We were able to cry out fuck you fuck you fuck you. Troy Masters, the publisher of LGNY, wrote to me: 'ACT UP recognized evil and confronted it loudly.'

Yes, we confronted evil. For a while.

We don’t say fuck you, fuck you, fuck you anymore. At least so anyone can hear.

Well the evil things that made me angry then still make me angry now. I keep asking around, doesn’t anything make you angry, too? Doesn’t anything make anyone angry? Or are we back in 1981, surrounded and suffocated by people as uninterested in saving their lives as so many of us were in 1981. I made a speech and wrote a little book called The Tragedy of Today’s Gays about all this. That was about two years ago. Lots of applause. Lots of thanks. No action.

[...]

We must be heard! We must be.

We are not crumbs! We should not accept crumbs! We must not accept crumbs! There is not one single candidate running for public office anywhere that deserves our support. Not one. Every day they vote against us in increasingly brutal fashion. I will not vote for a one of them and neither should you. To vote for any one of them, to lend any one of them your support, is to collude with them in their utter disdain for us. And we must let every single one of them know that we will not support them. Perhaps it will win them more votes, that faggots won’t support them, but at least we will have our self-respect. And, I predict, the respect of many others who have long wondered why we allow ourselves to be treated so brutally year after year after year, as they take away our manhood, our womanhood, our personhood. There is not one single one of them, candidate or major public figure, that, given half a chance, would not sell us down the river. We have seen this time after time, from Bill Clinton with his Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and his full support of the hideous Defense of Marriage Act (talk about selling us down the river), to Hillary with her unacceptable waffling on all our positions. The woman does not know how to make simple declarative statements that involve definite details. (Read David Mixner on Hillary and Bill. It’s scary. Go to his site: DMixner@AOL.com). To Ann Coulter calling people faggots and queers and getting away with it. As Andrew Sullivan responded to her: “The emasculation of men in minority groups is an ancient trope of the vilest bigotry!” To this very morning’s statement to the world by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, that he believes the 65,000 lesbian and gay troops fighting right this very minute for our country are immoral. That our country’s top soldier can say something like this out loud and get away with it is disgusting.

If I am going after Hillary and Bill Clinton it is because I think she just might win, or should I say they might win. Two for the price of one will prove irresistible. Thus it is important to go after the Clintons now, while it still might be possible to negotiate their acceptance and support of our concerns, nay our demands, instead of climbing on their bandwagon that is akin to a juggernaut smashing all in their way as David Mixner describes. Too many gay and lesbians and our organizations are giving her fundraisers and kissing her ass too unreservedly and way way too early. As for Bill, yes, he is at last doing great work for AIDS in Africa but it sure would be nice if we had his generics in America for all those who fall through the cracks of the Ryan White Drug Assistance Program. Have you noticed how fashionable it is for foundations and the two Bills, Gates and Clinton, to do AIDS good deeds in Africa and obviously much too unfashionable to do them in America? I don’t like this woman, but I could, if she wasn’t cockteasing us just like her husband did.

We are not crumbs! We must not accept crumbs!

[...]

Gays are equal to nothing good or acceptable in this country. It is criminal how they treat us. We get further and further from progress and equality with each passing year. George Bush will leave a legacy of hate that will take who knows how many eons to cleanse away. He has packed every court in the land with a conservative judge who serves for life. He has staffed every single government job from high to low with a conservative inhabitant who, under the laws of Civil Service, cannot be removed. So even with the most tolerant of new Presidents we will be unable to break free from this yoke of hate for as long as most of us will live. Congresspersons now call judges to pressure them, which is illegal, and if the President doesn’t like a judge’s record, he fires them, which is also illegal. The Supreme Court is not going to give us our equality in any foreseeable future, and it is from the Supreme Court that it must come. They are the law of this land that will not make us equal. If that is not hate, if what I am talking about does not represent hate, I do not know what hate is. We are crumbs to them, if even that.

This is not just about gay marriage. Political candidates only talk about gay marriage, making nicey-nice maybes. But they are not talking about gay equality. And we are not demanding that they talk about the kind of equality I am talking about, marriage or no marriage. Gay marriage is a useful red herring for them to pretend they are talking about gays when they are not. For some reason our movement has confined its feeble demands to marriage. Well, my lover and I don’t want to get married just yet but we sure want to be equal.

