Larry Kramer Quotes
-
Activism is very seductive, and writing is painful and hard. It's very scary to have a death threat living over your head. Activism is very sustaining. But I don't view myself as a political person. I'm just someone who desperately wants to stay alive.
→ -
I do not think the gay population has been all that rabid for gay marriage. Note that I do not use the words 'gay community.' Expunge that expression from your vocabulary. We are not a community.
→ -
This is always history's greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.
→ -
I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don't like that feeling.
→ -
It’s so wonderful being a gay person. I said that before. I’m going to say it again. I love being gay. And I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. And I think we’re more tuned in to what’s happening, tuned into the moment, tuned into our emotions, and other people’s emotions, and we’re better friends. I really do think all of these things. And I try not to forget them.
→ -
The most important fact is that gays have been here since day one. To say otherwise is a gross denial and stupidity. We played an enormous part in the history of America.
→ -
I was at Yale from 1953 to 1957, and I tried to commit suicide in my freshman year because I was gay, and I thought I was the only person in the school who was. I was just totally and utterly miserable.
→ -
By nature, Im an optimistic person. No one believes it, but I am.
→ -
You'd think one day we'd learn. You don't get anything unless you fight for it, united and with visible numbers. If ACT UP taught us anything, it taught us that.
→ -
Mr. Do-Nothing Obama will say today, 'Lets think of all the poor dead people' - or 'let's honor all the dead' instead of fighting for the living. He has been really useless in terms of both HIV and gay issues. He is simply not a leader. He may be president, but he is not a leader.
→ -
You do not get more with honey than with vinegar!
→ -
Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I’m telling my story as a political document.
→ -
I now realize that I am a gay man before anything else. Other gays may think they're a Jew first, or black, or a banker, but I'm gay.
→ -
I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do. I think we're smarter and more talented and more aware. I do, I totally do. I really do think all of these things. And I try very hard to remember all this.
→ -
We have to think bigger as writers. We have to try and change the world.
→ -
Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.
→ -
Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn't take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn't exist. I don't even think the word 'gay' was in existence.
→ -
I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people would have gotten sick.
→ -
The media in America is not covering American AIDS very much. They're covering African AIDS as if somehow miraculously it's all stopped here. Well, it hasn't, and the one thing they're not saying about Africa is that all those people are going to die; there's no way these people can be saved - none.
→ -
Too many people hate the people that AIDS most affects: gay people and people of color. I do not mean dislike, or feel uncomfortable with. I mean hate. Downright hate. Down and dirty hate.
→ -
Some reporter called me 'the angriest gay man in the world' or some such. Well, it stuck, but I realized it was very useful.
→ -
The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there--all throughhistory we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organise ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed.
→ -
AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.
→ -
I don't mind about the dead ones. They're dead. The worst of it is, they cling to the living and won't let go.
→ -
The point about L-O-V-E is that we hate the word. Because we vulgarize it. It should be taboo, forbidden from utterance for many years, till we've found a new and a better idea.
→ -
Being gay is a natural normal beautiful variation on being human. Period. End of subject. Therefore, any argument which says differently is an immoral supremacist one. Call it out as such. ... Be outraged, offended, angry and intolerant of any discussion or any one who describes you as unequal, undeserving or unnatural for being just as you are.
→ -
I forgot that San Francisco is not an angry city like New York. Gays have gotten what they wanted there over the years, unlike New York, where we had to fight for everything.
→ -
Saying someone is gay who is gay no longer constitutes defamation or slander or libel. You cannot defame someone by telling the truth.
→ -
AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.
→ -
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were gay, just for starters. They didn't have a name for it, but their primary affections and intellectual attractions were all for other men.
→