BEFORE LARRY, AFTER LARRY AND CONGRESSMAN JOHN LEWIS
GMHC Founders Day Commentary
by Lawrence D. Mass
Before Larry
August 11 marks a milestone. It’s the first Founders Day commemoration since the passing of leading GMHC co-founder Larry Kramer.
It was nearly 40 years ago, in Larry’s living room on that day in 1981, that six of us gathered to discuss our emerging health crisis. I was a physician working in addiction and a journalist writing about gay health and cultural issues for the gay press. Nathan Fain was a gay journalist writing about nightlife for the mainstream press. Paul Rapoport was a gay community organizer and philanthropist. Former Green Beret Paul Popham was prominent in gay social and professional circles. And Edmund White and Larry were acclaimed gay writers. Fain, Rapoport and Popham died from complications of AIDS. Larry was poz, as is Ed.
Indeed, a true crisis is what we were facing. At that time there were virtually no civil liberties protections for gay people. We could be and often were fired, evicted and ostracized by our employers, landlords, families, friends and coworkers for being gay. Even in progressive San Francisco, where a pioneering gay civil rights ordinance was passed in 1972, the atmosphere was bitter and riotous in the wake of the gay-hatred assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay figures to be elected to public office. These terrible crimes were committed by Dan White, a failed politician who was acquitted on the basis of a gay-panic defense just months prior to the first press report, by me in the New York Native, of the epidemic that later became known as AIDS.
The risk of widespread public explosions of homophobic extremism seemed real enough as well in the wake of the 1980 Chicago trial of John Wayne Gacy, a serial killer of 22 young men, most of them gay, which I covered for the gay press. Gays taking over politics. Gay-related murders of young sons. Gays spreading a deadly new disease to the public. Our aggregate vulnerability on these fronts of sensationalization was terrifying.
As homophobic extremists like psychologist Paul Cameron continued to speak openly on television about final solutions for homosexuals, here we were trying to grapple with a new epidemic disease in gay men, on top of epidemic spikes of syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis and amoebiasis. In that earliest period of the first reported cases of this latest health crisis, we weren’t even sure we were dealing with an STD.
From the beginning, Larry was pushing levels of public activism that were scary in terms of this atmosphere of homophobia and absence of civil liberties. Tell the truth and organize, yes, the other five of us agreed. But we also needed to tread cautiously, stick close to the facts and not carelessly add fuel to the fires of homophobia and hysteria.
After several of these meetings and early fundraising efforts, and with the help of Larry’s brother Arthur, an attorney, we regathered at Larry’s Washington Square apartment to officially establish a new organization, Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
At the time, I was the lone holdout to the name, which I felt linked the disease with being gay in a way that wasn’t scientific and could aggravate stigma. AIDS, as it had yet to be called, wasn’t a “gay disease.” It wasn’t “gay cancer,” or “Gay-Related-Immunodeficiency,” as the epidemic was already being labeled. To my ears, calling the new epidemic “gay cancer” or “GRID” was like Trump calling COVID-19 “the China virus.”
But I supported the group’s decision in favor of “Gay Men’s Health Crisis” and am glad I did. Although HIV/AIDS was a viral condition that doesn’t discriminate on the basis of age, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation or geography, one of its earliest and biggest recognized outbreaks was in gay men and our initial efforts to confront it remains a distinguished chapter in our history.
As it turned out, this was a history not only of AIDS activism but of gay liberation and kindred minority struggles. It was also a milestone for medicine, science and America. Not so unlike the pride that still burnishes names like NAACP or YMCA, the name GMHC continues to reflect a proud legacy of humanitarian, community and minority efforts.
After Larry
On May 27, 2020, just short of what would have been Larry Kramer’s 85th birthday, the gay and AIDS communities lost their most powerful voice and advocate. While there were many brave and notable activists before and during Larry’s time, none has come close to having such forceful influence. NIH director Anthony Fauci, a frequent target of Kramer’s activist wrath who became his personal doctor and friend, has described the history of American medicine as “Before Larry and After Larry.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. At the time of ACT UP’s storm-the-barricades pressuring of Fauci and the NIH to supercede leaden research protocols with revolutionary fast-track testing of experimental drugs, there had yet to be a successful treatment for any major fatal viral illness. What ACT UP, which Larry co-founded on leaving GMHC, achieved under his leadership was unprecedented in the history of medicine, science and grass-roots health care activism.
