Gay 27 Year-Old Salon Editor Doesn't Get Why Larry Kramer Isn't Chill

 

As eternal as spring blossoms and Cher farewell tours is the pas de deux of youth's self-absorbed apathy and age's righteous anger. This version is called "The Problem With Gay Men Today," performed across the pages of Salon by Deputy Arts Editor Thomas Rogers, a 27 year-old gay Brooklynite who has a way lot of straight friends, and the indomitable, soon to be 76 years old Larry Kramer who is first, last, and always gay. Larry says:

"I am a gay person before I’m anything else. I’m a gay person before I’m a white person, before I’m a Jew, before I’m a writer, before I’m American, anything. That is my most identifying characteristic and I don’t find many people who would say that. The polls say the same thing: People do not identify themselves as gay. And that’s too bad. In fact, it’s tragic. It will prevent us from ever having what we deserve, I believe."

They talk about how gay ghettos are emptying out and gay people are less visible to each other now and whether the internet is to blame. Rogers and a gay bud saw a preview of the revival of Kramer's The Normal Heart opening on Broadway tomorrow and found himself feeling a "perverse nostalgia" for AIDS because there's "something appealing about having this galvanizing issue to unite gay men. We don't have that as much now." Larry, discussing his partner, 64, points out

"I'll obviously die before he does, and the way the laws are written it's very hard to leave him anything of substance compared to what I have to leave. It all goes to taxes because we're not legally federally married and that's not fair, that's just not fair. You don't care about it at your age, but I care about it at mine, and there are a lot of older gays who should care about it as well. That should be a galvanizing issue. Anything that keeps us from being unequal should be galvanizing. I want what they have. I do. And everybody should. But again, people don't think that way."

Rogers does not refute the statement that he doesn't care. Earlier, he said he thought the battles over AIDS "seem very alien to a lot of young people's experiences" and that "many of the ideas in the play will seem exotic and a little dated to a lot of young gay men." He becomes more animated when discussing "the interesting thing about Grindr," which Kramer has never heard of.

Comments

[Alejandro]

That article annoyed me somewhat.

Maybe it's because I'm a little older than the interviewer (by 10 years) and I'm still a bit old school with the idea of gay culture (I like it and don't feel I need to lose all of it) . . . but all he could offer up was GRINDR and Will & Grace and that just made me sad.

[Gabriel]

If Larry Kramer really believes what he said about his estate, taxes, and his partner, he needs to find a better estate lawyer.

[Duncan]

I don't believe that younger gay people don't care about the marriage issue. I work at a Big Ten University, and it's very much on their minds, and they're pretty indignant about it. But most gay people never got angry about the discrimination we face; those of us who are pissed off, and Larry Kramer is not the only one no matter how much he likes to believe it, have always been in the minority among gays. I'm 60, and I was pissed off while Kramer was still cruising Fire Island.

I hesitate to make too much of this since it might be an artefact of the editing of the interview, but what I came away with from reading it was that what Kramer thinks is wrong with gay men today is that they won't have sex with him: he's gone hunting on the Internet, and came up (so he says) with nothing. I don't quite believe this. If a fat, ugly old troll like me can get laid, so can Larry Kramer. Something else must be getting in the way, like his personality. (But if a nasty, hateful old troll like me can get laid, so can an asshole like Larry Kramer.) And this is not a new thing with him: he's complained about it in interviews before.

(Incidentally, the interviewer didn't offer up GRINDR [which I hadn't heard of either, because I don't have an iPhone] as the summum bonum of gay culture. He offered it as something related to our sexual culture.)

He's also lying when he says that he never said that gay men should stop having sex, he just meant we shouldn't have it without condoms. Right there in the damn interview he starts bitching about "meaningless" sex, which he somehow equates with condomless sex, and also with the sex he's not getting because he's supposedly too old, and so he doesn't get to treat other people as things like all the other kids do.

[Arthur Durkee]

I don't always agree with Larry Kramer's opinions, but I adore him. He is absolutely necessary. Sometimes someone has to say those kind of things, no matter how outrageous they are, to break us out of our complacency. Or our narcissism, which to be honest is a real problem. Larry has been doing that for a very long time. And since Harry Hay is gone—and was always at least this controversial, this opinionated—there aren't many gay advocates left who speak like this. And we need all of them.

Gay marriage is not even remotely the most important issue, in my opinion. Bullying and suicide are. But that's MY viewpoint.

I have noticed this "generation gap" many, many times before. It does exist. The people who lived through AIDS, who lived through Stonewall, who lived through Anita Bryant, and all the early days of the gay lib movement, remember things differently than those who grew up with those battles already won, or at least engaged with if not yet won. There IS an attitude difference.

The real gap, though, it seems to me, is that most of the great gay activists of the 70s and 80s are all dead: of AIDS, or of assassinations, or of other things. What we have left is a largely conservative wing of the gay public, which controls the agenda now. That's why so much gay activists rhetoric these days is about fitting in—in a word, assimilation—rather than about being uniquely who we are, who we can be, and celebrating our diversity and differences. The tone has become as conservative as is imaginable. Larry is one of the few remaining surviving Last Angry Men from that era, and what he says still matters very much. Even if you don't agree with him all the time, he's speaking to truths more complacent, even narcissistic, gay men would rather not talk about. Too bad. It all does need to be talked about.

[Alex]

Great answers from Larry. It is sad that the young interviewer feels more comfortable in straight culture than gay culture - that, it seems to me, is more a reflection on him than of young gay men today, though he spoke of it in general terms.

[Elliott Mackle]

Agree. Kramer needs to consult another lawyer. Or maybe his remarks are not intended to be factual?