I wish I could make all gay people everywhere accept this one fact I know to be an undisputed truth. We are hated. Haven’t enough of us died for all of us to believe this? Some seventy million cases of HIV were all brewed in a cauldron of hate.

You must read the entire transcript.

If it's not a hell of a bother, could you copy-paste it and then e-mail it to me?

The new ACTUP Army has begun a listserve and plans a protest, Thursday, at noon at the Times Square military recruiting station to call for General Pace's firing.

Rex: I do feel hate sometimes from courts and politicians, but I only very rarely feel it living my daily life in San Diego. Some days I think they wish we'd just all disappear from the face of the Earth, but most days I feel like we're all accepted and integrated, at least in the cities. Aren't we, culturally, kind of in a supremely schizo phase? Also, what straight people do one-on-one with the gay people in their lives seems very different from what slimy politicians do in public. My ex and I were good friends with the fundamentalist Christians who lived next door. Perhaps they didn't like gays, I don't know, but they liked me and Bob, as a gay couple, just fine. In other words, schizo. Discuss.

Larry: It is seeing your life through such rose-colored glasses as you describe that is so dismaying to me. Yes, life is better for the blinded. Leave San Diego and go to northern Idaho, or to parts of Queens in New York City, and you would not live as you describe. Indeed, I am sure there are portions of San Diego where you could get seriously mugged. I am actually kind of sick and tired of palaver -- hot air -- as you just passed. I am also sick and tired of those who say that everything is better now than the old days. Maybe they are and maybe they aren't; this is an irrelevant argument. It is the today that we have to contend with. Every action that I describe in my ACT UP speech is an action of hate -- by judges, by our government, by our elected officials, by government bureaucrats. And until gays start facing up to this fact, that this is hate, not just, say, difference of opinion, then we continue to live in the doggy do-do that we do.

Gays do not realize that the more we become visible, the more we come out of the closet, the more we are hated. Don't those of you straights who claim not to hate us have a responsibility to denounce the hate? Why is it socially acceptable to joke about "girlie men" or to discriminate against us legally with "constitutional" amendments banning gay marriage? Because we cannot marry, we can pass on only a fraction of our estates, we do not have equal parenting rights and we cannot live with a foreigner we love who does not have government permission to stay in this country. These are the equal protections that the Bill of Rights proclaims for all?

Why do you hate us so much that you will not permit us to legally love? I am almost 72, and I have been hated all my life, and I don't see much change coming.

I think your hate is evil.

The listserv has changed its name. It is now to be found here.

Like most of you, I attended Larry Kramer’s speech last Tuesday and was inspired by some of the things he said. What I heard was a call for ACT UP to reinvent itself, to incorporate new ideas, take advantage of new technologies, and think about going after new issues in order to tap into the energy and passion of a new generation of activists.

That’s what I heard. What I saw in the planning session that immediately followed was a bunch of existing ACT UP members trying to relive their past.

Largely white, male, and older – as ACT UP is often perceived to be – the crowd last Tuesday posed an intimidating space for new people to come into, let alone voice their thoughts and ideas. A few people tried. The “young woman in the back” made some important and provocative statements that have been referred to several times in the past week.

But it’s not just that her specific suggestion to change the time of the action was voted down, or that the real content of her comments was largely ignored. There were subtle ways in which new voices – hers and those who tried to expand on her comments – were drowned out. Collective murmurs of “that’s not how we do things” and the like pervaded the discussion.

Larry has an op-ed in the LA Times today as well. I think his description of straight hatred for gays is far too excessive. I'm increasingly impressed by how many straight people - and straight men - are now sticking up for us. But I profoundly agree with his analysis of how gay people enable straight prejudice. Too many of us have internalized the sense that we are not worth every bit as much as straight people. The fundamental reason why we do not have our equality is not straight hate. It is gay self-hate.

The bigots still have a loud voice and they're not being shouted down.

You may say you don't hate us, but the people you vote for do, so what's the difference? Our own country's democratic process declares us to be unequal. Which means, in a democracy, that our enemy is you.

