Dear Mr. Kramer,First off, let me personally and sincerely thank you for your art, activism, and anger. I want to congratulate you and everyone involved with A Normal Heart on its success and your much-deserved Broadway run. As a young high school student from Wyoming, I used a monologue from A Normal Heart for college scholarship auditions. The scholarship I received from Whitman College allowed me to get the hell out of Wyoming in 2000. In more ways than one, your life’s work has without a doubt saved my life. Thank you for that.
With that being said, I respectfully ask you to shut the fuck up about the tragedy of my generation. I have listened to your speeches, essays, and interviews over the last decade and while I agree with so much of what you say about the joy of being gay, about the hatred that exists for people of difference, about the nature of our oppression, I cannot sit idly by as you continue to ignore my generation’s contribution to the history of LGBTQ folks...
J Ricky Price writes an open letter to Uncle Larry in The New Gay.
Here's the recent Salon interview with Kramer it was written in response to - though "It's not as good as the olden gays" is a long-running riff from Kramer, who often comes across as a terrible snob.
It was announced today that the Broadway revival of Larry Kramer's Aids play, The Normal Heart, has received five Tony Award nominations.
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Hmmm... Last year Glasgow University proposed to give an honorary degree to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow, a vociferous and vigorous opponent of LGBT rights. The staff LGBT group did meet to consider objecting to this, but their objections were of the mildest, and what particularly struck me was that the members seemed not at all fired up about injustices suffered by gays and lesbians. The anger and drive that were present in activists thirty years ago (when I was of their number) struck me as more or less entirely absent, and I began to wonder whether I was a dinosaur, sporting attitudes that somehow do not fit a UK world of civil partnerships and equality legislation.
ReplyDeleteI gave a talk to the student LGBT group at Glasgow University and drew their attention to some worthwhile campaigning they might do (e.g. seeking guarantees that students with gay-related problems could look for as much sympathy from staff as those with heterosexual problems, since I knew of a case a few years ago where a gay student whose parents had thrown him out and who had asked for extra time to complete an essay was told by a staff member, "I am not unsympathetic to gay people but, you know, there are places where you can be cured"). I was astonished to be told that the student LGBT group - the biggest group on campus, I think - was by its constitution restricted to social activity, campaigning excluded.