 So, I thought we'd begin by casting as far back as your memory serves to the very earliest days when, in fact, we didn't even call it AIDS. And if you could just give people who weren't around then a sense of what you were feeling, what you were discovering, what life was like. You know why? It's just an era of the history of the world that for anyone who lived through it, who was able to live through it, was just the worst. All your friends were dead or dying. I would make speeches and I would say to the kids, two thirds of the room, stand up. You're going to be dead in four years. It was that intense how many people were dying. You could not walk down a street in Manhattan without not only seeing people who were sick, but learning about people who had died literally in the last week. It was and still is a plague and it was, they were very harsh times. This was not in any way helped by anyone. Certainly the government didn't want to know and the mayor of New York didn't want to know and President Reagan certainly didn't want to know. And gay people who were terrified with good reason didn't want to know. It was interesting to watch the denial that set in among so many of us and very hard to break through that. The virus had not been discovered and would not be discovered for a few years after 81. And so without the actual causative proof of a virus, a lot of gay people, a lot of gay men chose not to believe that that's what the problem was or to change their way of living. And for those of us who were there in the beginning and who were saying not so much give up sex but just cool it, be careful. We were the pariahs among our own people and it was very hard personally for me to overcome that to literally have people cross the street rather than say hello to me. It was a number of years before that changed. I have learned so much about everything, the world, human nature, not only just gay people being involved in all of this so much as I have over these years. In many ways the irony of it all is that it gave me my life work as a writer and I was quite frankly I think I was intelligent enough to realize that I had been given a great story that no one else wanted to write or that few people wanted to write and that few people still want to write. And like a foreign correspondent who's parachuted down behind enemy lines and sees what a great story he's got. I don't think I have ever seen anything so sad and so awful and so tragic and so indicative of how we are as people that's reflected in every aspect of HIV and still is. That's gone on too long. No, it's great. Thank you. Can you recall the literal first time that you realized that there was something afoot? Before we, before any CDC notices before any of that. And what was that like? Well, the back story on that is that we were an exceedingly promiscuous population with good reason. We had been imprisoned as you were for so many centuries, shunned by everything. We only had each other. And when the sexual revolution for gay and straight people came into being and remember this is the Playboy era, Hugh Hefner, all of that, which was giving men and people everywhere really permission to enjoy your body. But that led in the case of the gay population to an enormous rise in STDs, sexually transmitted diseases, and in true stalwart fashion, we sort of made it a game of it in the sense that you would sort of, everybody would talk about, oh, what have you had lately? No one was noticing that what was happening was escalating in virulence. You know, it's one thing to have a dose of the clap, and then the amoebas, which everybody had amoebas, and you would trade secrets about which doctor you went to who was able to get rid of them in the least obnoxious way, and there were doctors who could do it faster than others. Those medicines were quite harsh, but it was really conversation fodder for Sunday brunches, and then the hepatitis began, and they weren't as differentiated then as they are now. It was basically just hepatitis, and I think hepatitis B came along, somewhere along there, but that was more serious. And a very good friend of mine, Dr. Laurence Mass, who was one of the six of us who founded Gay Men's Health Crisis, I had known him since he was a young man. He went to Harvard Medical School and had a practice in New York, and one of the great unrecognized heroes of all of this, who wrote a health column for the New York native, which was a gay newspaper then, which wasn't, I wouldn't say read widely, but it was read, and he would fill me in on things that were happening, and where, and a lot of things were happening earlier on in various places, particularly the arrival of pneumocystis pneumonia, which was something that had not happened to, basically been something for kids, for babies, and sort of strange things that no one quite knew, and he would write about all this. And prior to that July 1981 article in the New York Times, which was the true alarm call, gay cancer found in 41 homosexuals buried on an inside page, but nevertheless there, which quite frankly scared a lot, not enough people, but it certainly scared me. And I just, I just said, it's the beginning of something, I just knew it instinctively. And I went and Larry arranged for me to meet the doctors at NYU, which was the only hospital, the only medical center that would touch it with a barge pole, largely because of Dr. Alvin Friedman Keane, who was the dermatologist who first saw the Kaposi's lesions on his patients, and the incredible woman that I used as a character in my play, Linda Laubenstein, who was in fact in a wheelchair. Larry, let's dig into a little bit the question of gay people's initial suspicion of AIDS and whether it was real. I remember maybe 83 listening to Quentin Crisp talk, and one of the things that Quentin Crisp said was in his, in the way that Quentin could spin anything, he said, oh, I don't believe in this AIDS thing, they've always been trying to get us to stop having sex and now they're just found a new way of doing so. So could you sort of talk about what challenges AIDS represented and how in some sense it felt familiar to be told? In some cases, what? It felt very familiar to be told that your sex is killing you. Well, I mean, I got a cue, the thing that really set me off, the one thing that happened that made me an activist more than any other thing was a playwright, a friend, in quotes called Robert Chesley, who after I wrote my first big article in the New York native, 1112 and