Q Toon: Remembering Larry Kramer

I finally get around to penning a memorial cartoon for activist and playwright Larry Kramer this week.

It seemed only fitting to depict him in full outrage mode, circa 1988. Kramer was an early Jeremiah calling everyone, gay or not, to take the AIDS pandemic seriously. Having established himself years earlier as something of a prude, many in New York's gay community dismissed him as alarmist and homophobic.

One of the founders of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, Kramer quickly found the group too timid — "GMHC board meetings often degenerated into heated battles with Larry Kramer on one side and everybody else on the other," as Larry Shilts wrote in As the Band Played On. In March, 1983, at a time when the New York Times and even the gay Advocate magazine had barely taken any notice of AIDS, Kramer was ousted from the GMHC board and wrote a scathing cover story for New York Native titled "1,112 and Counting."

"If this article doesn't scare the shit out of you we're in real trouble. If this article doesn't rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get...
"I'm sick of guys who moan that giving up careless sex until this thing blows over is worse than death. How can they value life so little and cocks and asses so much?"

The quotation in my cartoon is from Kramer's 1985 play The Normal Heart. It's a line by the central character Ned Weeks, a not at all disguised alter ego of the playwright himself. Weeks becomes disgusted with a group very much like the GMHC, known for its deathbed vigils:

"I thought I was starting a bunch of Ralph Naders or Green Berets, and at the first instant they have to take a stand on a political issue and fight, almost in front of my eyes they turn into a bunch of nurse's aides."

As a more radical alternative to the GMHC, Kramer sparked the formation the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) in March, 1987. The background of my cartoon is based on a photo of an ACT-UP march through New York. (As I wrote last week, I try whenever possible to include people of color in my cartoons, but I could only see one in the photo. There were, however, a few women among the white males at the front of the line.)

ACT-UP was no bunch of nurse's aides. To give you a few examples, ACT-UP protesters

• chained themselves to the VIP balcony at the New York Stock Exchange to protest the high cost of AZT, the only anti-AIDS drug at the time.
• blocked access to the Federal Drug Administration to demand faster approval of anti-AIDS medications.
• staged a "die-in" during mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.
• encased Senator Jesse Helms's home in a 15-foot tall condom.

ACT-UP chapters still exist, and although the rage of the 1980's and 90's has cooled, its activists are still as relevant as ever today. As Sarah Schulman, a longtime ACT-UPivist and author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power New York, said in a recent interview:

"We are in a new era of repression and profound confusion. Medically, we are much further ahead than we were back then with AIDS. Nevertheless, the government in the U.S. is using the same strategy: it recycles earlier drugs that pharmaceutical companies have patents for because that is more profitable than investing in new or nascent medications. Even if a cure for COVID-19 were found tomorrow, we don’t have a healthcare system that would allow people to access it. In a joint statement issued on 27 February, for example, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said that vaccines should be ‘affordable and available to all.’ They didn’t say: ‘We need a free vaccine.’
"Looking at the history of progressive social movements in the U.S., there is usually a zeitgeist moment when things suddenly leap forward. Unfortunately, you can never force it. Current movements can learn the following from ACT UP: coalition, simultaneity and direct action. That combination is crucial to enable any movement to succeed."

Earlier this year, Kramer took up a new writing project, An Army of Lovers Must Not Die, "about gay people having to live through three plagues": HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, and the decline of the human body. The work remains unfinished. HIV-positive since 1988, Kramer died May 27 at the age of 84 of pneumonia.