Larry Kramer Quotes

There will always be enemies. Time to stop being your own.

Almost more than talent you need tenacity, and an infinite capacity for rejection, if you are to succeed.

Of the 2,639,857 faggots in the New York city area, 2,639,857 think primarily with their cocks. You didn't know that the cock was a thinking organ? Well, by this time, you should know that it is.

We’re all different in many ways and alike in many ways and special in some sort of way.

Holy shit," somebody muttered in the dark. "A virgin," sputtered another. "I didn't know they still made them." "He just did.

All I want is someone who reads books, loves his work, and me, too, of course, and who doesn’t take drugs, and isn’t on unemployment.

Don’t lose that anger. Just have a little more patience and forgiveness. For yourself as well.

I gave you books. You gave me plants. Books live. Plants die.

And then he thought, profoundly, how there was something grand about living in hope, but also something terribly unreal and incomplete about it, because when you were hoping, you were not doing or living or experiencing the Now,

A penis has never been something that you pick up and put down and put away idly without consideration.

Humiliation is so essential to Catholics. And to faggots!

When in doubt, eat donuts.

If Fred's history will seem less unbiased then some would wish, let it never be overlooked that it is no small task to record a history of hate when one is among the hated.

No matter what any struggle accomplishes, time, life, death bring in their changes, and new oppressions are always forming from the ashes of the old.

And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are like Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds. That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself Surely you see that.

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.

And every faggot couple I know is deep into friendship and deep into fucking with everyone else but each other and any minute any bump appears in their commitment to infinitesimally obstruct their view, out they zip like petulant kids to suck someone else’s lollipop instead of trying to work things out, instead of trying not to hide, and…unh…why do faggots have to fuck so fucking much?!

When Larry Kramer tells Mathilde Krim in Interview about the closeted gay man at the National Institutes of Health who buried the AIDS data for two years, that’s when I understand how doomed we were before we ever knew. It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.

Progress is unimaginably difficult, dangerous, always at risk, always made by people with only partial vision.

We shouldn’t have to be faithful, we should want to be faithful.

How needy man is.

Indeed, to be fucked pleasurably is a gift.

Why listen to me? I can only predict epidemics and plagues.

We have the ultimate in freedom – we have absolutely no responsibilities! – and we’re abusing it.

Straights don’t compare themselves to us!

The only safe place left is the dark.

How to phrase it? Ma, I want to fall in love with a fella.

All your life has been a journey to find an identity.

Like the deepest secrets in a psychoanalysis, our lives stay hidden, harboring our precious information like a piece of decaying food behind a major molar in our country’s maw,

Larry Kramer’s speech is Jewish in the devotion it displays to the messianic conviction that the truth liberates if its precepts are entirely engaged with, and lived.

What seems to matter most to Larry Kramer is the incessant disruption of business as usual, the refusal to be silent or polite. This refusal is praiseworthy.

Religion is such an icky, sticky thing, full of tortuous—well, everything. Why is it so essential for man to be forced, for that is what religion relies on, force, to believe in anything but himself? And this is what John Winthrop should represent for us: the utter disdain he and Puritanism have for the self, for the human, for the human being.

Ah, did he not hate that word ‘gay’? He thought it a strange categoriser of a life style with many elements far from zippy. No, he would de-kike the word ‘faggot’, which had punch, bite, a non-nonsense, chin-out assertiveness, and which, at present, was no more self-deprecatory than, say, ‘American’.

I have a life expectancy of ten more minutes I’m going to eat what I want to eat.

American actors, historical, familial, political, theatrical, move blindly ahead toward a future that never is, and never can be, clear.

There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.

And all analogies to the Holocaust are tired, overworked, boring, probably insulting, possibly true, and a major turnoff.

The tyranny of the blood test.

We were the generation psychoanalysts tried to change.

Was it not better to wear it, do it, live it, than suppress it? That only leads, on an international scale of course, to war.

Closets, schmosets, everyone’s out of the closet. Now where the fuck are the men!

No religion wants us. We’re going to have to invent our own.

Cock-a-doodle-do! Any cock will do!

When would insight, knowledge, hope, and beauty meld?

It’s the oldest story in the world. You want him back, don’t you?

Quick! what’s the Proust line? – that we’re attracted to those people who have qualities we hate in ourselves?

Well, kid, I have seen the future and it shits.

We have created our own aesthetic!” “You mean our own Ghetto.

For he knew there was a pit of sexuality out there and that he longed to throw himself into it.

The system will always be here. The system doesn’t change.

Have you listened to your heart?

One should be able to have the man one loves.

You’re the cure? I hope you come in a portable version, like a laptop. Can you find me a boyfriend while you’re at it?

the True End of not only therapy but Maturity is to learn to live with the inescapable fact that 97% of all human beings are getting fucked and 97% of all faggots are, too.