counting, which was sort of the cry for alarm and it was published all over the country. He then answered me by saying, oh, there goes Larry Kramer again, he thinks the wages of gay sex are death and that's how a lot of people chose to react. Instead of listening to the doctors who quite sensibly said, it's the virus. We haven't found it, but it's a virus. It's acting like a virus. Hepatitis acts the same way. We didn't know what caused hepatitis, but we knew it was there. So you've got important doctors at important medical centers who are basically saying that, so I would choose to believe them rather than Quentin Crisp. But that's what you were up against. And when did it occur to you that a medical battle was a political battle? When did that first, when did you first realize that the response had to be a broad activist engagement? Well, the development of our response falls into sort of two eros. There's what the Gay Men's Health Crisis era and the Act Up era. We started six of us, what became Gay Men's Health Crisis, in literally the end of 81. And there were very few of us, very few would show up, and it was hard to know who was going to come from meeting to meeting. And slowly, as friends died or lovers died, or you visited enough people, we grew. But the first time I had to try and find, no one would rent us office space at all because of who we were and what we were about. And when I, I had been very successful in the film industry. I had achieved, I had an Oscar nomination, I had a certain prominence and I had money, I will never forget when I tried to get through to Mayor Koch, whom we knew and know to be a gay man, a closeted gay man, how awful I was treated. By his openly gay assistant, a man called Herb Rickman. If any of you have seen the normal heart, everything in the normal heart is true. Every incident is true. Every character is real. Everything that I dramatized is nothing fictional in there. There's a scene between that man, Herb Rickman, and those of us from Gay Men's Health Crisis who came there begging him for an office, because we had no office. At the same time that San Francisco's mayor had given their population, I don't remember, $15 million. Finally we got out of Ed Koch, no office, but $9,000. I mean, it was just an insult. And you know, finally some gay guy gave us rent-free an office. But that call, I'll never forget that. Fuck you, you son of a bitch. I'm not going to be treated like this. And thank God I felt that way and was able to keep that anger through all those years. Because not only was the city not doing anything, no one else was doing anything either. And Dr. Laubenstein was there yelling at me, I can't get anybody at NIH to pay any attention. I can't get any medical journal to publish any of our reports, literally. By the time, again, this is in the normal heart too when she makes that monologue speech in the second act, every word of which came out of her own mouth, it was three years from the first case. By the time the NIH showed up for a site visit at NYU, which again was the only medical center that would openly deal with this. Not that they were happy about it, Saul Farber, who was head of the medical, of the hospital medical center, hated it, and he used to yell at Linda. And fortunately, I mean, you didn't yell at Linda. And she was in a wheelchair and she was, don't you tell me I can only have 20 patients in this hospital. What do you want me to do? Put them up in my room, in my apartment. I mean, she gave as good as she got. And it was like that. You have to also remember the first decent drug didn't come into being until 19, already getting my dates, until 1997. So from 81 to 97, you have got a population now all over the world that is not only infecting each other constantly, which is still going on, but dying like flies. And Gaiman's Health Crisis did not want to be an activist organization. The first group of guys were too concerned with the dying and they couldn't do what I wanted them to do, which was, you know, do what these kids are doing on Sakati Square. And they wanted to be caregivers. And it was hard for me because we needed caregivers and to keep criticizing this struggling organization as I continue to do didn't help them. So I wrote The Normal Heart and then by 80, which was put on in 85. And you started at what year? When did you start writing The Normal Heart? We had a fight at Gaiman's Health Crisis and I was thrown off of the board in 8083. And I didn't know what to do. I was just beside myself and I went on a trip to Europe and I went to Dachau by chance. And I saw a sign that said, Dachau opened in 1933, 1933. They had a concentration camp for Jews in 1933. I never knew that. And I said, hey, it just seemed to be so relevant to what we were going through. And I came back to America and bought a little dog. We moved up to a little house in Welfly and I wrote the play and it took a while to get it on. I couldn't get any director, major director to do it. I couldn't get any. It was turned out, I can't tell you how many places it was turned out. And finally, Joe Papp took it on. And then it was delayed again for various theatrical reasons. But by the time it opened, it made a certain stir. Any initial reviews? And what were the initial reviews like? I think the play was treated as agitprop, which is sort of a dirty word in the theater, in this country anyway. The New York Times, which is criticized mightily in the play, sent lawyers to the previews who would sit there with their flashlights, writing down what I was saying about them. And when Frank Rich's review came out, which had enough quotes that were useful, the times for the only time in its history put an addendum at the bottom of his review saying that they denied all the charges that I made. The play ran for about a year, mostly because Joe came to love it so much and kept it going. The comparison of the responses to the two production has been very moving, if I could jump ahead. This last production on Broadway, the play was taken very seriously as a piece of theater, it was a piece of writing, and we won a lot of Tonys and we got great reviews. The first reviews were good enough. The second production with Raul Julia in whatever year that was, they've always managed to get rid of, you know, they're all written by loudmouth Larry Kramer, but you leave crying. Fine, I'll take that, because I wrote the play to make people cry. I still cry. But then the second chapter in all of this was Act Up. You want