Larry Kramer's Faggots Analysis

It’s the middle of the 80s AIDS crisis and an activist named Larry Kramer is one of the most influential people of the movement. He is a Jewish gay writer born in Connecticut in 1935. His breakout novel was his book “Faggots,” a critique on the lifestyle of gay men in the 70s. When the AIDS virus hits the US he finds another calling in activism. He forms the groups Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP. Throughout his controversial life he’s found many enemies, though.
Larry was always a critic on gay men and their culture, and this was apparent in his novel “Faggots.” It gained much controversy. A gay playwright, Robert Chesley said “Read anything by Kramer closely, and I think you’ll find the subtext is always: The wages of gay sin are death.” (Larry Kramer in Love and Anger. Dir. Jean Carlomusto, 2015. Film.*) “This novel seemed to me… to be an act of self hatred that was smearing all of us.” spoke the gay activist Arnie Kantrowitz. (*). When Kramer later went into activism, Arnie was upset, “ When we were out in the streets, the gay militants, he was laughing at us… thinking we were just trash.” (*). In an interview with Peter Staley, a fellow AIDS activist, Staley critiqued Kramer’s modern activism, “I do worry that he’s stuck on a very kind of 1992 message around AIDS, and I worry how that’s going to resonate with …show more content…
Writer Will Schwalbe recalls, “Larry crystallized the rage that so many people were coming to feel about an absolute lack of response by the government.” Maxine Wolfe, a fellow activist, also noted “A lot of the younger people just looked up to him because he was just so adamant about what we had to do.” People definitely recognized Larry as a father figure for the movement. He created the most prominent AIDS activist group ever, ACT UP, as well as the GMHC. “A certain generation of gay men have reason to believe that Larry saved their lives,” said fellow Yale classmate, Calvin