A reader is incredulous:
This quote from Kramer surprises you? This is the Larry Kramer of the novel Faggots piping up. This is Fred Lemish, not Ned Weeks, the Kramer alter-ego who disdains everyone who enjoys his sexuality unshackled by the particular strain of Puritanical self-restraint (or self-denial) that Kramer/Lemish prefers. In this construct, condoms require foregoing a certain amount of pleasure; therefore they are courageous and virtuous. A pill doesn’t reduce the pleasure in sex; therefore it is a morally cheap and cowardly alternative. That Mr. Kramer is consistent in this since the 1970s doesn’t make it any less deluded and irresponsible.
No, it didn’t surprise me. Larry has been consistent in all this for ever – and wrong about it for ever. What still shocks me is that his moral agenda actually trumps preventing the spread of HIV. Another reader speculates:
I have nothing more to add to what you wrote, other than to say that the combination of safe sex, education, anti-virals and now Truvada may have finally put the disease on a path to oblivion, and as one result, Kramer may be losing the issue that defined who he was and is these past 30 or so years. Not to make a false equivalence, but it’s kind of like the neocons who can’t accept that the world has changed and there is no need for the US to be the world’s policeman anymore. Letting go of something one has fought for or against for a long time can be a loss.
I’d put it a little differently – and I explored this a little in my essay “When Plagues End” in Love Undetectable. Plague creates an entirely new persona – embattled, on guard, constantly afraid and always mobilized. And demobilization is never psychologically easy. Camus brilliantly saw this in La Peste. When I first read it, I didn’t really believe that the inhabitants of Oran would resist the good news when the nightmare lifted. But they did. And then I saw it in my own life – in the truly shocking wave of abuse I got when the essay first appeared in the New York Times Magazine and then, when my own viral load went to zero, in the deep depression that knocked me flat on my back. Humans are conservative. They get attached to what they know – even if it is brutalizing – and fearful of change.I think we’re seeing exactly the same psychological reaction to the amazing Truvada and anti-retroviral breakthrough. The reasons people are giving for opposing Truvada are so irrational and knee jerk they only make sense in the context of a deep aversion to change, even for the better.
Another reader asks:
Did you watch The Normal Heart, and if so, what did you think?
Yes, I did. So how to put this diplomatically?
I thought it was really helpful in showing people what it was like when the plague first hit, and in revealing the appalling, early indifference of the majority of Americans toward it. I thought Matt Bomer did about as good a job as possible in portraying the gruesome decline HIV visited upon so many. If that’s all the movie did, it was worth making.
But in general, I thought the production revealed the weakness of the original script – which works best in a theater as a kind of agit-prop set-piece designed for the 1985 moment. The best speech in the play, for example, is Bruce’s telling of the tale of the AIDS patient being treated literally like garbage in his final hours on earth – quarantined, untouched, brutalized and then sealed in a black plastic bag, ready for a garbage truck. The speech has real rhetorical power and forces you to imagine such cruelty and callousness – for the AIDS epidemic was not merely about pain and suffering, it was about adding stigma and discrimination to pain and suffering. But in the HBO movie, the literal depiction of the scene robbed it of almost all its force, although I wonder whether Taylor Kitsch’s mediocre talent could have pulled it off anyway. Or take one of the really powerful moments at the end of the play, when the names of the dead cascade over the stage in the hundreds of thousands. In the movie, it was about rolodex cards.
The play itself, of course, is a massive vanity project. Larry Kramer was Chad Griffin avant la lettre. Its politics are as crude as its cartoon characters. The added scenes were just excruciating. Ned Weeks in the White House screaming in the hallways? A Reagan official literally asking if the plague could affect someone who hired hookers? Embarrassing. Then there’s the underlying message – that nothing ever happened to beat back HIV, that the plague is as powerful as ever, that Reagan is still murdering people, and there’s no hope unless you follow Larry Kramer. The fact that AIDS deaths plummeted after 1996, and that we have a solid prevention tool and a powerful treatment regimen could not be mentioned, because it would detract from the pure drama of it all. And when you are engaged in pure drama, it’s hard to beat Larry Kramer’s talent for it.
Larry was dead right to write this play and a hugely important figure in helping gay men fight back at the hour of our deaths. None of that should ever be gainsaid. I honor him and feel great affection for him. But this movie? Meh.
The Dish 