On Larry Kramer

When I was seventeen, I read The Normal Heart for the first time, and it scared the hell out of me.

The anger in it was palpable. Sometimes I found myself needing to put down the script because it felt like it was searing my fingertips.

This was in 2001, and I had been out of the closet for all of five minutes.  I came out during my senior year of high school, and I was the direct beneficiary of the new wave of acceptance that was hitting certain liberal parts of the country.  That wave had conditions, of course, but I didn't know that at the time.  I just knew that my experience had been mostly positive, and I assumed that what I was reading in The Normal Heart was ancient history.

As a young man gay, I was eager to learn about queer culture, but I also wasn't ready for it, and I certainly wasn't ready for Larry Kramer.  It was made clear to me very early on that the way you survived in America as a gay person was to look, sound, and behave like a straight person.  It was about fitting in and shutting up.  It was about not coming across as loud or threatening.  It was about making people feel comfortable around you.

Like just about every blossoming theater homosexual who wants to go diving into plays they can identify with, shortly after The Normal Heart I discovered Angels in America, and that seemed to be the answer to my prayers.  While there was still anger, there was also magic, and the magic seemed like the sugar that helped the medicine go down.  Kramer and his work wasn't interested in magic.  He was interested in staring at reality until it burned your eyes.  He wasn't interested in making people comfortable.

It took years before I went back to The Normal Heart.  As both my sexual identity and my creative personality developed, my feelings on the play didn't.  I remembered reading it as being a nearly traumatic experience, and I didn't want to revisit it.  Even as I found myself struggling with being the affable, non-controversial person it seemed the world was looking for, it never occurred to me that I might be able to find something in the play that would speak to me.

Seven years ago, I was choosing plays for my theater company's second season, and I knew it was time to Angels in America.  I felt strongly that it should be the season closer, and that left me to figure out what could open the season.  The Normal Heart had just enjoyed a successful revival on Broadway, and a few friends had remarked to me that the lead role of Ned would be one that I should play one day.

While I still bristled at the memory of how intense reading the script had been, the idea of having those two plays in conversation with each other as bookends to a season seemed too good to pass up.  I went into that season thinking that Angels would be a life-changing moment in my theatrical career and that The Normal Heart would be an emotional slog that would take a toll on me if I wasn't careful.

It wasn't that I was dismissive of what people like Kramer had lived through, I was just terrified to explore it and convinced that we had moved past that moment as a country.  Homophobia was dead.  Ellen was the new Oprah.  There was exactly one gay character on every television show.  What was there to be angry about?

Here's what I can tell you about working on The Normal Heart--

It gave me permission to be angry.

It gave me permission to be loud.

It gave me permission to say "That's not good enough."

It gave me permission to demand to be seen.

It gave me permission to piss people off and not feel bad about it.

At a time when the common language around sexuality was "That's just one part of who you are, but you're just like everybody else deep down," Larry Kramer said "To hell with that."

The play taught me that negotiation doesn't work when you're talking about intrinsic human rights.  When you're talking about life and death.

With his work, Kramer created the groundwork for organizing and campaigning that still holds up today.  The kind of unrelenting drive that, even in an article about his death today by the New York Times, was described as "confrontational" was really an understanding of just how focused and unflinching you have to be when looking away from the truth for even a second will mean catastrophe.

Today we still put an inequitable amount of value in heroes who look and speak in ways that are easily digestible.  Kramer understood how to work the system even as he was attempting to dismantle it.  He knew that we're much more likely to listen to a pretty face who speaks softly than a man holding a picket sign and a clipboard screaming at the top of his lungs.

But he screamed anyway.

When someone dies, it's become habit to speak only of their best attributes.  To canonize them.  Kramer lived a life that refused to be sanctified.  He was not ashamed of his shortcomings, and he certainly wouldn't have wanted to be remembered as a relic of a time gone by.

He never stopped yelling that the war was still on.  That one of the biggest blows in the battle against AIDS and oppression and the erasure of queer culture was the relaxed attitude that men like me had adopted when activism seemed to be too much to ask of us.

Larry Kramer was not interested in being anyone's hero.  Trying to look the part would have distracted him from his work, and the work required a raised voice, not a suit and a nice smile.

Seeing the news of Kramer's death today seems especially cruel at a time when we desperately need people who are not satisfied that we're doing our best to combat injustice and ignorance.  People who are not afraid to galvanize their own community and alienate others if that's what it takes.  To demand more from those who identify themselves as our allies.  To assert ourselves as citizens.  To push back against a culture that champions vanity.  To feel scared and keep going.

"That's how I want to be defined:  As one of the men who fought the war."

I hope that everyone who has the chance to read about Larry Kramer today and the work he did are inspired to take up the fight, even if they weren't ready until now.