Colossus of Historical and Satirical Fiction: Volume 2 of THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, Larry Kramer’s Epic Novel of the AIDS Epidemic, Gay History and America

Review and Commentary by Lawrence D. Mass

The American People, Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact, a novel by Larry Kramer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, 880 pages

“If I couldn’t write, I would die.” — Larry Kramer

Francis Bacon and George Orwell

The bodies depicted by the painter Francis Bacon tend to be horrifying. They emerge from darkness and appear to be disfigured, especially the face and mouth. When Larry Kramer was in London, he became acquainted with Bacon and spent time in his studio.

During the 1970’s, in the aftermath of his screenplay for the academy-award nominated film Women in Love and amidst the early post-Stonewall explosion of gay liberation that fueled Larry’s first novel Faggots, I had a handful of friends in New York, where I relocated from Boston in ’79. Larry was central to this social life which included Alex Gotfryd, a distinguished photographer and the art director of Doubleday. Alex, it was known, had endured experimental surgery on his face as a child during his family’s internment in Nazi concentration camps. Above the mantel in Alex’s living room was a dark painting of a figure with an anamorphic face and mouth, an original work by Francis Bacon.

Larry recently said he has little recollection of Alex’s background or his Bacon painting, but it occurred to me that a very dark portrait of the American people that oozes the horrors of torture, atrocity, totalitarianism and genocide would have been as natural a subject for Francis Bacon as it became for George Orwell and Larry Kramer.

Here is what Orwell famously said of humanity and the future:

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever!”

And here is the epigraph that introduces the reader to Volume 2 of Larry Kramer’s The American People:

“The goal of every serious artist is to rework reality by artificial means to create a new vision of the world intensely more truthful than anything ever seen before.”

— Francis Bacon, from Francis Bacon and The Brutality of Fact, 1987

The Imperative of Writing

The 2019 December Holiday issue of the New York Times Style Magazine is devoted to “Rewriting History through a Queer Lens.” In a bravura piece by Jesse Green, the rapidly expanding canvases of gay art and culture are surveyed to show the many ways in which history is being reimagined and recreated and how the future of history is being thereby redirected. “The Future is Ours and So Is the Past,” proclaims the cover. With great verve and enviable clarity, Green surveys the bevy of artists, playwrights and novelists in the vanguard of these developments, among whom is Larry Kramer. Of the first volume of The American People, Green observes: “It has the urgency (and chaotic despotism) of truth — if not always a particular truth, then at least a general one.”

To have clarity about what Larry Kramer has achieved with his magnum opus, The American People, Volumes 1 and 2, we must begin with the imperative of writing in the author’s life. A theme of my Larry Kramer anthology, We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer, is the paramount importance of writing for Larry. That collection came together in the early 90’s, still in the heyday of AIDS activism, and some of those I interviewed took issue with my contention that Kramer’s writing was even more important — to him and to us — than his activism. Of course, both viewpoints are valid. While Kramer’s writing and his plays are likely to surpass AIDS in interest and relevance, his activism will always be intrinsic to his legacy.

A window on this issue of the activism versus the art of Larry Kramer is how people have responded to Kramer over time. Whether it be the public call-to-arms Larry or literary-theatrical Larry, people are often initially put off by his tone and question his credibility. Not surprisingly, this is already the case with The American People (TAP). Most people I know, including many admirers of Kramer, haven’t read it and don’t plan to. Others put it on the shelf after initial efforts to peruse it.

Yes, Kramer is this great activist hero and writer, we all now reflexively concede, but the two-part novel is 2,000 pages (having been edited down by half), covers familiar territory, is filled with Kramer’s trademark shit-and-fuck invective and once again declaims much that is semi-fictional and seems hyperbolic. Yes, Kramer turned out to be right about almost everything in the past, but this time, isn’t it OK for us to indulge our old reflexes that Larry Kramer is the blaming, judging, unpleasant scourge we would always, at least initially, recoil from? And now that AIDS is treatable and gay rights have advanced, albeit in no small measure thanks to Kramer and even if it’s all once again under great threat, do we really need another retelling of his story by him?

Moses vs Cassandra

The answers to these questions are already obvious. If Kramer’s track record of being prophetic, of turning out to be right, of capturing the essences of issues and feelings and trends, is so impressive, why are we once again hesitating to accord him the respect he has earned and give this greatest of his literary endeavors, decades in the making, the seriousness it deserves? Maybe it’s because what he has to tell us is so dreaded. Maybe it’s also because, as Kramer himself has observed, most recently in conversation with his biographer Bill Goldstein, he wanted to be Moses but ended up being Cassandra.

Petronius, Voltaire, Swift, Dickens, Orwell, Waugh. In trying to place Kramer in the context of other writers, it’s helpful to recall how the early writings and speeches of Larry Kramer were initially received. Several early passages in Volume 2 capture reactions to Faggots. Though the work was ultimately acclaimed, it was initially greeted with outrage by most of the gay activist community it so relentlessly pilloried, including me.

In my Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite, Faggots is described as follows: “It would be as if James Baldwin had written what was expected to be the major novel of emerging black consciousness in the early 1960’s — a time when the overwhelming majority of portrayals of blacks was still mired in negative stereotypes — and all the characters turned out to be petty welfare chislers, pimps, alcoholics and heroin addicts who do nothing but victimize each other in a ‘black’ comedy entitled Niggers.” In my memoir, I satirically refer to Faggots as “The Sissy” and The Normal Heart as “Here’s What’s Happened To The Community That Rejected The Sissy or I’ll Show Ya Who The Sissy Is Ya Fuckin Faggots!”

So how did I go from there to later describing Faggots, on the dust jacket of its British re-release, as “the funniest and most dazzling evocation in all of gay literature”? That’s what happens with the writings of Larry Cassandra Kramer over time. What initially seems arrogant, self-righteous, judgmental, vindictive, over the top and otherwise off-putting, becomes better appreciated as brave, truthful, soulful, deeply caring and visionary. Oh, and let’s not forget funny!

The Reagans

This challenge of Kramer’s writing, of how it morphs over time, can be appreciated in my own experience of his excoriations of the Reagans. Starting with the premise that they were sexual, Kramer, in various personas as both Fred Lemish and Ned Weeks in TAP, ponders the mechanics of their sexuality. What did they do with each other, especially when they were younger? Did they prefer blowjobs, anal sex, three-ways? In Hollywood, did Reagan (“Peter Ruester” in TAP) never succumb to gay seductions? According to Kramer, there are plenty who attest he did. Did Nancy never sleep around? Did she not lust after others? Notoriously, according to Kramer, at least prior to Ronny. And what exactly did she like to do sexually and with whom? Can we agree she was into big cocks?

Is this not the worst kind of gossip and slander, even if it’s also clearly satirical? Yet, as with the best of satire, the more Kramer asks these questions, and the more you ponder them, the more plausibly reflective of greater truths these caricatures become. Finally, even as we recognize them to be more in the vein of conspiracy theories and fake news, they resonate to strip the teflon emperor and his domineering wife of their political raiments to expose the Bacon-like bodies, faces and souls underneath.

Like too many others, I was somehow lulled into thinking that however awful, inexcusable and homophobic, some of what Reagan did, and especially what he failed to do, was more ignorant and bumbling than consciously, intentionally “Hitlerian” and “genocidal.” In TAP Vol 2 the Reagans are once again front and center, this time with big incorporated chunks of Kramer’s failed farce, Just Say No, about them and their callousness. Chunks of The Normal Heart and earlier work on an unpublished novel, The Masturbovs, about Jewish Washington, are likewise interwoven into the fabric of TAP. Hitler was profoundly, intentionally, genocidally invested in anti-Semitism. Were the Reagans and Ed Koch comparably invested in genocide against gays?

