In an interview with online magazine Salon.com published on April 23, Larry Kramer, a prominent 76-year-old American playwright, author, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist asked "why so many (younger) gay men don't want to know their history" and why they seemed to have "turned their back on the older generation as if they don't want to have anything to do with them."
Larry Kramer, a prominent 76-year-old American playwright,
author, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist.
The article noted that Kramer, who co-founded the New York City-based Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) in 1982, that led the United States in the fight against AIDS, and resigned a year later to form the more militant ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) as a more political alternative, first incensed gay men in 1978 with Faggots, an "eerily prescient novel that critiqued the gay community's culture of promiscuity."
In 2005, he published The Tragedy of Today's Gays, a transcript of a speech in which he attacked the younger generation of gay men for their apathy over gay causes and accused them of condemning their "predecessors to nonexistence." Thomas Rogers, Salon's Deputy Arts Editor wrote: "The largely autobiographical story centers on a group of gay men in the early days of the AIDS epidemic and stars Joe Mantello as Ned Weeks, a Kramer-esque activist desperately trying to draw attention to the plague, alongside a cast that includes Ellen Barkin, Lee Pace and The Big Bang Theory's Jim Parsons. The play remains a highly effective, moving work that brutally conveys the desperation and terror that accompanied the emergence of AIDS. But nowadays, it also doubles as a history lesson for people who grew up long after the first wave -- a role that Kramer sees as vital."
Kramer, in an interview with Thomas Rogers, Salon's Deputy Arts Editor, said:
On whether there's been a cultural shift away from meaningless sexual culture
"I think there's still an awful lot of meaningless sex going on and the infection figures are still much too high and going up, so obviously there's still too much careless sex going on. I don't want to come out of this sounding like this prude. I never said don't have sex, but what's so hard about using rubbers? It doesn't seem to require much intelligence to figure that one out. I don't have much sympathy for people who seroconvert now, who know about AIDS. I don't care if you were on drugs or whether you were out of it in the heat of passion or whatever. Your cock is a lethal instrument. It can murder people."
On being a "gay person before anything else"
"I am a gay person before I’m anything else. I’m a gay person before I’m a white person, before I’m a Jew, before I’m a writer, before I’m American, anything. That is my most identifying characteristic and I don’t find many people who would say that. The polls say the same thing: People do not identify themselves as gay. And that’s too bad. In fact, it’s tragic. It will prevent us from ever having what we deserve, I believe."