HBO’s LGBT History: Larry Kramer in Love and Anger (2015)
Wednesday, April 13, 2016 at 12:30PM Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.
Last week we looked at the recent doc Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures which works as a nice primer on the famed photographer and, as is par for the course for films on gay icons from a certain era, as a portrait of a man working tirelessly to make the most of his ever winnowing time: Mapplethorpe died at age 42 of AIDS complications. We’re not going too far afield this week, as we’re focusing on a documentary on “America’s angriest AIDS activist” in Jean Carlomusto’s Larry Kramer in Love and Anger.
Kramer should be familiar to you. We’ve previously encountered him and talked about his righteous anger when we talked about The Normal Heart, and by that point he had already made HBO appearances in The Out List, Vito, and Outrage. That enough should be a reminder that there’s no way of talking about American gay rights activism of the last three decades without talking about Larry Kramer. Carlomusto’s film expediently moves through Kramer’s biography; from his time at Columbia Pictures, to Women in Love and Faggots, through the Gay Men’s Health Crisis group and The Normal Heart to ACT UP and his latest health scares and marriage...
As is usual the case with documentaries that tackle the AIDS crisis, the most gripping moments come courtesy of the archival footage (the GMHC volunteers working the phones, ACT UP members scattering ashes at the White House, Kramer on any number of talk shows raging against the Reagan-machine). As a portrait of the cantankerous Kramer, it’s exhaustive if rather by-the-numbers. While the film hints at issues that have made the writer both an icon and a pariah of the community he’s always hoped to shape and serve, one is left feeling that there is more to unpack here. Then again, any film that begins on a hospital bed with a frail subject almost begets the hagiographic portrait that follows.
“How can they value life so little and cocks and asses so much?”
That’s Kramer in his famous “1,112 And Counting” article, wondering aloud how it is that the gay male community could so nonchalantly rebuke his own warnings against promiscuity.
“Why is our culture entirely based on our cocks?”
And that’s him in Carlomusto’s film talking about contemporary gay culture. The doc cuts immediately to a scene from the Ryan Murphy adaptation of Kramer’s film wherein Ned Weeks (Ruffalo playing Kramer’s alter-ego) rallies against what he sees as a gay community that continues to be sidelined by history. “Did you know that it was an openly gay Englishman who's responsible for winning World War II?” he yells. Kramer’s concern with what it is that passes as “gay culture” can be traced back to Faggots which tried to frame a romantic(ized) notion of gay coupledom that seemed both old-fashioned and reactionary when set against the backdrop of 1970s hedonism.
Kramer’s calls for a culture that isn’t (solely) focused on “cocks and asses” seems urgent in the way that it asks us to be explored as a community that can produce people a diverse group of people who may not see in sex the only way to explore their SEXuality. Then again, he also asks for gay people to find the courage to define themselves first and foremost as gay people. That he seems to be pushing in two different directions (embrace your sexuality! don’t let sex define you!) is part of what makes him such a fascinating figure. His call for broadening what the gay community stands for sounds eerily like a veiled demand for respectability politics, especially since it’s so often laced with prudishness about promiscuity. In many ways, the very plague that proved Faggots prophetic (all them fags are fucking themselves into oblivion, missing out on the joys of long term monogamy) have enshrined the writer’s own prejudices. Who can blame him?
And yet…
We’re told at the end of Carlomusto’s film that Kramer is working on The American People, a project that hopes to shed light on gay American history (“I don’t think you can be a people until you have a history”) and what are we offered on screen? Beautiful and touching vintage images of same-sex couples. There’s no denying the impact Kramer has had on gay rights activism but his prizing homonormative notions of gayness is, in common internet parlance, problematic.
I don’t have anything particularly enlightening to say about it perhaps because it’s something that I struggle with in my own life; must one rebuke the queer impulses of sexual abandon and non-normative relationships that gay people have crafted for themselves in order to validate a culturally accepted historical narrative? The answer was simple when faced with the onslaught of death during the AIDS crisis (though, as we know, Kramer was contemptuous of all of this way before), and it’s been complicated lately not only by new drugs (hello PrEP!) but also by attendant renewed sense of sexual liberation they’ve brought on. There’s more to gay people than sex, but there’s also more to gay sex than people like Kramer would have you believe.
Fun Awards Fact: We should take the chance here to remember that Kramer was nominated for an Academy Award for Women in Love, a film which won Glenda Jackson her first Oscar, and, perhaps more famously, features that naked and very homoerotic wrestling scene (“Was it too much for you?”) between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates.
Next week: We take a trip to Westeros, a place I have to admit I’m not too familiar with, to talk about one of the letters of the LGBTQA* acronym that we haven’t yet encountered: asexuals.
Reader Comments (4)
Larry Kramer is a figure in the gay community that I am always fascinated with, but endlessly frustrated with. Yes there is more to gay people then sex, but we shouldn't shy away from that part of us.
Calling Kramer 'problematic' is quite an understatement. He thankfully came around to the use of PrEP last year (after calling those who used it cowardly just the year before) and his gay history of America is, at best, fiction.
His impact on AIDS and queer activism is undeniable, but he has maintained a bizarrely narrow view of relationships and sex that seems almost self-loathing. He's a person of much privilege and wealth, which I think has maintained a bubble around him.
I have the out most respect for Larry Kramer even with all his contradictions.
So much respect for Kramer, but I'm not sure I needed this movie. It covers ground already well travelled and doesn't engage with some of his pricklier opinions and, well, there's really no hope that happening when you see him frail and sick in a hospital bed in the opening scenes (scenes that, including his bed-side wedding, are emotional and yet are, I felt, a bad narrative device.)