In an early ACT UP demonstration, I carried a sign that read “We Need Experts, Not Bigots,” rather than any of those showing Reagan as Hitler and sporting swastikas. But what Kramer had been declaiming from the outset is now in sharper focus. To remain silent about a major epidemic of a fatal disease with mass casualities in a stigmatized minority without civil liberties protections is indeed mass-murderous, Nazioid, Hitlerian and genocidal, just as what Western “civilization” has done to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, to slaves, to Jews in Europe and other vulnerable minorities was mass-murderous, Nazioid, Hitlerian and genocidal. This was Kramer’s battle cry all along and is an encompassing theme of The American People.

Ron Jr.

Yet I still reflexively wince at some of Kramer’s allegations. In the case of the Reagans, for example, is Ron Reagan Jr. really queer and poz, as Kramer still so vehemently insists? This exposing of queerness in the family is a bulwark of Kramer’s lampooning in TAP not only of the Reagans but of the Bushes and many other figures of prominence, especially politicians.

In my first year of medical school, my closest friend was a straight (no quotes) ballet and modern dancer in the mold of Ron Reagan Jr. He had a girlfriend he slept with and eventually married. Like Kramer, I can be suspicious of sexual orientation claims by men who could seem otherwise by their externals. But I never had any doubts about Tom. In all honesty, I had the same sense about Ron Reagan Jr., who otherwise always seemed at ease with himself and admirable in his ability to own his considerable political differences from his parents, who apparently did worry that he might be a fairy when he was at Yale, when he chose to dance with the Joffrey Ballet. Today, Ron Reagan Jr. continues his public service as a commentator and program contributor to MSNBC. He’s an outspoken liberal and “unabashed atheist” committed to the separation of church and state, and has been named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Honorary Board of Distinguished Achievers.

Again to be honest, the whole picture Kramer painted of Ron Reagan Jr, showcasing Kramer’s skill at insightfully demeaning others, still strikes me as character assassination in the interest of serving his own scenarios and agendas, and doing so utilizing one of the oldest sexist and homophobic tropes — of interest in dance as the weapon of choice to faggify the enemy. It’s the kind of weaponizing of difference the worst homophobes, our straight enemies, have always done. And it’s the kind of muckraking only one other person in the current period has been known to do as characteristically: Donald Trump, who the Washington Post recently called out for his “trademark vindictiveness.”

At one point in TAP 2, Kramer has a single sentence that reads like an add-on indicating his awareness of the fact that there are male dancers who aren’t fags. Though he doesn’t mention them, obvious front-runners include Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse and Michael Baryishnikov. This reminded me of my own run-in with Larry following the premiere of The Normal Heart. In the play Ned Weeks wonders why the raggle-taggle world of gay activists he has so stereotyped didn’t fight for gay marriage. “But we did!” I yelled at Larry the day after the premiere. In a subsequent draft of the play, the Mickey Marcus character based on me earns an add on: “We did.”

The Early Gay Movement

In TAP Kramer meets the challenge of spelling out his indictment of the gay movement that preceded him and that he had seemed so homophobically loathe to join. After canvasing many of the terms like “gay” and “queer” used over time to designate us, he goes on to survey a summary history of early activist organizations. With intelligence, caring and humor, and with greater circumspection — doubtless facilitated by the universal respect he now commands — he hones in on the inadequacy of our earlier efforts to lay claim to ourselves. However touching and brave these initiatives, and however insurmountable the obstacles we faced, what was needed, he concludes, was greater vision. Here he compares lesbians and gay men, noting real differences in our priorities — especially around sex and sexual freedom. Instead of going on an angry tirade about how gay men had made promiscuity our highest priority and were fucking ourselves to death, he concludes with disarming compassion that we were “a movement founded on wanting too little and dreaming too small.”

Rewriting History Through a Queer Lens

Meanwhile, what Kramer achieved with his vilifications of the Reagans is what he achieved with his faggifying of George Washington, Hamilton, Burr and others. Whatever Larry really thinks about the sexuality of these figures, it seems not so much the certainty of their gayness or involvement in specific gay love affairs and triangles, any more than it’s certain Ron Reagan Jr is gay and poz. It’s that we can never go back to trusting the superficial images we’ve absorbed from history and the media. Nor can we go back to not seeing ourselves as part of the American or any other people. Within which perception is the genocidal extent to which gay history has been expunged from all the received annals of history, and which Kramer so heroically recreates and evokes with unflinching verismilitude, tirelessness and pathos. As Jesse Green’s “Rewriting History Through a Queer Lens” helps us see, however mighty and singular Kramer’s voice has been, it’s no longer that lone cry in the dark, nor need it be ever again.

Edmund White and Sex Culture

Not surprisingly, TAP is brimming with caricatures. Some of these, especially of the health care honchos whose failures are continuously indicted by Kramer as mass-murderous, are more seemingly over the top than others, but many are scrupulously detailed, even when the characters have fictitious names, as they mostly do.

One of the more scathing of these putdowns from the early years of the epidemic is of “Jervis Pail,” a thinly disguised stand-in for “GCMP” (GMHC) co-founder and leading gay writer Edmund White. It’s easy to read Kramer’s satire here as a Trumpian counter-punch. Early on, White was an outspoken critic of Kramer. As such, White was expressing concerns about sex negativity and internalized homophobia we all shared about Larry and Faggots.

Where I parted company with Ed, however, and early on, was in my appreciation of Kramer’s gifts as a writer, his concerns about the community’s health and priorities, and with regard to the exclusionary literary clique White ruled, so aptly called “The Violet Quill.” A lot of what this small, claustrophobic group of writers was producing, Ed most skillfully, was purplish prose. Yes, there was intelligence and refinement in the best of this work, especially Ed’s, and there was bravery and value in its efforts to capture gay life and sensibility, especially by Ed and Andrew Holleran. Inevitably, however, especially as the epidemic unfolded and time moved on, for a growing number of us much of this school of writing increasingly betrayed a flaccidity of substance and soul.

Certainly, there was spirituality in our veneration of desire. But as it turned out, one could say the same for the greater sexual-revolution world of Playboy magazine and the Playboy mansion, both of which are objects of satirical scrutiny in TAP 2. Is there anyone today who would make the case that the spirituality of gay sex culture, even if gay men were a lot more menaced than straight men for being sexual outlaws, was of some higher metaphysical order than what went on at Plato’s Retreat? And though Kramer fails to even try to see it, there was likewise spirituality in the all-leather, S-M funeral for “Leather Louie” described by one of Kramer’s alter-egos in clinical detail in TAP. Yes, there was spirituality and humanity in our sex cultures. Yet so much of who and how we were as sexual beings in the 70’s had to do with levels of sexual disinhibition that veered into hedonism and compulsivity. For too many of us, sex became increasingly disengaged from love, responsibility and commitment.

For gay men especially and gay people more generally, our sexuality was the force that bound us together and because of our long-standing pariah status in society at large and because we so cherished and craved it, we defended and romanticized it fiercely; we exaggerated its importance. It was also the fuel, together with what we called “recreational” drug use, of a lot of our creativity. It wasn’t until decades later that we finally began to admit that the sex we had so uncritically over-valued was a failed substitute for what Kramer alone among us — outspokenly and courageously, if also judgmentally— had been trying to talk about all along as a community-level and ever-widening breach between sex and love.

Ed and I never developed a friendship, though we’ve had friends in common and would occasionally cross paths at the baths or in sex chat rooms. Whenever I tried to say hello in passing or wish him well (as when he had a stroke or at the opening of the New York Public Library exhibit Stonewall 50), I felt rebuffed. He never tried to initiate communication with me — or to respond to my few efforts to reach out to him — about the epidemic or GMHC in the nearly 40 years of their unfolding. His disaffection is perhaps understandable in view of my championing, though hardly uncritically, of his nemesis, Larry Kramer. Recalling White’s own observation that people can hold contradictory opinions simultaneously, and even in the face of my earlier criticism of him in my Larry Kramer anthology, I naively hoped that he would say yes to my inviting him to be a contributor to that anthology.

