Award-winning author and playwright Larry Kramer has made a name for himself with his confrontational style in advocating for the public to address the American HIV/AIDS crisis, directing his anger at both the gay community and political leaders. Kramer, who is in residence in the College this week as a Montgomery Fellow, spoke about his career, including his establishment of the direct action protest group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, yesterday in Filene Auditorium.
Kramer is most renowned for his leading role in forming both the Gay Men's Health Crisis, which advocated for health services for HIV/AIDS victims, and ACT UP, which launched provocative protests aimed at building the political will to fight HIV/AIDS, according to women and gender studies professor Michael Bronski, who moderated the discussion.
Kramer talked about his anger at the apathy of political officials, the National Institute of Health, pharmaceutical companies and the gay community toward the HIV/AIDS crisis, which led to his vocal efforts to change the status quo. Kramer's novel, "Faggots," sparked an uproar from both the gay community and society at large for portraying the New York gay population as sexually promiscuous, he said. This negative reaction from the public prepared him for a future in which his views would receive little support in mainstream American culture, Kramer said.
"It helped me to be an activist," Kramer said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "I realized that I had to surmount what people were saying about my beliefs."
In response to a growing incidence of illness among his friends in New York, Kramer started the Gay Men's Health Crisis in an effort to provide medical services for men infected with HIV/AIDS.
"Just picture everyone you know dying, because that's what it was like," Kramer said. "You couldn't walk down the street in the Village without somebody stopping you and saying, Did you hear that so-and-so died?'"
He said, however, that he lamented how GMHC's backbone nurses, doctors and churchgoers had little desire for activism and merely wanted to aid the sick.
As leader of the GMHC, Kramer leveled his criticism at both the gay community, for what he saw as its complacency, and at New York's mayor, Ed Koch, for his neglect of HIV/AIDS. Realizing the need for more direct confrontation in order to garner attention about the urgency of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Kramer founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), which he deliberately designed to be non-hierarchical.
"I was angry that [GMHC] became so structured," Kramer said. "I made one conscious decision for ACT UP to be as free-form as possible to absorb whatever ideas people wanted to bring."
Once a week, roughly 500 people would gather to discuss activism plans, make decisions and figure out how to implement the ideas. One protest involved ACT UP disrupting church services at New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1989, motivated by what Kramer and others saw as the Catholic Church's hostility toward the gay community.
Members of ACT UP, doubtful that either political leaders or the public would pay serious attention to their cause, took the initiative to do their own research on drug policy, according to Kramer.
"Every treatment out there for AIDS is out there because of activists," Kramer said.
ACT UP's combative tactics grew out of activists' recognition that mainstream America refused to come to grips with the reality of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Bronski said.
"Larry's message is that working within the system doesn't get you anything," Bronski said. "At that point in history, people simply did not want to listen."
Despite the success of ACT UP in advancing access to drug treatment, Kramer lamented that too few members of the gay community were a part of such an activism campaign.
"When things were at their worst, there were not more than 10,000 people in ACT UP actually fighting," Kramer said. "One criticism I have against the gay community is that considering how many of us there are, there were so few of us participating in taking responsibility in terms of looking after one another."
Kramer's autobiographical account consisting of his activism writings, "Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist," reflects his attempt to go beyond the theoretical realm of activism and set an example for others, according to Bronski.
"He's saying, This happened to me, this could happen to you and I'm an example,'" Bronski said.
Bronski said that Kramer's message to students, delivered through his classroom visits and lecture, is that they are obliged to fight inequalities before their eyes.
"Larry's message to students is, If you see an injustice, you have an ethical obligation to fight it,'" Bronski said.
Richard Stamelman, the executive director of the Montgomery Fellowship program, said the widespread neglect of the HIV/AIDS crisis left Kramer little choice but to take a confrontational approach in addressing the issue.
"He felt the only way to get attention and to get people to start listening to him and others who were talking about the epidemic was to be as belligerent as possible," Stamelman said. "He was willing to accept all those enemies because he realized that what was about to happen was going to be catastrophic."
The Montgomery Fellowship differs from a typical campus lecture in that the fellows are specifically brought to campus to interact with undergraduate students through both class visits and lunch discussions, Stamelman said.
