duplicate that.”

Having perceived himself as a failure, was Kramer proud of his accomplishments? “I feel well used, how’s that?” he said. “I’m proud of my organizations. GMHC is now thriving in a way it didn’t for a bunch of years. I’m unable to judge the quality of my writing, except as it pleases me.”

“In the case of ACT UP, which I’m exceedingly proud of having founded, it was based on love and fear. You know, earlier on people said, ‘You’ll scare everybody to death. And I said, ‘Good. ‘Cause you should be afraid, because it’s frightening.’’” ACT UP was composed of young people, Kramer said, “many of whom were already sick, many of whom had already lost friends or family or relationships. It bonded hundreds and hundreds of people every week. And they all came to love each other. It was exceedingly moving.”