Even if we had somehow bridged this communications gap in the greater interest of our communities, however, it’s not likely that my reaction to the body of White’s work could ever be much different. For me, the title of one of his books,The Beautiful Room is Empty, can seem more eloquent than intended. But Ed, who is poz and who lost lovers and friends to AIDS, has had his own stories to tell and has done so with distinction and acclaim. Preceding The Beautiful Room is Empty is A Boy’s Own Story. Following it is A Farewell Symphony. Together they form a trilogy and are one of several gay Ring cycles, as I call them, with AIDS at their center. Others are Tony Kushner’s two-part Angels in America; Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, The Destiny of Me and a subsequent screenplay on the ACT UP period and aftermath that has yet to be adapted; Matthew Lopez’s two-part The Inheritance; and Larry Kramer’s two-volume The American People.

Yale and Gay Studies

While Kramer’s narrative was often directed at the gay community, what now fuels and infuses his work is a volcanic anger at the willful ignorance and prejudice of the broader public that even today cannot deal with the homosexuality of some of civilization’s greatest exponents. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Tchaikovsky. This year marks 500 years since the death of Leonardo. As we celebrate the achievements of one of history’s greatest minds and artists, why hasn’t there been a serious film that tells the truth about him or any of these other supremely gifted and revered figures? Throughout TAP, the history of homosexuality, even the acknowledgment of its existence, is shown through countless examples, great and small, to have been willfully ignored, suppressed and expurgated. As it traverses this lonely, baleful, tragic but also tragi-comic journey, TAP easily becomes the greatest work of mourning of these losses in all of literature.

All of which comes to a head in Kramer’s recap of his experience with the Larry Kramer Initiative at Yale (“Yaddah” in TAP), which refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of gay studies, insisting on trying to bury it within “gender studies.” It’s easy to seize on Larry’s adamancy that Lincoln and other figures were gay as one of the reasons. And it should probably have been called The Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay or LGBT Studies, like CLAGS (the Center for LGBT Studies initiated by Martin Duberman at The CUNY Graduate Center). But the takeaway is how right Larry turned out to be about the homophobia that still pervades academe.

That Yale could not see fit to sanction gay studies seems even more troubled now than it did at the time of all the confrontations. For me it brings to mind Hollywood’s efforts to honor Tennesee Williams with a major film of his drama Cat On a Hot Tin Roof starring Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie and Paul Newman as her repressed gay husband Brick. The play is explicitly about everybody’s “mendacity” about everything, especially Brick’s homosexuality. Even here, however, the ending had to be rewritten a la Hollywood to be both straight and happy. Yet another moment of truth for Yaddah, for this otherwise so august and esteemed institution with its history, as Kramer revels in exposing, of slave-owners, Christian bigots and nasty, besotted presidents.

What Yale did with the Larry Kramer Initiative for Gay Studies is what Hollywood did with Cat. It chose mendacity over veracity. Because of Yale’s cowardly decision and example, timely initiatives for gay studies have suffered their greatest setback. No wonder Kramer is so uncompromisingly hostile to social constructionists, with their determination to theorize gayness out of existence and history.

My life partner Arnie Kantrowitz was a pioneer of gay studies at the College of Staten Island CUNY, where he chaired the Department of English. When he retired, he explicitly warned CSI not to subsume gay studies within gender studies, where he could see it would get lost, which is exactly what happened.

Pharma and Slavery

TAP is filled with insights about history and trends. And such are its gatherings of evidence and its evocations of personages and events that historians and scholars, especially of the gay community and AIDS, will need to keep mining these volumes. It’s a rare pleasure to savor writing of such individuality and character, to share the intimacy of reading with a writer of such impressive knowledge and literary skills, someone whose written voice has its own distinctive eloquence, language, rhythms and humor, and who beckons us to join him in a forward march to a drumbeat of ever-gathering momentum to reclaim our lives, our communities, our history, our souls.

Just as Kramer’s stripping the Reagans of pretenses is still revelatory and compelling, so are his other indictments, especially of pharma; it’s another example of how appreciation of Kramer’s perspective evolves over time. In the heyday of ACT UP, when life-saving treatments for HIV were finally being developed and made available, thanks overwhelmingly to Kramer and ACT UP, there could seem a dissonance between Kramer’s denunciations of pharma as evil incarnate and its promise of transforming the epidemic, which is in fact what happened.

In David France’s history of AIDS, How To Survive a Plague, the role of pharma is seen as more complex. France shows how negotiations, led by Peter Staley of ACT UP offshoot Treatment and Data Group (TAG), required levels of patience, strategy and savvy that were tough for Kramer. As he had with GMHC, Kramer wanted ACT UP to do a lot more storming of the barricades rather than play games of compromise. The picture that emerges of Kramer in Plague, and inadvertently as well in TAP, is of someone who in ACT UP essentially repeated his history of falling out with GMHC over tactics.

But thanks to Kramer’s hard lines on pharma, we are helped to see the bigger picture. Perhaps only slavery (my analogy, not Kramer’s) can compare to the gargantuan profit-oriented malfeasance of this Bromdignagian industry over time. Consider first what might be called the affirmative, medical-model, American business take on the role of pharma in AIDS. In The Inheritance gay billionaire Henry Wilcox, who speaks for big money, praises the achievements of pharma, boasting that successful treatments for AIDS were developed in less than 20 years. Indeed, using the latest minimum side-effects antivirals preventively (PrEP), leading health officials now foresee the end of AIDS. Comparable affirmation could be imagined for slavery. Whatever the moral issues, slavery helped establish America’s lead in world finance and trade, something even slaves themselves, a Wilcox might argue, would eventually benefit from.

There’s a film, Belle, based on a complicated case of slave-ownership, in the course of which you’re able to appreciate how much of the history of slavery was about business, finance, insurance and law. In much the same way that the debates about secession that led up to the American Civil War were mostly about states’ versus national rights, trials involving slavery became all about technical issues of law. The moral issues were treated as secondary to non-existent. The only questions being asked were, what exactly was in the contract or law and was it violated, and if so, exactly how? Verdicts could be appealed, as they are today. Examples of this same indifference to moral issues of life and death and vulnerable communities abound in TAP, which, needless to add, does not share Wilcox’s affirming view of pharma, even though it’s pharma that will seize credit for gaining control of and eventually ending AIDS. Just as pharma will eventually claim credit for resolving the opioid crisis it created, fostered and has so mightily profited from.

In fact, the present catastrophe that is the opioid crisis renders Kramer’s portrait of pharma a credibility that undermines TAP’s effectiveness as satire. There’s nothing Kramer cartoonizes about the ruthlessness of pharma, historically and today, that isn’t by now readily apparent to a much broader public than in the heyday of AIDS. Even so, the clarity and power with which Kramer points out that pharma is and always has been overwhelmingly about financial profit at the expense of everything else, including lives, sometimes large numbers of them, sometimes very large numbers of them (in the millions)— as in the AIDS, hepatitis C and opioid epidemics and the history of the making, buying and selling of knowingly contaminated blood products — is Kramer at his soulful, x-ray vision, brutality-of-fact best. For anyone open to an all-out indictment of pharma, TAP is your book.

Emblematic of the experience of pharma in AIDS in TAP is the role of “ZAP” (AZT). In TAP, this earliest of effective AIDS medications that had such serious, often fatal, toxicity, is endlessly indicted as poison. As depicted in TAP, its promotion was all about money combined with the absence of motivation to find something less toxic and more effective; it’s a viewpoint that has prevailed, even though the drug proved useful initially, later in combination with other drugs, and very effective in preventing maternal-fetal transmission of HIV. At every turn, the shining surfaces of pharmaceutical achievement are revealed to have a Baconesque underbelly.

