Homophobes on Our Ranks” Interview at NYTimes Kramer Speaks { “Streisand finds gay sex distasteful" }
Most revolutionaries don’t live to see as much dizzying change as Larry Kramer has.
In the 1980s, he was the most strident, scolding voice in New York City (in the world, really) on behalf of gay men infected with H.I.V.: men whose parents shunned them, whose doctors feared them, whose dignity disappeared as their corpses were stuffed into trash bags. Now, 33 years after Mr. Kramer helped found the advocacy group Gay Men’s Health Crisis, AIDS has just fallen out of the top 10 causes of death in New York for the first time since 1983. Epidemics of loneliness and isolation have given way to same-sex marriage and the Michael Sam kiss.
And after decades of fighting for Hollywood’s attention, Mr. Kramer is about to reach his biggest audience yet with a film adaptation of “The Normal Heart,” his autobiographical play from 1985 about those early years of needless suffering.
The movie is especially satisfying to Mr. Kramer, because he nearly missed it.
Theater Review | 'The Normal Heart': ‘The Normal Heart’ on Broadway - Theater ReviewAPRIL 27, 2011
“I came close to dying twice since the beginning of the year; it has been awful,” he said recently, back in his Greenwich Village apartment after a long hospital stay. “I fought to hang on to get to this moment. There were so many times I never thought I would.” (While some friends worry that he might have AIDS, Mr. Kramer, who is H.I.V. positive, said his health problems are mostly intestinal.)
Mark Ruffalo and Taylor Kitsch in the film of Larry Kramer’s play “The Normal Heart.” Credit Jojo Whilden/HBO
At 78, these are twilight days for Mr. Kramer: his memorable roar reduced to a whisper, his forward march aided by a cane painted with pink roses. Yet he has virtually willed himself into action again to take a victory lap of sorts with broadcast of the film Sunday on HBO.
The moment seems more than a little surreal to him. After decades of politicians, celebrities and even liberals and gays keeping a wary distance from his fulminations, the stars of “The Normal Heart” (Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts, Jim Parsons) rushed toward him the other night at a special screening at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie idled nearby, waiting to say hello.
A few minutes later, the film’s director, Ryan Murphy, led the thousand-member audience in a standing ovation for Mr. Kramer. “Larry, before we begin this film, I only have one thing to say,” Mr. Murphy said. “You were right.”
If many people (including once-implacable foes like Edward I. Koch) came to see him as a prophet — about AIDS devastating so many families, about the crucial role government had to play in the fight — Mr. Kramer didn’t boast a bit during the only recent extended interview he has given. He took minimal comfort in the current state of his crusade. While he said he “loved” seeing Mr. Sam kissing his boyfriend on ESPN after being chosen in the N.F.L. draft, Mr. Kramer is dismayed about gay America, pointing to this month’s recommendation by federal health officials that hundreds of thousands of people take the drug Truvada to prevent H.I.V. infection. The endorsement comes as many young gay men and others have stopped using condoms.
“Anybody who voluntarily takes an antiviral every day has got to have rocks in their heads,” Mr. Kramer said, describing the side effects of drugs he has taken. “There’s something to me cowardly about taking Truvada instead of using a condom. You’re taking a drug that is poison to you, and it has lessened your energy to fight, to get involved, to do anything.”
Larry Kramer in 1989, when he was the most strident voice in the fight against AIDS. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
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Mr. Kramer badly wants younger people to take up protest politics, and he hopes the new movie will inspire them. “The Normal Heart” delves into his efforts, with a group of friends, to start Gay Men’s Health Crisis, one of the first volunteer AIDS organizations. Both the play and the movie depict his eventual expulsion from the group after his relentlessly confrontational tactics became too much for his peers. His fury for fighting has always endured, said Jeff Soref, who, as president of group’s board in the early 1990s, invited Mr. Kramer (over some opposition) to speak at the group’s 10th-anniversary ceremony at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.
“He took the pulpit, singled out G.M.H.C.’s board of directors one by one, and denounced each of us as if we were personally responsible for the spread of the epidemic,” Mr. Soref said. “Larry couldn’t pass up the opportunity to tell people the fight wasn’t over and we couldn’t rest.”
