Larry Kramer On Stonewall Boycott

"Don't listen to the crazies. For some reason there is a group of 'activists' that insists on maintaining their prime importance and participation during this riot. Unfortunately there seems no one left alive to say 'it wasn't that way at all,' or 'who are or where the fuck were you.' As with so much history there is no way to 'prove' a lot of stuff, which allows artists such as yourself (and me I might add) to take essences and attempt to find and convey meaning and truth. I sincerely hope this boycott your film shit peters out. We are not dealing with another 'Cruising' here. Keeping your film from being seen is only hurting ourselves. Good luck and thank you for your passion." - Larry Kramer, responding to the Facebook page of Stonewall director Roland Emmerich.

TRAILER: Larry Kramer In Love & Anger

Kramer tells TIME: "I don’t regret anything I’ve done or said. No matter what you say, some people are going to like it and some people aren’t. So it hasn’t shut me up at all. Inside I’m just as tempestuous."  The documentary debuts on June 29th at 9PM. Set the DVR now.

HomoQuotable - Larry Kramer

"Genocide is the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or ethnic group. Such as gay people. Such as people of color. To date, around the world, an estimated 78 million people have become infected, 39 million of whom have died. When we first became acquainted with HIV there were 41 cases. The main difference between the Larry Kramer who helped to start Gay Men’s Health Crisis in his living room in 1982 and ACT UP in 1987 and the Larry Kramer who stands before you now is that I no longer have any doubt that our government is content, via sins of omission or commission, to allow the extermination of my homosexual population to continue unabated.

"It is talk like this that got the original GMHC board to boot me off and out. It is also talk like this that enabled ACT UP to succeed in getting us our own treatments. These treatments are not good enough but have been good enough to extend our lives. Unfortunately they still come with side effects and they reward their greedy manufacturers with more money than they would make locating the cure that would end this plague." - Larry Kramer, accepting the first-ever Larry Kramer Activism Award from Gay Men's Health Crisis. Hit the link for the full text of the speech.

Out Magazine Unveils 2014 Out 100 List

Out Magazine has unveiled this year's Out 100 list. The 2014 ranking features Buzzfeed's Chris Geidner (seated above) and New York Times writer Josh Barro (third from left.) Others on the list are Dan Savage, Larry Kramer, Andy Bell, Armistead Maupin, Jason Collins, Richard Chamberlain, Carmen Carrera, and the cast of Looking.  See the full list.

The Normal Heart Wins Emmy For Best Movie, Larry Kramer Joins Cast On Stage

Kramer took the stage with the aid of a bright pink cane and wearing an ACT UP hat. Director Ryan Murphy gave the acceptance speech and the audience responded with the first standing ovation of the night.

HIV/AIDS News: The First Ten Years

JMG reader Dave Evans has compiled the below hour-long clip of news reports from the first ten years of HIV/AIDS. Noted figures that appear: Ryan White, Lyndon La Rouche, Larry Kramer, Ronald Reagan,  Magic Johnson, and Cleve Jones.

SPOILER: The Normal Heart

Stay out of the comments if you've not seen last night's debut of The Normal Heart. Otherwise dive in and give us your thoughts.

Quote Of The Day - Elton John

"While The Normal Heart is a product of a specific time, it is not an artifact. There is still an AIDS crisis -- not only in sub-Saharan Africa, but right here in the America, in your state, in your community. And, just as in 1985, it is silence, fear and stigma that continue to drive the epidemic. Today, African-Americans represent 12% of the national population, but they account for 44% of Americans living with HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gay and bisexual men comprise only 2% of the American population, but they represented 30% of the nation's HIV infections in 2010.

"Around 4,000 Americans are infected with HIV each year because of injection drug use, and one in seven HIV-positive Americans pass through a correctional facility each year. The crisis is particularly acute in the American South, where homophobia is rampant. I hope HBO's production of The Normal Heart will compel a new generation to act up. There is so much work still to be done, but there's also so much potential. The characters in The Normal Heart, living as they did in the 1980s, didn't understand what they or their friends were dying of, and they didn't have treatments to manage the disease. They hardly knew how to protect themselves.

"Today, we know how to protect everyone, and we have the ability to treat every single person living with HIV. Yet AIDS continues to prey upon the most vulnerable in our society: the poor, the incarcerated, sex workers, drug users, and those living in regions where intolerance and stigma are facts of life. Today, as ever, silence equals death." - Elton John, writing for CNN. The Normal Heart debuts on HBO tonight at 9PM.

Larry Kramer's Fight For The Normal Heart

The HBO movie debuts on Sunday at 9PM.

