R.I.P. Larry Kramer: "I don’t want to lose my anger. There’s work to do."

If you don't know anything about Larry Kramer, you should. Gay or straight, black or white, young or old -- whatever. He saw what was true and real, and dedicated his life to justice.

Crashing into the limits of his entitlement turned Kramer into an activist. “I grew up nonpolitical,” he told me in an interview some 15 years ago. “I was out in Fire Island laughing at Gay Pride marches on TV. What politicized me was a couple of friends dying real fast” — and his shock at the lethal indifference of government, medical, religious, and media institutions.

"Lethal indifference" is the universal in all this. The arbiters of established orthodoxy care little for those regarded as different, unless the "different" (are they really?) can be used as scapegoats for one or the other of polite society's myriad failings.

Larry Kramer’s Righteous Rage, by Alicia Solomon (The Nation)

His jeremiads against the state and those complacent during the AIDS crisis galvanized generations of activists.

At that exasperated point (in 1991), Kramer had been sounding such jeremiads for a decade, and he did not let up in the nearly 30 years since, not until his death last Wednesday, at age 84. He is survived by his husband, David Webster; two generations of activists galvanized by his vision and fortitude; and untold numbers of people whose lives were saved because of his writing, the service organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis (which he cofounded in 1982), and the direct-action group ACT UP (which he cofounded in 1987).

"I don’t want to lose my anger," Kramer told The Economist in 2011. "There’s work to do."

Thank you to Larry Kramer for doing that work.

Scott County's HIV crisis "may reveal a terrifying future for public health in America."

Earlier today:

"State Representative Ed Clere will be a featured guest speaker at the Southern Indiana PRIDE Launch Event next Thursday October 11th, 2018."

Last year:

Mike Pence minced in The New Yorker: "(Ed) Clere remains bitter about Pence."

And a year before that:

Prayer, needles and Pence. Radical Christian extremists, be gone.

I've said it before and will say it again: As a lifelong Hoosier, I'm compelled to warn those of you currently existing on an steady diet of "Impeach Trump" that waiting in the wings is someone far worse, primarily because Mike Pence actually believes the religious mumbo-jumbo to which The Donald pays only bored lip service.

Mike Pence Is Still to Blame for an HIV Outbreak in Indiana—but for New Reasons, by Steven W. Thrasher (The Nation)

The avoidable Scott County epidemic may reveal a terrifying future for public health in America.

 ... The disaster in Scott County was not just a failure of clean needles or even just Indiana’s long-time “abstinence stressed” sexual education. It was a disaster born of a total abdication of Indiana’s public-health responsibility—and it’s the kind of health disaster we could see nationally. Pence is now vice president in an administration that is gutting HIV/AIDS resources and further criminalizing drug use—two paths that will increase HIV prevalence across the country. Meanwhile, the twin crises of deindustrialization and rising opioid usage mean that the conditions for localized HIV epidemics are not unique to Scott County. Indeed, Gonsalves and Crawford write that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes there are “220 counties across the USA at risk of outbreaks of HIV” and hepatitis C ...

... Gonsalves and Crawford’s study of Scott County shows that preventable epidemics can happen anywhere where austerity is combined with theocratic, anti-science policies. As public-health approaches are abandoned throughout the United States, that applies to increasingly large swaths of the country.

Robert Mapplethorpe, the First Amendment, and "a generation of artists ... wiped out by AIDS."

When Robert Mapplethorpe died in 1989, I was tantalizingly close to completing my period of employment at UMI-Data Courier, and getting back to Europe to work for the Commies in East Berlin.

My snazzy job title at Data Courier was "associate editor," or some such. For a year and a half, I read and abstract magazine articles for an emerging CD Rom data base, and although the spirit-crushing corporate mentality chafed, it wasn't a bad gig at all, and my closest experience to grad school.

They paid me to learn. Writing the abstracts could be done in one's sleep, and overall, it was a means to an end.

My introduction to Mapplethorpe's work came less from the actual images than the backlash they produced.

ARTS AND FIRST AMENDMENT: Public funding of controversial art, by Bill Kenworthy (First Amendment Center)

Throughout history artists have produced works which tested society’s standards of decency. Society, or parts of it, may respond to these controversial works with harsh criticism and scorn. In free societies, artists may produce any type of work that their talent, imagination and means can support, whether it is controversial or not. However, the question arises: Do artists have the same freedom when their art is publicly funded by taxpayer dollars?

On one side, Jesse Helms; on the other, Mapplethorpe. It makes it remarkable easy to pick your team. There is a new documentary film about Mapplethorpe, prompting reflections about how far we've come since the 1980s -- and haven't.