The straight and narrow, so beloved of our founding fathers and all fathers thereafter, is now obviously and irrevocably bent. What is God trying to tell us...?

Have you any idea how long a ten-inch cock is?

The warring conflict in man between the intellect and the libido shall never be twinned.

It’s happened before. It’s all happened before. History is worth shit.

Dangerous, free time on your hands. You can only jerk off so often.

And you can't do anything without God. God hates us, you know. That's why so many believe we have to love Him so much. What feeble goddamned pussies we are.

All you want is Love. And if you’ve wanted love so badly, why haven’t you had it? Does not that say something about The Wanter, not his World?

Government research at the National Institutes of Health did not commence in reality until January 1983, eighteen months after the same government had declared the epidemic.

There is no love in Puritanism. It turns out that these monsters that won't allow any deviation from that rigid orthodoxy are obsessed with frigging, fucking, wanking, twatty sex. Don't do it, they screamed, while that's exactly what they did. My mother's cunt was all bent out of shape to prove it...All those Puritan preachers were vindictive, vengeful men spouting hateful thoughts and threats, and it's disheartening that they're still taught in the schools with reverence. They were shits. And they spouted shit. And a goodly portion of the world is still spouting shit.

The great error has been to mistake the darkness for damnation, to surrender to immobility or worse, to try to retrace our steps backward to a safety that has ceased to exist or never existed.

There are three roles one can play as a homosexual: one involving being the daddy to someone who is the son, another, therefore, being the sonny to that pop, the third involving looking for yourself in someone approximately identical to you.

What we have invented, Hans, is a new religion. Oh, not the moralistic and old-fashioned theological kind with that God who does not want us, but one with brutal splendours, magnificent contemporary rites and rituals, scenes, gestures, sacrifices, humiliations, terrors, tremblings, mortifications, degradations, phantasmagoric transfigurations into other realms of feeling, new realisations that will come from this cleansing purge, and then transcendencies unto a New World of our own making, with our own new rules and rewards and justifications.

Buy a dog. Dogs are faggot children.” “Nonsense. It is possible for two intelligent men to be turned on to each other in totality: emotionally, physically, and intellectually. Though I am about to become middle-aged, I shall not become a bitchy, middle-aged queen. I shall not turn sour.” “I tell you, buy a dog.

When he really wanted to get juicy, he would write in Latin. Remember? I was seventeen before I realised that immissio penis in os meant sticking it in the mouth.” “And immissio penis in anum, those who practiced that, he called us moral imbeciles and moral depravities, certain barbarous races devoid of morality. I grew up in constant fear!

NED: 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 Hammarskjöld . . . These are not invisible men.

Yeah. It tells me something. It tells me no relationship in the world could survive the shit we lay on it. It tells me we’re not looking at the reasons why we’re doing the things we’re doing. It tells me we’ve got a lot of work to do. A lot of looking to do. It tells me that, if those happy couples are there, they better come out of the woodwork fast and show themselves pronto so we can have a few examples for unbelieving heathens like you that it’s possible. Before you fuck yourself to death.

Fred had first come to Fire Island Pines when he was thirty. He wasn’t ready for such beauty, such potential, such unlimited choice. The place scared him half to death. It was a warm and sunny weekend and there were one thousand bathing-suited handsomenesses on The Botel deck at Tea Dance. They all seemed to know each other and to touch and greet and smile at each other. And there he was, alone. Though he had acquired his 150-pound body for the first time (of his so-far three: the first for himself, the second for Feffer, number three, with muscles, for Dinky), he still felt like Mrs. Shelley’s monster, pale, and with a touch of leprosy thrown in. Not only had he no one to talk to, not only did the overwhelmingness of being confronted by so much Grade A male flesh, most of which seemed superior to his, which would make it difficult to talk to, even if he could utter, which he could not, floor him, but everyone else seemed so secure, not only with their bodies (all thin and no doubt well-defined since birth), tans, personalities, their smiles and chat, but also with that ability to use their eyes, much like early prospectors must have looked for gold, darting them hither and yon, seeking out the sparkling flecks, separating the valued from the less so, meaning, he automatically assumed, him. Their glances his way seemed like disposable bottles, no deposit, no return. He felt like Mr. Not Wanted On The Voyage, even though it was, so be it, his birthday. Many years would pass before he would discover that everybody else felt exactly the same, but came out every weekend so to feel, thus over the years developing more flexible feelings in so feeling.