While Gay Men’s Health Crisis and others stepped up, including the advocates depicted in the new book “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality,” by Jo Becker, Mr. Kramer is unimpressed. He has written “The American People,” a novel of more than 1,600 pages about the role of homosexuality in history, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in two volumes starting next April.
“Considering how many of us there are, how much disposable income we have, how much brain power we have, we have achieved very little,” Mr. Kramer said. “We have no power in Washington, or anywhere else, and I say it over and over again, and it’s as if it falls on deaf ears. It doesn’t occur to people how to turn that around.”
Still, in a relatively rare concession, Mr. Kramer acknowledged that his pugnacious side has sometimes backfired.
From left: Matt Bomer, Ryan Murphy, Julia Roberts, Larry Kramer and Mark Ruffalo. Credit Dave Allocca/Starpix
His efforts to get a movie made of “The Normal Heart” were delayed by jousting with Barbra Streisand, who had the film rights for years. He admitted to demanding “a lot of money” and that the story be told his way. Ms. Streisand has said she couldn’t raise the money; in Mr. Kramer’s telling, she also expressed discomfort about the subject of gay sex.
“I said, ‘I really think it’s important that after eons of watching men and women make love in the movies, it’s time to see two men do so,’ ” he said. “I bought her a book of very beautiful art pictures of two men making love, and she found it very distasteful.” In response, Ms. Streisand released a statement saying her intention for the movie was “to promote the idea of everyone’s right to love. Gay or straight!”
“Larry was at the forefront of this battle and, God love him, he’s still fighting,” she said. “But there’s no need to fight me by misrepresenting my feelings. As a filmmaker, I have always looked for new and exciting ways to do love scenes, whether they’re about heterosexuals or homosexuals. It’s a matter of taste, not gender.”
Referring to the gay couple at the center of “The Normal Heart,” she added: “I was trying to reach a large audience, and I wanted them to root for these two men to get married.”
Mr. Murphy initially used his own money to buy the rights, Mr. Kramer said, “which shows how much he wanted to do this, and how tacky it sort of is that Barbra never would think of something like that.”
The Tony Nominee John Benjamin Hickey The Tony Nominee John Benjamin Hickey
John Benjamin Hickey in a scene from the 2011 Broadway revival of Larry Kramer’s 1985 play, “The Normal Heart.”
Credit Zach Wise/The New York Times
Yet even the courtship with Mr. Murphy — the force behind television shows like “Glee” and “American Horror Story” — was rocky at first. Mr. Kramer didn’t really know who Mr. Murphy was, and sent several facetious emails — classic Kramer — that strained their relationship until he came to appreciate Mr. Murphy’s devotion to the project.
“It’s by far his best work,” Mr. Kramer said of Mr. Murphy, for whom he is now writing a “Normal Heart” sequel. “I said, ‘You’ve really got to stop with the horror movies and become a serious director, because you are one.’ ”
Mr. Murphy said that he and Mr. Kramer, in the hospital, worked for months on the screenplay by email. They were determined, he said, to create a movie with “real immediacy” — visually graphic scenes that would pack a punch for New Yorkers who lived through the 1980s and that might motivate those continuing to fight for gay rights today. Harrowing monologues in the play, like the description of one character’s physical disintegration on a cross-country flight, have been opened up into fully rendered moments that show the agony of AIDS.
“I wrote the word ‘true’ on a notecard and put it on my computer,” Mr. Murphy said. “Larry was always trying to be on the right side of the angels, but he can be so abrasive, and he was so hurt by how he was treated by his friends and enemies in the ’80s. I wanted the movie to be true to all sides of him.”
After finding fault in so much, Mr. Kramer found little with the movie, and none with its depiction of his life’s work.
“It’s about speaking up, being a buffalo if you have to, being mean if you have to,” Mr. Kramer said. “You do not get more with honey than with vinegar.”
A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 2014, on page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Lion Still Roars, With Gratitude
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