In an interview appearing over at MetroWeekly. Chris Geidner sat down with , longtime gay activist, novelist, playwright and co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis Larry Kramer and as only Larry could do, he let it all out about what he believes wrong with “gay activism” today.
Here are some excerpts of what Larry says:
I remember in ACT UP, everything was so bad all the time that we just sort of had to make it up as we went along, what we were going to do. Because today’s emergency wasn’t necessarily tomorrow’s emergency, or the other way around. People who were in one job one day weren’t there the next, and you were constantly having to educate people.
People always ask me, ”What was it like?” I don’t look back. I look to today and to what we still have to do in the days to come. What we achieved in the past has always been haphazard and more often by luck than by skill……
I know that there’s a lot more sympathy for Obama than I’m prepared to show him. We still haven’t got these things, you know. I don’t consider ”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” some major victory. It’s a small, dishonest political move that Clinton did to enchain us, and it’s been unknotted. But it’s for a very small percentage of us. Everybody acts as if it’s a major thing for all of us, and it isn’t. And he knows that. It’s been a small gift he’s given us to throw us a bone. The big gifts, he’s not giving us – no one’s giving us. And that hurts. I don’t see that changing…….
I think we should have learned by now that this “pebble at a time” attempt to make right is just that. They’re pebbles. We need bricks. Until we’re ready to throw bricks, we’re not going to get anywhere. You can name any kinds of wonderful things [HRC has] done, but they still have not changed the basic problem: We are not equal. We do not have equality. They do not look at the big picture, they look at the small picture. As does every other gay person, who is just happy to go home at night and go back into their state of denials.
It’s a very, very passive population, and that is our great tragedy. I love being gay, I love gays. It hurts me to say this. These are all lessons that I’ve learned painfully since 1981, but until we learn to fight back we get what we deserve.
BRAVO LARRY KRAMER!
The interview at MetroWeekly is one of the most forthright, honest and brillant interviews I have seen with Kramer
Bravo Chris Geitner, MetroWeekly and Larry Kramer
PLEASE head over to METROWEEKLY and read the entire interview.
Larry Kramer is a gay hero and in my opinion 100 percent correct and we all should listen to his words.
And on that note I would like to leave you with what Kramer says about the Human Rights Campaign:
KRAMER: I think HRC is the dregs. I think it’s the toilet of the gay movement…..What more can be said? I find them useless, and I find them perpetuating con jobs on all of us. Ass-kissers extraordinaire.
TESTIFY!
