Larry Kramer

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2025

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today we profile Larry Kramer, the writer and AIDS activist. Kramer took space, took credit, operated in the world with tremendous privilege, and was somewhere between actively and passively misogynist and racist. But politically effective people are not always as we imagine them. We document Kramer's exclusions and blind spots, and explore how his hatred and fear of gay male sex culture, one that predated the AIDS epidemic, made his political work less effective; his gay male supremacism that led actual gay men to constantly disappoint him; and his prefiguring of a moralizing social media politics understanding rhetorical maximalism as the proof of radicality. We address Kramer as one of his narrators addressed his stand-in in the first volume of his last novel, The American People: “You fuckster! You are so fucksome. I love you very much.”’ Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays for monthly episodes, our advice segments, and to support our work. Check out our new merch, including hats, shirts, and socks. ----more---- SOURCES: Larry Kramer, Faggots, reprint edition (New York: Grove Press, 2000) Larry Kramer, “March 27, 1983: 1,112 and Counting,” Los Angeles Blade: LGBTQ News, Rights, Politics, Entertainment (blog), May 27, 2020, https://www.losangelesblade.com/2020/05/27/march-27-1983-1112-and-counting/ Larry Kramer, TheNormal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays (New York: Grove Press, 2000) Ben Miller, “Larry Kramer’s Great Expectations,” Literary Hub (blog), June 11, 2020, https://lithub.com/larry-kramers-great-expectations/ Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc, 2021) Michael Shnayerson, “Kramer vs. Kramer | Vanity Fair,” Vanity Fair | The Complete Archive, accessed February 4, 2025, https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1992/10/kramer-vs-kramer “Larry Kramer’s Anger Is Essential in Historic ‘Plague’ Speech,” accessed February 4, 2025, https://www.advocate.com/news/2020/5/27/larry-kramers-anger-essential-historic-plague-speech Jane McAlevey on How To Organize for Power,” Current Affairs, April 20, 2019, https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2019/04/jane-mcalevey-on-how-to-organize-for-power. Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Badgay, is a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:20.3	My name's Hugh Lemmy.
0:21.4	I'm a writer and author. And I'm Ben Miller, a writer and historian currently at work,
0:25.7	Abeye Arifate of Rudy Gurnrick. So last week we were talking about the Crown Prince of Iraq,
0:31.2	Abad Al-Ila. Who are we talking about today, Ben?
0:34.3	Let's start today with a story, Hugh. I was a student and I was sitting in a cheap seat at the John
0:38.6	Golden Theatre on Broadway in the late spring of 2011, watching names write themselves across the
0:44.4	back of a simple white unit set. They were the names of people who had died of AIDS-related illness.
0:50.2	They flowed from left to right, slowly, behind characters beginning to understand and name
0:55.6	and fight a terrifying new plague that threatened to kill them all. By the end of the night,
1:00.9	they filled the wall. These characters spoke in words that ran me over like a truck. I had never
1:06.0	heard such words, nor did I know then the history of that pandemic, and the murderous silence and contempt with which
1:12.4	it was handled by the political class, liberal and conservative, whose grip on power has since
1:17.5	only intensified. The play was, of course, Larry Kramer's polemic, the normal part, being revived
1:23.6	in New York for the first time after its 1985 off-Broadway public theater debut. I was just
1:29.7	learning about being a writer, and I was there with a friend. At the end, I couldn't say anything.
1:34.7	And so we were walking silently to the subway, but as we fought our way out through the theater
1:38.4	door, a wizened old man handed me a leaflet. And that old man was the subject of today's episode and the author
1:45.7	of that play, Larry Kramer. Larry Kramer leafleted every evening's performance with an afterword
1:52.6	which I've kept in my personal archive. Wow, that's astonishing. Please know, the leaflet began,
1:57.8	that everything in the normal heart happened. I began to search and to read and to think about the history of this epidemic, what it had meant,
2:05.3	to radicalize in terms of my identity, in terms of my politics, to think about gay rights,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.