Trump, Medicine, Health Care, Nazi Doctors and Mass Murder

Can anyone who knows what’s going on in America today with the skyrocketing cost of life-saving medications like insulin, asthma pumps, cancer treatments, the new treatments for hepatitis C and new generation antibiotics, among many or even most other medications, many of them now routinely advertised on television the way cars are, or who witnessed hedge-funder Martin Shkreli, “the most hated man in America” for his extortionist drug pricing, or who is witness to the ravages of the opioid crisis, have any doubt now about the validity of Kramer’s war on pharma?

Again, the biggest problems with TAP for today’s readers are that it is upended by reality and Kramer’s own track record of proving right. The tension of uncertainty is gone. Today, the worst of Kramer’s forebodings are front, center and in our faces. To assert that Reagan was Hitlerian could seem extreme. To assert that Trump (“Derek Dumster” in TAP) is Hitlerian a lot less so. The fascism with a friendly face — smiles and laughter— that Reagan perfected is no longer bothering with the friendly-funny-charm. In TAP 2, the press conferences of Reagan spokesperson Larry Speakes — which kept devolving into laughter at the sadistically homophobic expense of the gay men who were dying en masse from AIDS, which Reagan had yet to even mention— are quoted verbatim. Actual footage of that news conference is also a devastating highlight of Laurie Lynd’s film documentary, Patient Zero. Today, those who are transgender are instantly deligitimized by a stroke of Trump’s pen. Press conferences are dispatched with altogether.

While Kramer and ACT UP were presciently on target from day one about the Reagan administration, today’s fascism is without pretense. It’s right there, bludgeoning us incessantly, it’s sadism overt. In fact, the unfriendly fascism of Donald Trump and at least a dozen other authoritarians like him dominating the world stage can make Larry Kramer’s see-all, tell-all, spill-the-beans approach seem something you wouldn’t think possible: quaint. Would it surprise you to learn, as you do throughout TAP, that there’s an international gulag of concentration camps where undersirables and illegals, prominently including homosexuals, have been sent and continue to be sent for experimentation and liquidation? That new genocides of homosexuals and others are being planned as we speak?

“In Trump’s America, we doctors are silent and thereby complicit in mass-murder.”— Larry Mass

One of the most upsetting of Kramer’s accusations was that we were all “murderers” — more by omission, by silence, than commission. Our failure to act, to more actively resist, to fight, to fight a lot harder, was relentlessly declaimed by Kramer. This is again the case with TAP, with its extended excerpts from TNH. It’s Kramer’s intention and success that his plays are in sync with the fabric of TAP. Only in TAP the outrage about lost lives is on a much grander scale, with amplification of all the bullshit that went on and on and on and on — for 4 years! — as those claiming to be the co-discoverers of HIV battled for the titles and profits of blood tests that were already available. Kramer was consistently vociferous in his assessment that these delays, together with those of health care professionals like those who led CDC and NIH and lesser functionaries in failing to issue stronger prevention guidelines, were tantamount to mass murder.

Mass murder is an accusation Larry Kramer leveled at all of us, even the likes of his and our beloved Rodger McFarlane, the early legendary AIDS activist. But who can look at what’s going on now with immigrants, with Syria, with ongoing genocides like those in Myanmar, with the homeless, from gun violence, with Duterte’s death squads in the Philippines, with victims of natural catastrophes like Hurricane Maria, with people dying from being unable to afford essential medications for diabetes and asthma, with the tens of thousands whose lives are being destroyed by the opioid epidemic and by increasingly out of control health care costs (tens of thousands die annually from their inability to pay for health care), and not see the truth in this calling to account of all of us?

Clearly, silence does equal death. I’m still working as a physician in a system that’s neglecting large numbers of people who can’t afford basic health care and life-saving medications. American physicians are not organized and with almost no exceptions are not standing up to these crimes against humanity. Are we therefore not unlike the majority of doctors of the medical profession who by their silence facilitated what was happening in Nazi Germany?

However self-righteous and judgmental these indictments may initially ring, Larry does include himself. In TAP, he estimates the many gay men he may himself have infected before there was certainty of the cause of AIDS and testing for HIV.

Jews, Jewishness and Anti-Semitism

Another area where Kramer’s viewpoint has gained authority is around Jewishness. One of the things that so struck me about Kramer and his writing in the heyday of our friendship and coming together around AIDS was a distancing of himself from his own Jewishness and from anti-Semitism. Kramer’s big identity crisis and journey were around being gay. If there were issues around his being Jewish, they were far less traumatic and consequential, at least so far as Kramer seemed consciously aware. Kramer was never shamed and traumatized by his father and others for being Jewish the way he was for being gay. The minority identity crisis he experienced growing up was about being gay and being a sissy. While being gay was likewise a defining issue of my upbringing, the overt trauma I experienced growing up in the rural south was primarily about being Jewish.

Like Kramer, claiming my gay identity became my principal journey, until I discovered, after years of struggle to be self-acceptingly and openly gay, that I had hardly begun to scratch the surface of my Jewish identity and the realities of anti-Semitism, not only for history but for today. In myself I discovered reservoirs of internalized anti-Semitism. In fact, amidst the early unfolding of the AIDS epidemic, as described in my Confessions, an unprecedented experience of overt anti-Semitism on the eve of the AIDS epidemic became the touchstone of my own writing and activism.

In TAP Kramer is at pains to explore the connections between Nazism, racism and anti-Semitism in America, and to consider homophobia in the context of the fascist and eugenics movements in America and their counterparts and offspring in Germany and across the globe. These efforts and probings are among TAP’s richest rewards. Even with Kramer being an equal-opportunity satirist, however, when it comes to minorities and ethnicities, the special relish with which he skewers Jews and their pretensions can seem to betray a subtle disconnectedness, what he perhaps still sees as his own remove from anti-Semitism. Larry Kramer may be — to use the vernacular with which he is most comfortable — a “faggot” and he may be a “sissy,” and he may also be a morbidly preocccupied or even “ugly old Jew,” but at least he’s not one of those people, one of those fanatical religious or mizer types — “kikes,” a word Kramer does finally use, along with “niggers,” “spics,” “bitches” and of course “faggots,” in this cockeyedly democratic narrative vernacular in which everyone is put down or sent up coequally, or seems to be.

On this issue of Jews and anti-Semitism I’ve given Larry a hard time. Like so many gay Jewish intellectuals, artists, progressives and leftists, Kramer can seem smug in his disconnectedness from Israel and its concerns about genocidal anti-Semitism, especially as clouded today by ever-worsening settlements controversies, by the BDS movement and Netanyahu’s partnership with Trump. We gay people are the ones experiencing genocide now, Kramer endlessly proclaimed and what his Reports from the holocaust, with its intentionally lower-case h, intoned with what seemed little or relegated awareness of the recurrence of genocidal anti-Semitism, especially as we keep witnessing it today among Islamic extremists and white supremacists.

But the balance on this issue of Larry Kramer, Jews and anti-Semitism has shifted since the publication of my Larry Kramer anthology in the direction of giving Kramer’s perspectives more credibility. What Kramer kept expressing was what Tony Kushner was showing us in his portrayal of Roy Cohn in Angels in America (Cohn also features in TAP) — that Jews can be just as crazy and fucked up and malicious and dangerous as everybody else, regardless of anti-Semitism or maybe because of it, just as gay people are all those things, notwithstanding our in many ways comparable history of genocidal prejudice. That we’ve sometimes played decisive roles in our own fate, as Jews, as gay people, is no longer contestable. Who can look at Trump’s own fuhrer-obedient Kapo-in-Chief, Stephen Miller, currently coordinating the fate of oppressed, dispossessed, vulnerable peoples in America and globally, and think anything else?