EW Cover Story: The Normal Heart

Entertainment Weekly on the decades-long journey from stage to screen for The Normal Heart:

Despite involvement from names like Barbra Streisand, who owned the rights for 10 years, The Normal Heart appeared to be destined for only theater until Glee co-creator Ryan Murphy acquired the rights in 2009 with his own money. “I really believed in it,” explains Murphy, who first read the play in college and directed the film version. “Larry set a very high price. I gulped and said, ‘Okay,’ and bought it. I think he wanted to see, ‘Is this kid serious?’ And I was.” Kramer, who’s HIV-positive and currently recovering from unrelated medical complications, was unable to speak to EW but emailed that Heart made it to the screen “because of Ryan Murphy caring passionately about getting it made, abetted by [exec producer] Dante Di Loreto.” Murphy and Kramer’s passion project will finally reach a mass audience when Heart makes its debut May 25 on HBO.

TRAILER: The Normal Heart

(Via Towleroad)

HBO Cast Discusses The Normal Heart

The cast of HBO's coming The Normal Heart chatted with the Hollywood Reporter during a shoot for the magazine's current cover.

TEASER: The Normal Heart

NEW YORK: ACT UP Crashes Ceremony Honoring Home Of Closet Case Ed Koch

Members of ACT UP yesterday crashed the ceremony to announce that the home of late New York City mayor and closet case Ed Koch is being named a historical landmark. That apartment building, NOT incidentally, is also the home of Larry Kramer.

Larry Kramer Marries

The New York Times has the story:

Larry Kramer, the award-winning playwright of “The Normal Heart” and longtime gay rights advocate, married his partner, David Webster, on Wednesday in the intensive care unit of NYU Langone Medical Center, where Mr. Kramer has been recovering from surgery for a bowel obstruction. Mr. Webster, in a telephone interview on Thursday, said the couple had set the wedding date a few weeks earlier, before Mr. Kramer’s health flare-up. The original plan – to be married on the terrace of their Greenwich Village apartment with two witnesses and the officiant, Judge Eve Preminger – was scrapped in favor of the intensive care unit, where two dozen friends and relatives attended the noontime ceremony led by Judge Preminger.

Larry Kramer Accepts Special Tony Award

True to form, even getting an honorary Tony Award managed to piss off Larry Kramer. Michael Musto reports for Out Magazine:

Downstairs, I found gramps Larry Kramer, who’d been briefly seen receiving a special award for his humanitarian work. He was sitting, but not in a wicker chair. And his normal heart wasn’t smiling. “It was all fucked up,” fumed Kramer. “They kept shunting me around. I was supposed to be on in the first segment, but everybody spoke too long, so they kept putting me off. I had to go on during a commercial break. They promised me they’d show a clip on network, but I don’t think what they showed was very long.” Oh, well, at least Larry told me they stood for him in the theater. “You and Cicely Tyson,” I beamed. “Don’t say anything bitchy!” he warned. Huh? After his harangue, anything I had to say would be as peachy as that hot guy from Pippin.

BROADWAY CARES: Win Tickets To The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me

Courtesy of Broadway Cares, we've got a pair of tickets to the fundraising one-night-only revival of The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, which plays the Gerald W. Lynch theater on Monday, May 20th.

For its 20th anniversary, The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me will be re-imagined from a one-man show to one featuring an ensemble cast performing a play that The New York Times originally called "rivetingly angry, intense, frenetic, frank and touching." The special performance is produced by Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and benefits BC/EFA and Sero Project. The one-night-only benefit performance of The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me features an ensemble of talented actors taking on the story, including author Drake, Brandon Cordeiro, two-time Tony Award nominee Robin De Jesús, two-time Tony nominee André De Shields, Claybourne Elder, Tony nominee Rory O'Malley, Anthony Rapp, Chad Ryan, Donald C. Shorter, Jr., Wesley Taylor, Aaron Tone and Tony winner BD Wong.

Enter to win by commenting on this post. If you cannot be in Manhattan on the night of the show, your winning entry is transferable to your favorite local theater buff.  Please remember to leave an email address in your comment. Entries close at midnight on Friday, Broadway-time.  Buy tickets here.

Larry Kramer To Get Special Tony Award

Larry Kramer will be honored this year with a special Tony Award.

Kramer will receive this year’s Isabelle Stevenson Award, a non-competitive Tony award given to an individual from the theater community who has made a substantial contribution on behalf of humanitarian, social service or charitable organizations. “Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists,” Kramer said in an interview. “I look upon this recognition as acknowledgment that a serious writer can also be a serious activist, and no less an artist for it.”

This year's regular Tony Award nominees will be announced this morning.

Ed Koch Dies At Age 88

Former New York City mayor Ed Koch died this morning at the age of 88.

As mayor from 1978 to 1989, the forceful, quick-witted Koch, with his trademark phrase "How'm I Doing?," was a polarizing figure and the city's constant promoter. Koch died at about 2 a.m. (0700 GMT) at New York-Presbyterian hospital, the spokesman for Koch said. Koch was credited with lifting New York from crushing economic crises to a level of prosperity that was the envy of other U.S. cities. Under his leadership, the city regained its fiscal footing and undertook a building renaissance. But his three terms in office were also marked by racial tensions, corruption among many of his political cronies, the rise in AIDS and HIV, homelessness and a high crime rate. In 1989, he lost the Democratic nomination for what would have been a record fourth term as mayor.