Where else in dramatic literature is there such a treatment of the life-and-death cycle of people and political change? One needs to reach back to the chronicles of Shakespeare, back to the Greeks. Larry Kramer isn't Sophocles and he isn't Shakespeare; we don't have Sophocleses or Shakespeares, not these days, but we do have, on rare occasion, remarkable accomplishment, and Kramer's is remarkable, invaluable, and rare. How else to dramatise revolution accurately, truthfully, politically, than by showing it to be tragic as well as triumphant? And on the other hand, if the medical, biological, political, and familial failures of "Destiny" produce, by the play's end, despair again; if we are plunged back into night, it cannot be different from the night with which "Normal Heart" began, rife with despair and terror, and pregnant with an offstage potential for transformation, for hope. Failure awaits any political movement, even a spectacularly successful movement such as the one Larry Kramer helped to spark and organise. Political movements, liberation movements, revolutions, are as subject to time, decline, mortality, tragedy, as any human enterprise, or any human being. Death waits for every living thing, no matter how vital or brilliant its accomplishment; death waits for people and for their best and worst efforts as well.politics is a living thing, and living things die. The mistake is to imagine otherwise, to believe that progress doesn't generate as many new problems as it generates blessings, to imagine, foolishly, that the struggle can be won decisively, finally, definitively. No matter what any struggle accomplishes, time, life, death bring in their changes, and new oppressions are always forming from the ashes of the old. The fight for justice, for a better world, for civil rights or access to medicine, is a never-ending fight, at least as far as we have to see. the full blooded description of this truth, the recognition and dramatisation of a political cycle of birth, death, rebirth, defeat, renewal - this is true tragedy, in which absolute loss and devastation, Nothing is arrived at, and from this Nothing, something new is born.

Do you think they’ll find a cure before I. . . How strange that sounds when you say it out loud for the first time.

It is a very peculiar feeling having to go out and seek support from the straight world for something gay.

Isn’t it amazing how a kid can come out of all that analyzing everything incessantly down to the most infinitesimal neurosis and still be all alone?

Sugar is the most important thing in my life. All the rest is just to stay alive.

Walter Benjamin writes: The talent of a good writer is to make use of his style to supply his thought with a spectacle of the kind provided by a well-trained body. He never says more than he has thought. Hence, his writing redounds not. . . to his own benefit, but solely to the benefit of what he wants to say.

Does flying Bucharest Airlines inspire you with any confidence?

Although God and His promise of a better life hereafter may have been dismissed by Kramer as just another false comfort, the muscular directness of his writing, its spontaneous spoken-ness, its proud discomfort, its inelegant elegance, are Jewish tropes.

Kramer’s unadorned prose is evocative of the best Jewish-American writing: of Singer, Malamud, Bellow, Ozick, Roth, Kunitz, Paley. This is the speech of the newly arrived, the immigrant, the oppositionist, the pariah; it is underclass, or working class, or even middle-class.

Politics is a living thing, and living things die.

Here is an American epic, a wandering without a homecoming.

Nobody listens for very long anyway. There’s a new disease of the month every day.

The full-blooded description of this truth, the recognition and dramatization of a political cycle of birth, death, rebirth, defeat, renewal—this is true tragedy, in which absolute loss and devastation, Nothing is arrived at, and from this Nothing, something new is born.

Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.

I’m frightened nobody important is going to give a damn because it seems to be happening mostly to gay men.

You have a mayor who’s a bachelor and I assume afraid of being perceived as too friendly to anyone gay. And who is also out to protect a billion-dollar-a-year tourist industry.

Unfortunately, the immune system is the system we know least about.

NED: Nobody ever listens. We’re not exactly a bunch that knows how to play follow the leader. EMMA: Maybe they’re just waiting for somebody to lead them. NED: We are. What group isn’t?

During the first nineteen months of the epidemic, the New York Times wrote about it a total of seven times:

EMMA: I’m sorry. I still don’t know how to tell people. They don’t teach acting in medical school.

We’ve got ourselves a lot of bereavement overload

MICKEY: No, don’t take me home. I’m afraid I might do something. Take me to St. Vincent’s. I’m just afraid.

We’re living through war, but where they’re living it’s peacetime, and we’re all in the same country.

How about if we say we’re going to become a cross between the League of Women Voters and the United States Marines?

There is only one Long Day’s Journey into Night. There is only one Death of a Salesman

I set out to make sense of my life. And I found out that one’s life, particularly after one has written about it, doesn’t make sense. Life doesn’t make sense.

The little boy in me still believes everything is possible. Mom, you taught me this. And you lied. But so does art and so does hope.

Nothing works for everybody.

NED: Why can’t you just say yes? BEN: Because we have a committee. NED: But you’re the senior partner and I’m your brother. BEN: I fail to see what bearing that has on the matter. You’re asking me to ask my partners to give up income that would ordinarily come into their pocket.