Hollywood, From Bleak House to the White House

Yes, Kramer’s writing is still blistering. But the controversy that would always erupt around Kramer being more incendiary than credible is now much weaker. Now that Cassandra’s prophesies have come true, Kramer is no longer Cassandra, even if we still initially and reflexively appreciate him as such. Whatever the facts— like who had sex with who, the mechanics of their sex, the exact details of Larry’s alleged end-of-life reconciliations with the GMHC Board, which ACT UP or TAG members rejected him or didn’t, who said or did or didn’t say or do exactly what, when — they now seem so much less important, receding in interest alongside the brutal facts of the bigger picture. That Republicans can be like Nazis and include Nazis and white supremacists in their ranks and support is no longer as shocking at it seemed when Kramer first began suggesting this reality in the heyday of ACT UP, or even as recently as a year ago.

“There is no other writer in America, or the world, who is responsible for saving so many lives with his writing.” — Bill Goldstein

Facts do still matter, of course, and always will. Hopefully. And now that Larry’s greater credibility is incontrovertible, we want to know more of them, especially the bigger ones that remain hidden, including many uncovered in TAP. But why remains a good question. What will knowing knowing that America and the world have always been Nazioid tell us that we can’t already see?

It has been said by Bill Goldstein that Kramer’s writing may have saved more lives than any other writer. The appraisal that Kramer’s literary voice has been so salutary seems accurate and deserved. But it’s Kramer’s insistent theme that so many more lives could have been saved had we all done a lot more, a lot better, a lot faster. OK, we can now concede, but will his example inspire new generations, not only of gay people, but of Jews, of women and of oppressed and menaced people everywhere, to stand up for ourselves, to take back the night of our own lives? Alas, it’s in this sense that Kramer is most likely to remain Cassandra, his example marginalized and evaded until the worst is well underway.

As for the experience of TAP, while it may not be everyone’s idea of “fine writing,” it’s writing at its finest. As in Satyricon, Candide and Faggots, we are guided through worlds of adventure and encounter at once strange and familiar, fictional and fantastical, commencing in wonder and retreating in disillusionment.

In TAP, an early such encounter takes place when Fred/Ned revisits his experience with the worst disaster of his career in film: Lost Horizon (“Beyond The Mountains, Beyond the Stars” in TAP). What started out as an adaptation of Dickens’s Bleak House — about labyrinthine and endless legal battles en famille that reverberate to today’s worlds of Donald Trump, Roy Cohn and Rudy Giuliani — ended up being about Shangri La! In the course of this greatest of Fred Lemish’s misadventures, we are re-introduced to the film’s producer, “Rust Legend” (based on Ross Hunter) who we met in Faggots. In TAP, Fred’s entanglement with Hunter becomes a cockeyed introduction to the closeted worlds of Hollywood and inevitably of Rock Hudson and the Reagans.

This Bleak House background is a key to the crazy names that color TAP.

E.g., from Bleak House:

Mr. Tulkinghorn, Honoria, Lady Dedlock,
Conversation Kenge
Prince Turveydrop
Peepy Jellyby
Mrs. Snagsby
Mrs. Smallweed
Mrs. Guppy
Phil Squod
Watt Rouncewell
Mrs. Pardiggle
Arethusa Skimpole

from TAP:

Rust Legend
Purpura Ruester
Buster Punic
Mayor Kermit Goins
Drs. Oderstrasse and Maudilla Chanel-Bausch
Tolly Mcguire
Dr. Horace Vetch
Sister Grace Hooker
Bosco Dripper
Didier Lestrade
Adreena Schneeweiss

The Hollywood material peaks with Rust Legend in an extended monologue, explaining to naive young Freddy Lemish what’s really going on with gays in the industry, as it’s still unwittingly referred to. Among the allegations: Jack Warner was so rabidly homophobic he had James Dean killed for being a fag; that Jimmy Dean hated Jews as much as Warner hated homos; that mobsters like Meyer Lansky and Mickey Cohen got involved trying to save Warner; that Peter Ruester (Reagan) blabbed the names of commies and fairies at those UnAmerican Activities hearings; that George Cukor was fired from Gone With The Wind because Clark Gable didn’t want a fairy director.

In TAP, Fred/Ned is joined by a gaggle of other personages, many of them alter egos or nemeses— scientists, doctors, researchers, nurses, lab techs, politicians, spies, preachers, tycoons, tricks, community activists, writers, artists and lovers, many of them already familiar from Volume 1, from earlier Kramer works, and many of them caricatures who are all doing what Fred/Ned sees as his principal and highest calling — to give testimony to what he sees, what he’s been witness to. Like Candide, he wanders through this phantasmagorical world, pondering its oddities and suffering inevitable disillusionments, trying evermore against the odds to retain his soul. The biting satire that results of governments, religions, philosophies, individuals, events, locales and history conjures Voltaire in approach but with surpassing ambition.

In the midst of his romance-affairette-close friendship with Tommy Boatwright (Rodger McFarlane) from The Normal Heart, Fred falls in love with “David,” who was abused and tortured, having been kidnapped in affiliated American and German concentration camp gulags when he was still too young to have any inkling of what was going on. As they make love, Fred can feel the ridges of the scars on David’s back. Why this happened to him is a question both David and he would keep pondering. “Were all men like the ones I had to deal with in Mr. Hoover’s whorehouse?…All I see are versions of the same thing. Over and Over. The inability of fellow humans to deal decently with others as a fellow human.”

Along this journey, there are multiple stopovers and side trips, at historical phenomena like food handlers, toilet manufacturers, a history of shit; examples of the vast history (many of them imagined but based on historical indices) of the detention and punishments of homosexuals in concentration camps and prisons; histories of medicine, health care, hygiene and AIDS before it was identified as AIDS in Africa; histories of AIDS before it was identified as AIDS in Haiti in relation to Africa; a history of murderous and profiteering failures of sterilization and hygiene in blood products and treatments for hemophiliacs; a history of houses of prostitution and their relationships to leading political figures and crime.

Drug Addiction and Religion

Though addiction figures notably in TAP’s foreshadowing of the opioid crisis as exemplary of pharma run amok, there’s surprisingly little about drug addiction itself or addicts as a major AIDS risk population. Thanks largely to ACT UP’s early championing of needle exchanges, HIV risk and spread from needle use and drug addiction (mostly heroin) was nearly eliminated in New York City and other major epicenters of AIDS. Yet here we are now, post-AIDS, experiencing huge setbacks in the prevention of AIDS and hepatitis C because of pharma greed and irresponsibility, on top of the ignorance and bigotry of morality politicians like Mike Pence who as governor of Indiana initially refused to sanction needle exchanges, even as the opioid crisis in his state exploded.

The greater history of the relationship between drugs, addiction, profiteering and malfeasance begs for the treatment of Dr. Larry Kramer. (Yes, Kramer is now a real doctor, having been awarded an honorary degree by Yale!) Especially since a great majority of the drugs that were manufactured in this country for everything from “female troubles” to colds were bogus snake-oil products promoted by bogus snake-oil salesmen and the companies they worked for. Most were alcohol or morphine based, and knowledge of their addictive (“habit-forming”) potential long preceded any warnings of such.

Alas, addiction isn’t a paradigm that Kramer ever got very interested in exploring as such. Not so unlike Dr. Brookner’s prescription for gay men to “just stop” having sex, his prescription for sexual compulsivity — and by extension for other forms of addiction — can seem not so unlike Nancy Reagan’s approach of “Just say no.” The treatments for addiction that injection drug users need beyond needle exchanges — from detoxes and rehabs to opioid maintenance treatment (e.g., Methadone, Suboxone), 12-Step programs and outpatient therapy — were not waters Kramer ever waded very far into.

While the murderous diatribes of religions and religionists are sometimes quoted verbatim in TAP, some of the more notable spiritualists in the history of AIDS are not mentioned — .e.g, Louise Hay. In the earliest period of the epidemic, when spirituality seemed an alternative to the unavailability of treatment, Hay was a real community presence. Faith-healing, her outreach seemed to me. But Hay, who continued to work successfully with persons with AIDS until her death in 2017, was more in the tradition of motivation therapy and self-help than peddling false hope, even when her book titles, like You Can Heal Your Life, might seem to suggest otherwise.