Larry was endlessly angry about injustice. Initially, we in the gay community were the targets of a lot of that anger. Anger that we couldn’t get our act together. Anger that we were acting out instead of acting up. Eventually, that anger became focused on much bigger targets.
Larry’s last work and magnum opus, his two volume, semi-fictional and satirical novel, The American People, is a volcanically angry, accusatory indictment of a country that was built on slavery and genocide. As the AIDS epidemic spread amidst public silence, Larry held “the American people” responsible for what he decried as our gay “holocaust” and “genocide.” It’s basis in homophobia — “Why do they hate us?” — he recognized as of a piece with the country’s history of racism, sexism, colonialism, xenophobia and bigotry.
“Silence = Death,” which became the logo of ACT UP, could be the subtitle of The American People. In its countless tales and images of our unacknowledged losses from AIDS, and of our being written out of history alongside indigenous peoples and other minorities, The American People is truly epochal in its declaiming and mourning of these losses and in its indictments of their perpetrators.
Larry Kramer and Congressman John Lewis
With Larry’s passing, we are officially launched on the treacherous seas of After Larry. The odds are once again stacked against us locally, globally and looming darkly into the future. Once again, we are David facing Goliath. But in large measure because of Larry Kramer, we need never again feel hopeless. As Larry showed us, anything is possible— like turning a rampaging, uniformly fatal global pandemic into a manageable chronic condition. So long as we believe, care, hope and are willing to stand up for ourselves, to fight injustice whenever and wherever it emerges, no matter how intimidating, we can prevail.
Larry was often described as being like one of the biblical or mythological prophets, rejected in his own time and land. “I wanted to be Moses but ended up being Cassandra,” Larry himself observed. From his writing of Faggots to his gay and AIDS activism and the publication of The American People, Larry consistently demonstrated visionary foresight and courage of conviction. Even in the face of vociferous rejection, Larry’s message was always clear. We cannot and must not remain silent. And we must not lose that quality of the American people and of all people that remains most cherishable — hope for a better and more just world. Hope for the right of everyone to pursue life, liberty and happiness.
The best way we can honor Larry Kramer today is to begin by nurturing that hope in our hearts for a future worth fighting for. As GMHC’s public relations trailblazer Krishna Stone captured it on Larry’s passing and the future of GMHC: “We will be with each other with Larry’s spirit guiding us and yelling at us.”
Although Larry was a leader and visionary like no other, much of the tough, nitty-gritty, heroic work of leadership has always been carried out by others. Through decades of angry criticism of GMHC by Larry, who dramatized his falling out with the organization in his play The Normal Heart and who finally returned to the fold as the recipient of GMHC’s first Larry Kramer Activism Award in 2015, GMHC has not only prevailed, but has consolidated its reputation as the world’s premiere HIV/AIDS information and service organization.
From ushering in Kramer’s special place of honor in the organization, a feat no one but GMHC’s CEO Extraordinaire Kelsey Louie could have conceived and engineered, to managing the organization and its many and varied client needs and services during our concurrent health crisis of pandemic COVID-19, Kelsey and the organization he has so proudly and successfully guided now carry that torch of hope.
As people in recovery say, there are no coincidences. With the recent passing of towering civil rights hero Congressman John Lewis, who was as well an ardent champion of gay civil rights and gay marriage, we can take pride and comfort from his legacy, and as it intersects with and reflects that of Larry Kramer and GMHC.
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair,” Lewis exhorted us in 2018. “Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
Lawrence D. Mass, M.D.
New York City
GMHC Founders Day, August 11, 2020
Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., is a cofounder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and was the first to write about AIDS for the press. He is the author of We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer. He is completing On The Future of Wagnerism, a sequel to his memoir, Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite.
