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拉裡·克萊默（Larry Kramer）是一名美國編劇、作家和LGBT權益活動家。他曾因《戀愛中的女人》獲奧斯卡最佳劇本提名。他親身經歷目睹了1980年代的愛滋危機並成為了一名重要的政治活動家。1985年，他創作了戲劇《平常的心》。他創立了 Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC)和AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)。1988年，他確診為HIV陽性。2013年，他與伴侶David Webster結婚。他們曾經在1970年代交往，在對方離開他後極度抑鬱的他創作了小說《Faggots》。他們在1991年複合並交往至今。當被記者問起他們20年後的重聚時，David Webster回答，「他成長了，我也成長了。」
In some versions of the greek myth, Cassandra promises Apollo that she』ll sleep with him if he blesses her with the gift of foresight. When he does, she takes back her vow, allowing him only a kiss. So he spits into her mouth a curse: She』ll be doomed forever to see the future, but no one will listen to her prophecies. And as the world plunges into ruin around her, she』ll be powerless to prevent them from coming true.
If the writer and AIDS activist Larry Kramer, who died on May 27, is to live on in myth as a modern-day Cassandra, the record must be corrected. When the AIDS crisis began to devastate gay New York in the early 』80s, Kramer was still notorious among the Apollos of Fire Island for his profane, bitter riot of a novel Faggots, published in 1978. Kramer tended to write versions of himself into his work; his avatar in that book was the protagonist, Fred, who strives against the tide of sexual liberation for a committed relationship with a man named Dinky.
For many in the gay community, which was newly empowered after the Stonewall riots to develop its own models of what relationships could be, Faggots read as a self-hating screed. Then, as AIDS started to spread, Kramer’s insistence that bathhouses be closed and sexual intercourse be subject to precautions seemed to many like more of his paranoid, anti-sex ranting. It was also ammunition for the evangelical propagandists who were allied with a White House that refused to acknowledge or combat the plague that was killing gay men.
For Kramer, it wasn’t that he wanted to deny his community sex. It was the way the sex at times obscured all the other things that made him love gay people, the fact that we could create art and drama and life out of nearly nothing. It was the way we failed to love ourselves enough to fight, when the cocktail of pent-up need and federal indifference started to poison us. But however much he raged at us, he wanted to make clear, he did love gay people. He did not love being Cassandra.
By the time i discovered kramer, as I was coming of age in the 』90s and early 2000s, the fights over Faggots and bathhouses had been mostly consigned to gay history. The first big steps I took out of the closet brought me into the gay and lesbian sections of used bookstores, where I found a copy of the novel. It came to me at a time in my life when finding pleasure was easy and finding love was hard, so I identified with Fred and his struggle. Laying that book, with its audacious title, down on the bookstore counter might have been the first time I felt the thrill of seizing a weapon that had been used to harm me, and learning to take its power for myself.
Kramer’s writing became a lifelong influence on me. I』ve spent an afternoon in the Library of Congress, hunting down a copy of an out-of-print anthology of gay short stories that contained a rare gem of his, 「Mrs. Tefillin.」 I』ve cried my heart out at a theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts, over a performance of his play The Normal Heart.
I learned that he used his plays to express the nuance that his impassioned speeches often left out, showing that he understood why the people around him made the choices they did. In The Normal Heart, he fictionalized his older brother, an attorney named Arthur, via the character of Ben Weeks, a somewhat tender homophobe who finds it in his heart to demonstrate love for his sibling Ned, an acerbic gay activist. The play’s sequel, The Destiny of Me, reveals the forces that shaped Ben and Ned, and offers insight into why Ben might have pressed his brother to see a succession of therapists about his sexuality, as Arthur had encouraged Larry to do.
Kramer carried trauma from those therapy sessions. (In Destiny, Ned tells his younger self, referencing the sessions: 「While they teach you to love yourself, they will also teach you to hate your heart.」) But any resentment Larry might have felt toward Arthur is smoothed over in the fictionalized story. 「I’m proud you』ve stood up for what you』ve believed in,」 Ben says to Ned. He wonders whether, 「if I』d gone off on my own instead of built the firm, I could have taken up some cause and done it better than you. But I didn’t do that and you have and I admire you for that.」
「I guess you could have lived without me,」 Ned responds. 「I never could have lived without you.」
Those two sentences accompany The Destiny of Me’s dedication: 「For my brother, Arthur Bennett Kramer.」
In these works, Kramer was gentle with almost everyone except himself; Ned is one of the most piercing self-skewerings I can think of, an activist whose unyielding irascibility drives away everyone who tries to make common cause with him. For much of Destiny, the adult Ned haunts scenes from his memory, visible and audible only to his younger self. The device hints at what it must have felt like to shout your message into a void. 「They look to me for leadership, and I don’t know how to guide them,」 he laments. 「I wanted to be Moses, but I only could be Cassandra.」
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