STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS
Larry Kramer. I loved him. I couldn’t even post this photo without tearing up this morning looking at all the photos I was looking at of him as I was trying to find the photographer who took this one to give him or her credit for it. I just couldn’t find it. If you know - and are a paid subscriber since that comes with the ability to comment here - please write the name in the comment section and I’ll insert it later.
I am glad Larry and I more easily found each other in our lives. I admired him as a firebrand but I loved him for his sweetness. Yes: sweetness. I would tease him and call him my “Dolly in Levi’s” because he was the matchmaker who fixed me up with his fellow activist, Peter Staley, who became my boyfriend for a halcyon time in my life and who remains such an important part of it, as Larry was and will ever remain. Larry once took me to task for using my talents to write cover stories at Vanity Fair - or “fucking bullshit” as he called it - but after my Bette Midler story came out he called me to say he had been wrong and that the story was beautifully written, moved him to tears, and I was using the magazine to create another sort of narrative form and sneak in, when I could, a kind of activism of my own. Indeed, Joan Juliet Buck told me the other night at dinner here in London that sometimes a party game is played by old Vanity Fair hands like us to sum up the writers who were in that stable with one question we’d ask. Mine, she teased me, is always, “Are you gay?” Those Vanity Fair years - fucking bullshit aside, or maybe because of it since I had to find my way through it with the grace that required my finally being a grownup - were another halcyon time in my life. I am now creating a new little era in my life here in London as I continue to create new narrative forms, this time here on Substack. I hope I can one day describe this one as well as halcyon. That phone call from Larry back during my Vanity Fair days has always meant the world to me - not only because Larry admitted he was wrong, a rare occurrence which can still make me crack a slight smile as I type this - but also because I, for a moment, had his approval. He was a mensch finally. A dear man. I miss him. I always will.
Below is a quote from his great American play, The Normal Heart, which I told him belonged in the American canon along with A Long Days Journey into Night, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Our Town, among a few others. I had just seen a one-night-only reading of the play on Broadway directed by Joel Grey with whom I have a more strained history. More about Joel at some point in the coming weeks here on Substack and, don’t worry, “halcyon” is not a word that will be overused when I do. But Grey did a remarkable job with that cast that night, or maybe the nuances I found in that reading that night and moved me so were there to be discerned because the actors were actually under-rehearsed and had not had the time to burrow into the amped-up anger - a kind of splenetic splendor that Larry used in his writing and his activism - that director George Wolfe later brandished at the cowering audiences in the production that was inspired by this reading and which later opened on Broadway. When Larry was having a hard time corralling the play into its final form for its initial production at Joe Papp’s Public Theatre directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and starring Brad Davis during another April back in 1985, Papps’s wife Gail offered Larry this advice: “Make every scene a fight.” He took it to heart, this giant of a man whose own heart was both noble and normal. It wasn’t that he thought we all weren’t good enough. He proclaimed our goodness. He just longed for us all to be better.
Here is that quote from his stand-in, the character Ned Weeks, in The Normal Heart:
“I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E.M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold… These are not invisible men. Poor Bruce. Poor frightened Bruce. Once upon a time you wanted to be a soldier.
“Bruce, did you know that an openly gay Englishman was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do — and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don't they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and maybe you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are. The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there—all through history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed. That's how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war.”
NOTE: Photograph of Larry by Ethan Hill for OUT magazine. Thank you, D. Leslie Hill for pointing this out in the comments section after I asked for help in finding the photographer. See? We’re creating a community.
SOME JOY
David Furnish, Elton John, Larry Kramer, David Webster
BEFORE GOOGLE
Larry Kramer and his parents. Graduation. Yale. 1957.
The photo of Larry Kramer was taken by Ethan Hill for POZ magazine in 2007 in New York City. It can be found on Getty Images. (While everything connects, I am not related to Ethan Hill)