The 69-year-old playwright, novelist and gay political activist Larry Kramer delivered an extraordinarily impassioned speech in New York recently, in the week that Bush was re-elected.

Hyperbolic and not a little hysterical in style (he believes you get more done with vinegar than with honey), with a rhetorical rhythm that is theatrical and provocative, at its heart it’s a damning indictment of the gay (male) community, its pathology, its political impotence, its immaturity and apathy. Undoubtedly distressed by the comprehensive victory of the religious right in the presidency, as well as in the eleven states that had voted to ban gay marriage, he was also reeling from hearing about two dear friends of his, both middle-aged and intelligent; one had become HIV positive, and the other had become hooked on crystal meth, an increasing problem on the US gay scene, because it is often lethal in overdose.
Five times in the speech, in a treacly sentimental chorus, he tells his audience that he loves being gay, he loves gay people, he thinks we’re better than other people, smarter, more aware, tuned into our emotions, and are better friends. But by the end, it’s become a parody of celebration, for the body of his sermon is that he’s downright ashamed of us, hates our state of hedonistic denial, and fearful that we even have the will to survive, let alone thrive.
He says that gay rights are dead. He sees the progress that the right wing has made in American politics as unassailable in the foreseeable future, and he predicts all the gains made in equality in the past few decades will roll back with the new Supreme Court. He believes that 60 million Americans hate gay people. American gays are “living in pigshit” and it’s up to each one of them to figure out how to get out of it. “You want to kill yourself by sero-converting? Go on, kill yourself,” he says. Or... “grow up. Behave responsibly. Fight for your rights. Take care of yourself and each other. These are the answers. It takes courage to live. Are you living? Not so I can see it.”
Kramer was one of the first to start shouting when, on July 3, 1981, “Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals” was the headline in the New York Times. The figure is now 70 million. He despairs that it will ever be contained, never mind cured. He believes there is no political will to direct funds towards a cure, and attributes that to a motive that is akin to murder by neglect. He also believes that the myth that HIV is treatable is pernicious - he lists the side-effects of his medication, which he calls chemotherapy, which are many and unpleasant, and asks: “Is a fuck without a condom worth not being able to taste food?” He bemoans the $100 billion being spent on Iraq, and the fact that the AIDS organisations in the US are all about to collapse due to lack of funds. HIV infections, he says, are up 40%.
He acknowledges the tone of his criticism as being maternal. “Too much time on your hands, my mother would say. Hell, if you have time to get hooked on crystal and do your endless rounds of sex-seeking, you have too much time on your hands. Ah, you say, aren’t we to have a little fun? Can’t I get stoned and try barebacking one last time. ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND? At this moment in our history, no, you cannot.”
One of the irrefutable tragic consequences of AIDS is that role models for the new generation are dead. “Many of you deny the horrors of what happened to your predecessors. Every moral code I know of requires respect for the dead.” He cannot believe how easily young gay people remain ignorant about the horror that previous generations went through, and rightly challenges us to contemplate the likelihood that the virus will mutate faster than we can cope with, and a new plague could easily (and suddenly) cut a swathe through this young generation, as it did in the ‘80s and ‘90s, if our behaviour doesn’t change. Indeed, in my work as a therapist, the grief that gay men of a certain age carry from that era of unspeakable loss, with whole sets of friends and lovers dying, is something that is still hard to express, still harrowing in its power, and completely missing from the awareness of younger gay men. Perhaps, like those who have ever served in a war, who have experienced similar levels of bereavement, such devastation is not easily talked about. However, Kramer goes on to ask what, as far as I’m concerned, is the most important question of all:
“How do we claim the God that they (the American right) have subsumed into their own ownership? Is it inhuman to think that the only way we can get through to some safe other side is by policing each other, and in so doing, destroy whatever hope we have of getting along?” Here, he identifies the unconscious association that for so many (gay) men is our own undoing - the linking of (seemingly maternal) concern to a feeling of being controlled, policed. How can sexual outlaws make our own laws? If a sexual identity is built upon flaunting convention, how can we moderate our own behaviour in a way that isn’t oppressive, but supportive and life-enhancing?
Like an impossibly irascible prophet, crazy and proud of it, whose message is infuriating because it is so uncompromising, so demanding, so goddam intense, he alienates as much as he inspires. But we owe it to him, and to all other men and women of his generation who have fought for our lives and health and wellbeing, to listen. And think. b

Speech in full: www.scotsgay.co.uk/kramer.txt