Women, Sexism and ACT UP

Remember the (Playboy?) cartoons of Martians contemplating the significance of this or that earthling behavior, symbol or belief? That’s the way Fred and his cohorts are in looking at phenomena like “Sexology” (based on Playboy), the sex periodical founded by “Mordy Masturbov” (How would Hugh Heffner like to be thought of by posterity as Jewish?) that went very far and very profitably in normalizing predatory male sexual behavior. The same sense of amazement overtakes encounters with anything and everything sexual, especially involving women — from the manufacture of brassieres to the horrors of back-room abortions and the realities and treacheries of prostitutes and prostitution, with their high rates of involvement in blackmail and murder, entangled with top government agencies like the FBI and officials like J. Edgar Hoover and their boys like Roy Cohn.

All of these mosaic pieces find their places in the three great puzzles that are the abiding preouccupation of TAP: the histories of the American people, gay people and the “underlying condition” (UC) — what became AIDS. Squeamishness, ignorance and bullying around the sexuality of women is everywhere apparent and assumes its inevitable place in the ignoring of women along with persons of color in the early period of the epidemic. This relegation of women by science and medicine is a notable study of TAP, alongside coruscating looks at our leading medical and scientific research institutes and their figureheads. Women have been marginalized and demeaned together with blacks, gays, Haitians, hemophiliacs, anuses, vaginas, STD’s, the elderly, children and other categories of interest and relevance because of biases in science that reflected social mores and taboos, most of them masculinist or religionist, invariably both.

Women were so pejoratively excluded from consideration that CDC and other leading medical and research organizations initially refused to acknowledge that they were even at risk. A lot of pioneering work on addressing gender barriers and discrimination in health care access and research was done by ACT UP under the leadership of women. In TAP Kramer is clearly and rightly proud of Sarah Schulman, whose contributions to AIDS I’ve elsewhere described as “legion and priceless,” Maxine Wolfe, whose star shines as brightly in TAP and otherwise as any activist in the firmament, and Ann Northrop, whose formidable presence is still so strongly felt via Gay Cable News.

Eventually, though not reprised in TAP, Mary Fisher, who was not affiliated with ACT UP, made a startling appearance at the Republican National Convention, coming out as a person — and woman — with AIDS. It was one of those moments, like Rock Hudson’s acknowledgment of having AIDS, that greatly influenced broader public perceptions.

The sadistic relish and pride with which Fred/Ned and his TAP colleagues and friends expose the foolishness and failures around AIDS and the pride with which TAP celebrates the triumphs of ACT UP and activism will come as no surprise. Yet the writing is endlessly fresh, even for people and events we think we already know. There isn’t a sentence that seems rote, that doesn’t breathe life and fire.

In TAP, as in Satyricon, Candide and Animal Farm, the brutal realities underneath various preposterous situations can require some teasing out, in TAP doubtless a lot more because of the relegation of gay history. Because of this paucity of verifiable gay history, however, everything in TAP must be mined for accuracy. Obviously the fictional names Kramer uses — .e.g., Drs. “Omicidio” and “Dodo” — weren’t the real names of Anthony Fauci and Robert Gallo, but less obviously everyone else. In some cases, especially of heroic figures, Kramer uses real names — e.g., Maxine Wolfe, Sarah Schulman, Laurie Garrett, Michelangelo Signorile, Jim Eigo. With other figures, likewise heroic — e.g., Linda Laubenstein, Rodger McFarlane, Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, Ann Northrop, Spencer Cox, the names are fictionalized. Decisions about names often seem more situational or capricious than methodical. Many details may differ from reality, but often not by much.

In Animal Farm, some of the characters — pigs and humans — are modeled specifically on historical figures. In some cases, characters are composites — e.g., one of the pigs, Snowball, combines elements of Trotsky and Lenin. The same is true of TAP. The character based on me, Mickey Marcus, is also a composite — of me and of Larry McDevitt, an early GMHC volunteer who worked for the city.

In contrast to what’s said in TAP, I never slept with Larry. We were friends and the chemistry wasn’t there. But there was a moment when I wished it had been. That conscious thought occurred to me as I took notice of the physical resemblance between Larry, so handsome in his prime in an ACT UP period photo, and sexy Mark Ruffalo, who plays Ned in the HBO film of TNH. It was a juxtaposition that took place with Ruffalo speaking live onscreen in a special tribute to Larry when GMHC bestowed its first Larry Kramer Activism Award to Kramer himself in 2015.

Barbra Streisand, Judy Peabody, Vito Russo, Mathilde Krim, Elizabeth Taylor

Whatever the other facts of Barbra Streisand’s years of inaction on Kramer’s scripts for TNH, Kramer’s sense was that “Adeena Schneeweiss” — spoofing the German background of Dr. Brookner in TNH, a role Streisand wanted to enlarge at the expense of Ned and the epidemic — was indeed the self-absorbed figure of legend, an assessment that feels in sync with Kramer’s undressing of her as squeamish about appearing in a film that would feature explicit gay sex, even as he admits to being one of the gay boys who sings her in the shower. Darker suspicions linger. At some level, and notwithstanding her legions of gay fans and the gayness of her own son, did TNH strike her as representing phenomena she needed to maintain distance from culturally or politically?

Squeamishness about gay sex is also an accusation leveled at “Montserrat Krank” (Mathilde Krim) who worried that sexual explicitness would alienate wealthy donors and whose decision to partner up with Elizabeth Taylor made her medical director (Joe Sonnabend) so uneasy he distanced himself from their organization (AMFAR). Krank, who was not Jewish but who was married to a leading Hollywood producer, had always impressed Larry for her involvement in the Irgun, the Israeli guerilla-militia that served as a sometime model for Kramer’s visions of gay insurgencies. Fortunately, ACT UP was more scrupulous than Larry about the priority of maintaining boundaries of non-violence.

Krim is valorized in TAP, but comes under fire, like others, for not more directly importuning leading politicians she had social access to — e.g., the Reagans. But after dressing her down on several fronts regarding early decisions about outreach, TAP credits her, alone among early AIDS organization leaders, with stating clearly and emphatically that “this is a historic plague that need not have happened. It could and should have been prevented.”

Meanwhile, squeamishness about gay sex was an accusation that was often leveled at Larry, who in TAP is disarmingly at ease acknowledging his own attractions, inclinations and adventures. So while he was himself still calling out gay men for being sex-besotted, he has no problem admitting the lust, mixed with bursting pride, he felt for the hordes of sexy gay men — the hottest in New York and around the world — who flocked to ACT UP. Of course, the bigger truth here, which can sometimes be hard to glean, is that Larry, for all his alleged moralizing, ostensible erotophobia and toughness on promiscuity, never actually excluded himself from this critique, just as he never excluded himself from the accusations of murder (second degree or felony or by neglect) he was constantly leveling at everyone else.

TAP features many portraitettes. There must be a hundred of them, usually lasting only a few paragraphs or pages, sometimes with brief reappearances. Among the most arresting of these is of “Perdita,” based on Judy Peabody, the glamorous bejewelled society lady who pioneered the GMHC buddy system. At one point in that early period of his greatest anger and confrontations with GMHC, Kramer publicly called her out, among other people of rank and influence, for an imputed aloofness he saw as all too typical of GMHC’s greater investment, as he would endlessly, bullyingly and shamingly characterize it, in “helping people die rather than live.” That was Kramer at his most brutally truthful and confrontational.

In TAP he does thoughtfully and respectfully credit Judy Peabody’s considerable achievements in developing GMHC’s buddy system. At key moments in this description, however, he hones in on his failure to connect with her more personally as emblematic of the whole problem with all of us at GMHC and as well with himself in his failure to arouse the levels of anger and activism that were needed. Yes, Judy Peabody was an angel of mercy, he concedes, but as such she came to be perceived by those dying of AIDS as “the angel of death.” A visit from her meant it was the end and everybody knew it.

