More to the Story: A History of Gay America

Magnolia PicturesLarry Kramer

In 1980, convinced that Ronald Reagan’s references to “the American people” were not intended to include gay citizens like him, Larry Kramer began writing a book called “The American People,” envisioned as a national history of homosexuality. The author of such plays as “The Normal Heart” and “The Destiny of Me,” Mr. Kramer focused at first on the 20th century but concluded that he had plenty to say about 19th century, the 18th century, and, ultimately, precolonial gay life. It became a magnum opus, with Mr. Kramer writing on and off for 30 years while he was a co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the protest group ACT UP and nearly dying from end-stage liver disease until receiving a transplant in 2001.

On Tuesday the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux announced that it had acquired the world rights and planned to publish the work in two volumes, with the first scheduled for the spring of 2012. Though still recovering from a bout of bronchitis, Mr. Kramer, 75, was his usual lively self as he spoke by phone about the book — or “work of fiction,” as the publisher is calling it. Here are excerpts of the conversation.

Why did it take three decades for you to write “The American People”?

The history of homosexuality in America starts even before America did, but I didn’t know that when I started writing. It became a chronological story, and I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I wasn’t working against any sort of deadline, and the more I wrote, the more I wanted to find out. It became this wild adventure of learning so much about how long we’ve been here and what we’ve accomplished and all the pain that we have been through. Of course it culminates with AIDS, and in a sense it’s really a history of AIDS and where the plague came from. We’ve just discovered that the AIDS virus has been in monkeys for 32,000 years. I don’t go back that far, though.

How long is the book?

It’s 4,000 pages. That’s what I turned in, at least, that’s what we’re editing. Whether it turns out to be that, I don’t know, but that’s what they bought.

For how much?

The days of the $8 million publishing deal is over. It was six figures. The thing is, it’s a very expensive book to produce. They want to do it in two volumes, but we’re editing, so maybe it’ll be one volume. I personally am a little nervous about them publishing the first volume while I’m working on the second, but I’ll probably want to go back and make changes in the first.

Is it a novel, or historical fiction, or something else?

I want to call it a book, but Jonathan [Galassi, president of the publishing house] wants to call it a novel. I think he’s probably right because it makes a lot of claims, and some of them are substantiated more than others, and I don’t want to be forced to have to defend everything. It obviously deals with Abraham Lincoln being gay, which is pretty accepted by now, but it deals with a lot of other people being gay, like George Washington. It deals with a huge number of people.

Are you “outing” historical figures, by way of imagination or by way of facts?

A lot of what I’ve written is substantiated; there has been scholarly work done by earlier gay scholars on Washington, but the reality is that no one has paid any attention to this work by gay scholars like Charlie Shively. All history really up to now has been written by straight historians, and they just haven’t got a clue -– when you read about a lot of them like George Washington, or about Samuel Clemens, you see how important other men were in their lives. Yes, they were married, but the overwhelmingly important relationships and outlook in their lives was homosexual.

Does the book revolve around fictional characters, as in a traditional novel?

It’s got a cast of thousands, but most of them are real people or based on real people. It has many stories and many eras. I grew up in Washington, and a great deal takes place in Washington, as it should be, and especially during the years of McCarthy and Hoover. We now know that Hoover was gay, and he was just a monster, certainly to gay people. You find a lot of that over the years: The biggest enemies to gay people were, in fact, gay people. There’s no question in my mind, for instance, that AIDS has been allowed to happen, and there are many culpable people.

Was there ever a time when you feared you wouldn’t be able to finish the book?

For many years I never showed pages to anyone, and then I got very sick in the year 2000 and I wasn’t expected to live. So I showed the book to one of my oldest and dearest friends, Will Schwalbe, who was the head of Hyperion Books and my literary executor. I had about 2,000 pages then, and if I wasn’t going to live, I wondered if I should leave some money to try to get those pages published. Will said, ‘Larry, this is really terrific.’ And then they got me a new liver, and I knew that if I came out of the transplant alive, I’d have something to work on.

Mr. Kramer’s play, “The Normal Heart,” will have a staged reading on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater on Oct. 18, with a cast including Joe Mantello, Victor Garber and Patrick Wilson. Joel Grey is directing.

NYTimes