I admire him not because I agree with his politics, indeed, I find his rants against Republicans to be unfair and over the top. But, when he talks about gay culture, his diagnosis of our woes is spot on, even if the solutions he offers may not be entirely to be my liking.

I believe this angry gay activist to be a great American largely because he is constantly reminding us that being gay is about more than just sex. He did so today, just as he did yesterday.

Ten years ago in The Advocate, he trashed Edmund White’s then-latest novel, The Farewell Symphony because it celebrated (in his graphic detail) White’s (endless and meaningless) sexual exploits. Like me, Kramer wanted to see more gay fiction which told stories of real relationships and love. In that spirit, he noted today that too often we find having sex with another man as the be-all and end-all definition of being gay. Instead, he said, “Love is what it’s all about it.”

Exactly. Sex talk permeates our culture. And we’re only beginning to talk about love between men as being more than a furtive sexual encounter having a meaning deeper than the cute and clever expression of a Hallmark card.

Like this blog, he was quite critical both of the Advocate and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), in large part, for some of the reasons we’ve been so critical of that publication and that group. He feels they have been too kind to the Democrats. He claimed to be “constantly taking swipes at HRC.”

Hillary “should kiss our ass to be there” (in the Advocate) and its reporters should “ask questions which amount to something.” He said the word “beggar” defines HRC “when it come to talking to the candidates.” While they fawn all over the candidates, Kramer said, “Hillary says ‘I love you’ and I don’t believe her.”

Like this blog, he was quite critical both of the Advocate and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), in large part, for some of the reasons we’ve been so critical of that publication and that group. He feels they have been too kind to the Democrats. He claimed to be “constantly taking swipes at HRC.”

Unlike me, however, Larry Kramer is not an optimist, despite the cultural progress of the past few years. Much of what he has “learned about gay people is not comforting.” A pessimist, he remarked that there are “not enough curmudgeons.” Commenting on the Advocate’s fortieth anniversary, he said he didn’t think things would be much different forty years hence (than they are today).

I’m sure I will find he offers many thoughts similar to my own in those pages — as well as ideas and notions at odds with those I have articulated on this blog. (The book is the published version of a speech he delivered at Cooper Union on November 7, 2004. I had read parts of it on Towleroad.)
While I agree with much of what Larry Kramer has to say, I often find his anger off-putting. He defended it, saying today, “Anger is one of the greatest emotions there is. Anger is as useful as love. Learn to use it.” I will agree that there is often much wisdom in anger. After all, the Greeks had a deity, Nemesis, who represented the quality of righteous indignation. And there is much that is righteous in Larry Kramer’s indignation.

Even where I disagree with Larry Kramer, I find some common ground. For like us, he relishes in taking on the gay establishment. He may not always be right, but he does always speak from the heart.

And we gay men would be wise to listen. Even if we don’t always take his advice.

- B. Daniel Blatt (GayPatriotWest@aol.com)

... I figured if *anybody* did, Kramer deserved a thread dedicated to him...

Turns out, even the termites have developed some respect for Mr. Kramer...

While I agree with much of what Larry Kramer has to say, I often find his anger off-putting.

Kramer had set a tone for his appearance at the convention, and he continued with it two days later when he attracted a capacity crowd to an auditorium in the hotel. The tone was one of dismay with the gay rights movement today.

The activist — who once roared but now almost whispers into the microphone — accused LGBT people of being “passive” and “apathetic” today. Freedom cannot be won without a fight, he warned.

“If you want the freedom, [then] you have to find a way,” Kramer said. “Just don’t be so passive. We are capable of so much more.”

He lashed out at society in general and the education system for failing to teach the history of gay and lesbian people to students. Kramer called on people to get angry and resume “in their face” activism like he and others employed in the 1980s when gay men were dying daily from AIDS.

He complained that he is concerned his partner will not inherit enough from his estate to be secure when he dies because of unfair laws that penalize gay couples and reward straight ones. He lashed out at gay rights leaders, claiming their tactics are not doing enough to bring about equality for LGBT people.

As the session ended, members of the audience lined up to shake his hand and praise him. He never stopped smiling, but the glint in his eyes revealed that the anger still burns.