First published in the Chicago Free Press, April 4, 2007
It's getting to be a tradition. Like some ancient Hebrew prophet, Larry Kramer descends from Mt. Sinai, or maybe just Mt. Kramer, and ascends a podium in the harsh, barren deserts of New York City to deliver his latest denunciations and warnings to a world awaiting them with decreasingly bated breath.
These presentations are generally attended by a public of younger gays and characterized by substantial exaggerations of fact, hyperbolic rhetoric, and a certain amount of vulgarity--all of which are apparently how Kramer thinks you communicate with fellow gays. Think of it as performance art.
The burden of Kramer's latest speech was that everybody hates us: politicians, judges, the U.S. government, "they," "them," "America"--they all hate us. "We are still facing the same danger, our extermination, and from the same entity, our own country." Even our so-called friends are not willing to fight for us, he says.
Kramer's view is that the best, the only, response to all this is a newly formulated, hierarchical organized ACT-UP: an Army Corps to Unleash Power.
Kramer points to genuine injustices and the malign neglect of many gay concerns: equal treatment of gay relationships, the ban on immigration of foreign partners, anti-gay violence, the murder of gays abroad. But the gay press writes about these things regularly and the national and state gay organizations work on those as well as other issues such as military access and gay adoption. Kramer is unjust to say that "our movement has confined its feeble demands to marriage." Nor does he acknowledge that marriage would solve some of the problems he lists--e.g., tax equality and partner immigration.
In addition, there are conceptual problems with Kramer's new solution. When ACT-UP was created it had:
• A specific set of goals--the development of effective treatments for AIDS, faster drug trials and access to those drugs and research for a cure.
• A specific set of targets: the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, pharmaceutical firms, and Presidents Reagan and Bush and their administrations.
• An intensely involved constituency of HIV-infected gay men who knew that their lives literally depended on their activism.
But in Kramer's proposed new organization and its vastly expanded agenda, who specifically are the targets, what are the specific goals and where is the intensely concerned constituency? A "Lo here, Lo there" approach to a wide array of gay issues seems at risk of a quick diffusion of focus, exhaustion of energy and rapid demise.
Kramer focuses on politicians. "Much of what I am calling for involves laws, changing them, getting them," he says. And he proposes an omnibus gay rights bill and "hold(ing) every politician's feet to this fire until he or she supports it." Great. How do we do that? By demonstrations? Can you produce personnel regularly? And sometimes demonstrations can be counter-productive by antagonizing politicians and public opinion. Then with votes? But Kramer says "There is not one single candidate running for public office anywhere that deserves our support."
And Kramer forgets that politicians are elected by "the people" so politicians are not going to change until they sense a change in popular sentiment regarding gays. So persuading the American public about gay moral equality has to be a vital part of the project. But how do you do that, especially if the people are our enemy, and if, as Kramer says, "They hate us and want us dead"? Kramer even seems to scorn "our own country's 'democratic process.'"
In short, Kramer's speech does not seem to cohere. Some parts conflict with other parts or depend on supports that Kramer has already yanked away.
Nor does Kramer seem to have thought through what is involved in changing Americans' minds about gays and lesbians so they will stop "hating" us. He seems to want to threaten and bully people into respecting and fearing gays as he claims the original ACT-UP did to drug companies and government agencies. But that probably won't work with a whole nation.
And as always Kramer simply ignores the obvious political progress gays have made in the last 20 years. He exaggerates the number of our opponents, distorts the extent of their power and intensity of their hostility and exaggerates the extent and likelihood of looming homophobia. He airily dismisses the existence of genuine friends and supporters. And he repeatedly distorts facts to support his claims--a column topic in itself. Not a way to build credibilty for a new movement.