A generation of artists were wiped out by Aids and we barely talk about it, by Suzanne Moore (The Guardian)

... I was explaining this to my 25-year-old daughter. She understood what happened, but said, “I just can’t imagine it”. And somehow nor can I, but we lived through it. HIV, we say, is now no longer a death sentence. But, of course, it is in many parts of the world. South Africa has a 19% HIV rate. Russian is only just starting to admit the scale of its problem with an estimate of 1.5 million people with HIV. Neither homosexuality nor addiction can be spoken about in Putin’s Russia.

Mapplethorpe’s work was censored by US senator Jesse Helms who, like many Republicans, saw Aids as a punishment for homosexuality. Nancy and Ronald Reagan pretty much signed up to this line. Republicans banned needle exchanges. The Catholic church banned condoms. Mapplethorpe’s work is shot through the lens of his Catholic upbringing, the black mass and rituals of S&M – his composition, his invocation of the devil not as a metaphor, but as a living presence.

He was but one of a generation of artists, activists and athletes wiped out by Aids. Why don’t we speak about this anymore?

C. Everett Koop: "Then, strikingly enough, he changed."

Did the office make the man? It seems that once C. Everett Koop was elevated to surgeon general, he was able to separate his personal views from the requirements demanded by the job. As Perlstein observes, "You don’t see his like much any more, in that there Republican Party."

C. Everett Koop, 1916–2013, by Rick Perlstein (The Nation)

A decent enough interval has passed, I hope, to begin to think about an interesting figure of our recent history in a bit of a critical temper. C. Everett Koop died on February 25 this year, the former surgeon general of the United States, between 1981 and 1989—the only person to hold that title to have become a household name, not least for his goofy half-beard and his charming insistence on wearing his ceremonial brocaded Gilbert-and-Sullivan-style uniform everywhere. But also for, it has to be said, serving as an exemplar of honor and courage in a dishonorable time.

“We’re still fighting the disease.”

From The Economist.

“The Normal Heart”: Thumping, boiling and loving; Larry Kramer’s seminal play about AIDS makes its Broadway debut

WHOEVER thought you could die just from having sex? Surely only the God of the Old Testament would imagine a plague that smites gay men just as they are starting to enjoy themselves. But in New York in the early 1980s a mysterious illness was suddenly ravaging these men. People would literally “cough, go home and then die in two weeks,” says a former employee of the downtown Public Theatre at the time. “It was horrifying.”

It was the Public that first staged “The Normal Heart”, Larry Kramer’s raging, rabble-rousing play about AIDS, in 1985. The HIV virus had just been discovered, but government officials were moving slowly, reluctant even to mention the epidemic by name. “Who cares if a faggot dies?” asks a doctor in the play. A meditation on gay men fighting for their lives, “The Normal Heart” went on to become the longest-running hit in the Public’s history. Now, over a quarter of a century later, the show has arrived on Broadway, with both bark and bite intact.

“This play has an enormous number of ghosts,” says Mr Kramer, who based the story on his own experiences, lovers and friends, many of whom are now dead. At nearly 76, he seems a little surprised to be alive himself, having been infected with HIV for decades. Much has changed since the play was first produced—HIV is no longer a death sentence. But Mr Kramer, a longtime activist, is hardly counting blessings. “Gay people are hated in a huge part of the world, and we refuse to fight back.”

The play centres on Ned Weeks, a nebbishy and combative gay man. Inhabited here by Joe Mantello (pictured with John Benjamin Hickey as Ned’s lover, Felix). Ned is full of fury. He attacks the mayor, Ed Koch, for his negligence, the media for their silence and his fellow gay men for their sexual irresponsibility. His provocative antics get attention, but they also alienate his friends. Men who had finally achieved some kind of sexual freedom don’t want to be bullied about their bodies. Meanwhile, Felix gets sick.

“The Normal Heart” is designed to grab viewers by the lapels and give them a good shake. Full of expository dialogue and dramatic monologues that carry on a few beats too long, the play is more agitprop than art. “I wanted to get the message out fast,” Mr Kramer concedes. But it is also powerful and unfailingly moving, not only as an historic document but also for its unsparing look at physical deterioration and premature death. “We’re still fighting the disease,” says one theatregoer. Another marvels at how fresh the play feels, given the shame and recklessness that still bedevil gay people. “We don’t have gay marriage, so we don’t have role models for lives that aren’t about loneliness, sex and drinking,” he says. He is 28, and three of his friends are HIV-positive.

Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, may take this production to London. A film could also be in the works. Yet Mr Kramer is still angry—about the people who will needlessly die from the disease, about the cure that hasn’t been found. “I don’t want to lose my anger,” he says. “There’s work to do.”

“The Normal Heart” is at the John Golden Theatre in New York until July 10th