In some of his more patient and careful writing, Kramer goes on to explain that he tried to more personally confront some of these society people, specifically Perdita and a figure based on Joan Tisch, to urge them to intercede through their connections — access to Nancy Reagan — to influence the White House to act more decisively and humanely, to break its silence and inaction.

Even acknowledging how ferocious, insulting and off-putting his anger could be in frightening people off, which Kramer is honest about here, the fact that these alleged entreaties were not responded to lends credibility to his perspective that his falling out with GMHC had more to do with our failure to rise to the occasion of the much greater level of activism that was needed than with his problems as a communicator and trusted leader, or with GMHC being primarily an information and service organization. That “we” were all responsible for this failure stung deeply, as it did at the memorial service for Vito Russo, when Kramer began his testimony with “We killed Vito.”

Judy Peabody was a heroic figure whose achievements will continue to be celebrated. And her genuine friendship with Vito Russo, which my Arnie, who was Vito’s closest friend, and I were witness to gives at least indirect testimony to her support for greater activism. She and Vito spoke often and casually as friends, sometimes late at night. Mostly because of her friendship with Vito, I met her periodically. I always thanked her for her service, but was never able to get any further in genuinely, personally connecting with her. Though I wanted more, cool greetings in passing were my only exchanges with Judy Peabody.

Of course, genuine friendship is precious and must be nurtured. Vito had it with Judy, with Larry, with Arnie and me, and with virtually every one he ever met, even with his enemies or those designated as such, notwithstanding Larry’s telling Michael Schiavi (author of the biography of Vito, Celluloid Activist): “[Vito] was furious at other gay people just like I was, no question. He was just more beloved than I am and was probably able to say it with an ability of not making other people as angry as I do.”

I still well up when I remember Vito’s final days, me sitting next to him on his hospital bed massaging his legs covered with KS and other lesions. When I tried to apologize for not being a more successful warrior on the front lines, he looked me in the eye through all his pain and said, “I love ya, Lar.” Clearly, this ability to love and be loved came less easily for Larry, who everybody respected and revered and inevitably loved but whose judgment, censure and retaliation we were also afraid of.

Would Judy have tried to intercede with Nancy Reagan had Vito asked her? Would Vito, who always respected people’s boundaries, have ever asked her in the first place? Who knows, but because of the genuineness and reliability of their friendship, Judy probably would have at least answered Vito.

Meanwhile, David France is on target in his history of AIDS in noting my dismay at never having been consulted by Larry, who I had thought of as my friend, regarding his depiction of me in TNH. All’s fair in love, war and writing, I guess. Even so, and even if my tacitly siding with GMHC’s leadership (I had already resigned from the Board in the wake of my hospitalization for a major depressive episode) in separating itself from Larry gave him the right to say whatever it is he felt he had to say, my own experience of the fraying of what had seemed our genuine and abiding friendship seems a window on these issues of friendship and trust. Judy had never had any relationship with Larry, and based on his constant fulminating against GMHC and everything it stood for, and explicitly including her (“a hoity toity rich bitch”), communicating with him was something she could not have been expected to trust.

It’s to Larry’s credit that he understood and articulated this difference between himself and Vito, who everybody so adored and respected but who nobody was afraid of. “I forgive no one,” reads the final of 16 epigraphs that introduce Volume 1 of TAP; not his own father, and certainly not the Reagans or Koch or Anthony Fauci, but not a lot of the rest of us either. Even Elizabeth Taylor, who I witnessed at an AMFAR benefit giving Kramer a special award and who spoke without notes from her heart about all he’d done and about the urgency of AIDS and whose own contributions had been so brave and invaluable. I was sitting at Larry’s table at the Governors Island event with Rodger McFarlane, Larry’s brother Arthur and Kramer’s old friend and fellow writer Calvin Trillin.

Yes, even E.T. is called out in TAP. Why didn’t she, with all her star connections, do more? We all know how much E.T. did. Following such moments of reminder of Kramer’s relentlessness, of what “a difficult man,” he could be, as the New York Times (the New York Truth in TAP) put it, it’s heartening to read the passages in TAP that are filled with loving and grateful recognition of the many heros of ACT UP, like Maxine Wolfe and Jim Eigo, and even of some in government (before they were relieved of their duties) like pseudonymed C. Everett Koop, whose courage in speaking truth to power as a ranking government official was singular.

Other notable portraitettes include GMHC cofounder Nathan Fain and his harrowing final days back home in rural Texas, about which there has continued to be some dispute, as there continues to be regarding the AIDS deathbed exchanges between Larry and “Bruce Niles” (GMHC’s first president Paul Popham). But there’s no portraitette of our mutual friend Craig R,, who chose to die from AIDS at home, wearing the retro earrings and necklace I bought him at a thrift shop to help him fulfill his wish to spend his last days in drag as “Harriet Craig,” the Joan Crawford 50’s housewife camp classic and our affectionate nickname for him. Dearly departed “Craiglach.” Among those closest to Craig was an ex-boyfriend, John, heir to one of the nation’s richest dynasties. A Henry Wilcox type, he was concerned and caring about Craig but aligned with politics inimical to us.

Dr. Anthony Fauci and Rodger McFarlane

Though “Dodo,” based on HIV “co-discoverer” Robert Gallo, isn’t far behind in Kramer’s contest for Villain-in-Chief, the most expansive of these Baconesque portraitettes is of “Jerry Omicidio,” based on Anthony Fauci, head of “NITS” in TAP. Throughout TAP Omicidio is called out for inaction and ineptitude. In view of his levels of at least titular responsibility, he is seen as a principal perpetrator of the holocaust of AIDS; he is seen as Ruester’s accomplice in mass murder.

TAP is implacable in its indictments of do-nothing institutes, divisions and individuals. Fancy-titled head of this or that exalted-sounding department are continually revealed or declaimed to be just that, titular, bureaucratic and empty, accomplishing nothing — whether it be Fauci, Gallo, the NIH, CDC, GMHC or any other organization or person. The image of Omicidio as someone who wasted so much time and so many opportunities and resources for organizing, for leadership, is devastating and infuriating, even as questions of how fair this caricature is do keep intruding.

Towards the book’s conclusion, when a sexual portrait of Jerry emerges, like those ascribed to the Reagans, it’s success is questionable, the way the caricatures of Ron Jr. and Ed [Koch] were in Just Say No. Even with the failure of that play acknowledged by Kramer, he can’t help expressing himself with these metaphors. Here, as TAP finally reaches for closure — which we know can never be real closure because the book had to be so edited down (there are 2000 more pages in Kramer’s archives)— Jerry is revealed to be a repressed homosexual necrophiliac who gets off on ejaculating onto the corpses of the young gay men who perish under his lack of care.

These intimate details are related in a letter to Fred from Jerry’s wife. Again, as with a painting by Francis Bacon, or an imagined episode with any of the Reagans or of Koch getting blowjobs under his desk from the ex-lover he’s threatened to murder, what is clearly over-the-top caricature leaves you with questions you would never think to ask. In the case of Jerry, what was the psyche of this straight-laced man whose sexy wiry hairy Mediterranean body could be discerned at the edges of his shirt collars and cuffs? What were the Mayor’s kinks? If we do succeed in imagining these publicly entrusted figures as sexual beings, what might that sexuality have encompassed, metaphorically as well as literally? And what might that suggest about the lives they led and didn’t lead, even if we should know better that sexual fantasies, even the kinkiest, don’t necessarily correlate with goodness or badness?

The most moving of the book’s portraits is more tacit than explicit. Rodger McFarlane (Tommy) was Larry’s best friend, ex-lover and one of the great heros of the AIDS epidemic. His death from suicide was felt by everyone as shocking, out of the blue, tragic and one of our great losses. No circumstances — e.g., back troubles, depression, debt, losing Kramer to David — are known that can account for it. Following Kramer’s example of select, warm, measured, loving reminiscences of this unflaggingly humane and heroic character’s charisma, courage, generosity of spirit and accomplishments, there are finally no words adequate to our grief, for the love we all felt for this wonderful man.

Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, Charles Ortleb and AIDS Denialism

Another vivid portraitette that emerges in TAP is of “Rebby Isenfelder,” based on Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, whose struggles to expedite treatment for opportunistic infections and co-founding of AMFAR and other organizations were pinnacles of early activist efforts. But in TAP, Rebby — and with him his patients and fellow activists Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz — are also given a free pass on their role in what is still, even in TAP, the big unwritten chapter on AIDS, the chapter no one, including Kramer, wants to spend much time looking back at or talk about: HIV denialism, which was the source of the biggest mass casualty catastrophe in the history of the AIDS epidemic.

In the early 2000's, a third of a million people died in South Africa, all of them preventable deaths, when South African President Thabo Mbeki, an AIDS denialist, blocked access to treatments of proven efficacy. AIDS denialism can be most succinctly described as the belief that, as Sonnabend initially characterized it but in contrast to the early viewpoint attributed to Rebby in TAP, there was no single “killer virus” responsible for an epidemic that seemed far more likely — to Sonnabend initially if never to Kramer — to be due to immune overload from multiple infections, poor nutrition and drug use.

Kramer does acknowledge denialism, which ACT UP was notably successful in derailing within its own ranks, and does note his own later confrontations with Rebby and chief denialism enabler “Orvid Guptl,” based on New York Native (The New York Prick in TAP) editor Chuck Ortleb. “He has blood on his hands,” Larry said to me of the deterioration of the Native. The origins of the germ warfare theory that originally seemed so plausible to Ortleb and the rest of us have now been traced to Russian disinformation efforts. But the origins of denialism, however eventually disclaimed by Sonnabend, Callen and Berkowtiz, and the role it played in fueling fanaticism, cultism and the worst single swath of mass-casualties in the history of the epidemic are evaded in TAP, just as they are in David France’s history of AIDS. Why seems a question worth asking.

In fairness to Larry, who even in a 2000 page book couldn’t possibly acknowledge everybody who contributed or didn’t and everything that happened or didn’t, here is the statement that begins his page of Acknowledgments, placed to follow the book’s conclusion:

“This has been my history of the plague I lived through, a brutality few ever dreamed of. I do not pretend to have given an inclusive picture. There is no one who could give an all-embracing recital. I hope this book will encourage others to add their own experiences and histories so that the world will never forget.”

If my own commentary here has seemed expansive and discursive, I do believe it to be in the spirit of Kramer’s invitation to all of us to add our own experiences and histories.

From Hamilton’s “Black and White Law” to Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Tribunals

Traversing the final passages of the epic saga and journey of TAP, the reader would anticipate the tying up of loose ends, statements of gravitas about what has happened and portentousness for the future. The payoff turns out to be much bigger.

In TAP, Fred/Ned is living out the rest of his post-liver-transpant and post- FUQU (ACT UP) days with David, his beloved, who is an attorney (“David” being a composite). The liver transplant was expedited by Jerry Omicidio! Between the lines of blaming TAG renegades in collusion with Montserrat Krank, GMPC and others, the demise of FUQU seems attributable to multiple factors, some of them ineffable. Whatever the variables, the Cassandrian fallout predicted in TAP now seems unassailable: there won’t be enough FUQU left to protest when problems arise in the future. Though a reduced ACT UP is still out there and has intermittently continued to mount brave and effective protests — e.g., of the extortionist pricing of curative medications for hep C — it’s easy to see that today’s challenges could become as great as those faced by ACT UP in its heyday.

It’s David who has those ridges of scars on his back, having been tortured as a child in Nazi concentration camps in hideous medical experiments to see how much pain could be endured and to test new drugs. These experiments, fiendish developments of pharma, would eventuate in drugs like the highly addictive amphetamine and opioid derivatives that were used by Hitler and his troops to sustain conscienceless violence, and to keep legions of contemporary gay men enslaved to conscienceless sex.

David, inspired by his journey with Fred, has been devoting most of his later-life time and energies to exploring the history of war crimes tribunals and archives. What he discovers is that these initiatives are altogether new. They didn’t really get going until 2002. Like the United Nations, they are primitive, needy and faltering. The obstacles they face are overwhelming, but their having originated in the first place, it’s suggested between the lines, could be as important for the future as the origins of democracy were in Greece (my analogy, not TAP’s), a development for all time. It’s an epic statement of hope, even as the unofficial group of chapterettes that make up the conclusion of TAP begin with warnings about hope, which in Kramer’s experience has usually been a euphemism for evasion of justified blame, responsibility and justice.

Hope for the future was not how to deal Nazi war criminals. According to TAP, “many” went unprosecuted. This is not the only time that what we thought of as Kramer’s hyperbole turned out to be understatement. Just as the plague Kramer predicted eventually affected tens of millions more than even he imagined initially, it’s not “many” but the overwhelming majority of Nazis who went unprosecuted. War crimes, or crimes against humanity, have only been designated as such in our time. They have only one precedent: the Nuremberg trials, which succeeded in prosecuting only a tiny fraction of Nazi war criminals.

Could those political and health care leaders who Kramer is unwavering in seeing as responsible for allowing the epidemic to become one of the greatest in recorded history (TAP’s conclusion includes a formal listing of the fictional names of those alleged to be principal miscreants), still be called to account for their crimes of neglect, their crimes against humanity, their war crimes? Even as TAP is otherwise so eloquent in giving testimony to the complexity of the origins of the AIDS epidemic (a subject amplified in Patient Zero)?

In tandem with David’s explorations of war crimes trials is his discovery of Alexander Hamilton’s “Black and White Act,” which is alleged to be a consistently overlooked law still on the books that gives any individual or class the right to challenge inhumane social or political actions. It’s this approach to intervening in the future of human rights catastrophes, like the allegedly preventable and containable epidemic of AIDS — as crimes of neglect, hate and genocide — that sees TAP conclude on high notes of love and hope. Yes, hope, which Kramer warned against. Not pie-in-the-sky hope, but hope with empowerment and justice. This is the blockbuster conclusion of TAP.

One of the Greatest Stories Ever Told

In the end, alas, however powerfully these volumes render historical figures, events, atmospheres and meanings, they cannot be regarded as reliably accurate or comprehensive sources. This is the price Kramer must pay, like so many other writers of satirical and historical fiction — like Orwell in Animal Farm and Voltaire in Candide, like Tolstoy in War and Peace and Margaret Mitchell in Gone With The Wind, and writers of legend, like Virgil in The Aeneid. As with Animal Farm and the others, eventually who certain characters represent or are supposed to represent in TAP will be mapped out, if not directly by Kramer himself, who may already have done so, then by others. You’ll be able to look it up online.

But the result is well worth the price. While Larry Kramer may have forfeited his place as an always credible historian, he has recreated the history of AIDS and gay people with incomparable art, truthfulness, detail, perspective, authority, imagination, vision and sweep. In doing so, he has drawn the attention of the world to three of history’s biggest stories — those of gay people and the AIDS epidemic, and with them the American people. In each case he has been on the mark like no one else and with a voice compelling enough not only to capture but to re-create history and direct the future. Thanks to Kramer’s lead and so long as history retains any credibility, it must henceforth include gay people together with the other of Lady Liberty’s “wretched refuse of America’s teeming shores.” In neither the American Civil War nor in either World War were the casualties or the stakes higher than in the history of AIDS and the American People.

With Kramer at the peak of his powers, The American People can take its hard-earned, rightful and secure place among other classics of history, fiction, satire and legend. By any measure, it’s one of the greatest stories ever told.

Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., is a co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and was the first to write about AIDS in the press. He is the author/editor of We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer, and is completing On The Future of Wagnerism, the sequel to his memoir, Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite: Being Gay and Jewish in America.