Throughout his life Koch refused to acknowledge his gayness.  Four years ago he spoke to the New York Times about being asked.

“I do not want to add to the acceptability of asking every candidate, ‘Are you straight or gay or lesbian?’ and make it a legitimate question, so I don’t submit to that question. I don’t care if people think I’m gay because I don’t answer it. I’m flattered that at 84 people are interested in my sex life — and, it’s quite limited.”

During his tenure as mayor, Koch was especially despised by AIDS activists, who accused him of slowing the reaction to the epidemic out of fear of being outed himself. None were more disdainful of Koch than Larry Kramer.

A few years after he left Gracie Mansion, Ed Koch ran into gay-rights activist and playwright Larry Kramer in the lobby of their apartment building on Washington Square. Mr. Kramer had famously been a harsh critic of what he believed was Mr. Koch’s slow response to the AIDS crisis, satirizing him as closeted and craven in his 1985 play The Normal Heart, about the syndrome then baffling doctors, and confronting the indifference of public health officials like those in Mr. Koch’s administration. Hundreds of New Yorkers dead or dying from a terrifying new disease and the mayor couldn’t give less than a damn, according to Mr. Kramer. For Mr. Koch, though, it was bygones.  “He was trying to pet my dog Molly and he started to tell me how beautiful it was,” Mr. Kramer once told The New Yorker of the incident, recounted in N.Y.U. Polytechnic historian Jonathan Soffer’s Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City. “I yanked her away so hard she yelped, and I said, ‘Molly, you can’t talk to him. That is the man who killed all of Daddy’s friends.’”

Koch was a regular target of ACT UP.

Koch, a documentary about his life, debuted this week.

NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the favorite to win this year's mayoral campaign, this morning issued a statement on Koch's death.  Via press release:

"All of New York City is in mourning today as we say goodbye to a great mayor, a great man, and a great friend.  Ed Koch dedicated his life to the five boroughs. He loved this city fiercely and it loved him back. He saved us from the brink of bankruptcy, raised our spirits, and restored our city’s reputation in the world. He rebuilt our crumbling infrastructure, adding more than 150,000 units of affordable housing. And after leaving office he continued to make New York a better place, inspiring us through his writing, his activism, and his commitment to change. But he was more than just the sum total of his accomplishments. Mayor Koch was larger than life. He stood taller than the bridge that bears his name. His sense of humor and tenacious spirit personified this town. Ed Koch was New York."

Closeted Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch Reviews How To Survive A Plague

Poz.com blogger and renowned activist Peter Staley tips us that closeted former NYC Mayor Ed Koch has reviewed the AIDS documentary, How To Survive A Plague. Staley notes that Koch fails to mention his own detestable role in thwarting the early response to what would become a global pandemic. From Koch's review:

While demonstrations were necessary to keep the issue on the front burner, Act Up protesters occasionally went too far, e.g., when they entered St. Patrick's Cathedral, took communion hosts from the priest's hands, and threw the wafers to the ground insulting many Catholics. Those wafers are, for Catholics, the Body of Christ.  The person who makes the greatest impact in the film because of his superb speaking ability is Peter Staley. In his New York Times review of this movie, Stephen Holden describes Staley as: "A former closeted Wall Street bond trader with H.I.V. who left his job and helped found the Treatment Action Group, an offshoot of Act Up. Self-taught in the science of AIDS, the group collaborated with pharmaceutical companies like Merck in the development of new drugs."

Others named in the Times' review as major leaders of Act Up, which began its activities in 1987, are Larry Kramer, Robert Rafsky and Ann Northrop, all of whom appear in the film. I don't know if these individuals were ever honored by the White House for what they did in fighting government and powerful corporations. If not, I urge President Obama to do so by presenting them and other leaders recognized by Act Up with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This superb documentary directed by David France should not be missed. Regrettably, when I saw it on a Sunday at 2:00 p.m., there were only about ten other people in the theater. I urge our Chancellor of Education to show the documentary in our public schools. It would teach children a lot of lessons, the chief one being the community can, working together, speak truth to power and win.

Larry Kramer himself has commented on the above-linked review in the manner for which he is best known:

What is this evil man up to as he approaches his death? Is he trying to make up to us? National Medals of Freedom from the White House! Would these provide a big enough enema to clean out his rotten insides? We must never forget that this man was an active participant in helping us to die, in murdering us. Call it what you will, that is what Edward Koch was, a murderer of his very own people. There is no way to avoid knowing that now. The facts have long since been there staring us in the face. If we don't see them, then we are as complicit as he.