to jump to that? I want to jump to it, but I have one other question before we get there, and that is that it strikes me that AIDS may very well have been the first illness, at least in modern times, that was fought in part through different representations, competing representations. I'm remembering back to when I first saw the normal heart early on in its first incarnation. It felt like a glass of water in the desert because all there were at the time were representations that made us out to be quasi-animalistic. Still do. Yeah, absolutely. And so I wanted you to reflect on sort of the place of the normal heart within the context of AIDS and how people were talking about AIDS at the time, because I think us old folks have forgotten what it was like, and younger people of course never knew. Can you cast back that far? That's too academic a question for me. Rephrase it. Okay, broadly all I want to know is when the normal heart first came out, when the normal heart first came out, it struck me as very different from the way AIDS had been talked about, had been addressed previously. And I wanted you to talk about what it was like before the play emerged, how people were talking about AIDS, and whether you saw any change after the play was produced. I'm not very good at questions like this. I don't think in many respects things have changed that much or enough. When I turn on my computer and have to watch stories about these congresspeople who are saying these just awful things about gay people to this day, and it's legal for them to say that, you can't talk that way about Jews or black people, but you can about gays. And I say that's, I identify more with that as a lack of progress than when things got rosy. I'm not a negative person and I'm amazingly hopeful, but I am a glass as whatever, half full or half empty. I'm a half empty, still, is that answer anything? Yeah, fair enough. So talk to us about the founding of ACT UP. Well, I think ACT UP, I know ACT UP was the greatest thing that any gay population has ever achieved, ever in history, that any population has ever achieved in history. Every single HIV drug that is out there is out there because of ACT UP and the template for activism that ACT UP set and was then followed by places like Project Informant San Francisco. It was, I will never go through such a miraculous six or seven years of feeling this strange dichotomy of feeling useful, well used, couldn't get up early enough in the morning at the same time, everybody's dying still like flies, but we had a cause and we had a target and we had troops and we had smart people all working together and we knew what we had to do and we did it and we had meetings in New York City alone that would vary between 500 and 1,000 people every week that showed up and they went to different meetings every other night of the week. We learned and this was men and women, gay men and lesbians for the first time in our history working together, these are not two groups that had previously paid much attention to each other and we had really smart people, you know, lawyers and doctors and then statisticians and scientists and very early on a straight woman showed up at a meeting, Iris Long, she was a biochemist who had worked in the fields and she was essentially a Queen's housewife now who was moved by all of this and she got up and said in no uncertain terms, you guys don't know shit and I'll teach you, I'll teach you, you don't know about the system, you don't know about grants, you don't know about science, you don't know about pharmacology, you don't know about statistics, you don't know how the government works, you don't know about the NIH and she listed all these things and she's right, we didn't know and from that day on we learned and the smart or the ones who wanted to would meet with Iris and we formed this thing called the Treatment and Data Committee and we educated ourselves so effectively that I could take some of these kids to meetings with the drug companies whom we came to confront and the doctors from the drug companies would turn to me and say that Harrington, that's Dr. Harrington, isn't it? Because they were so impressed with him and I had a lot of people, we had a lot of those people and we had committees that dealt with every pharmaceutical manufacturer, we had committees that dealt with every branch of anything just like we knew more about what was going on than they did and when the time came to set up the trials for the drugs, we had doctors who were able to prove to government the biostatisticians who were running the clinical trials that they were doing them all wrong and that's why they were turning out so bad and we showed them how to set up an effective clinical trial. These are basically dying kids who are doing all this and slowly and that's why Dr. Fauci who is the man at NIH who has been presumably the head of all this since he took office at NIA, National Institute on Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Health in 1985, he had to let us in because he didn't have any ideas. All his ideas and all his principal investigators were coming up with nothing, failure after failure on every clinical trial and I took a group of our smartest kids, it started in Montreal, whatever year the conference at Montreal was and I made Fauci meet with us for lunch and then we came back and I took this group to Bethesda and they presented a program which they had laid out at Montreal, a very thick report on what everybody was doing wrong and how it could be righted. Exceedingly, exceedingly impressive piece of work, it was 60, 70 pages and you could not fault any of it. No scientist could fault any of it and Fauci saw that and Fauci saw that we knew more than they did so slowly he let us begin to participate in the system. He got in a lot of trouble because of that. That was by then it was sort of 91, 92 and it was those years from 92 to 97 or eight when the first drug came out that all the first decent drug because there were some earlier ones that weren't any good. AZT was just awful and that was where all our work bore fruit. And Larry, can you give us a sense of what the people on the other side of the fence were thinking? In other words, I remember those days and I remember those protests and thinking these are evil bastards that were protesting but now as I'm older I'm trying to figure out why there was such resistance to what we're doing. Do you have a sense? Listen, I mean look at the resistance to these these kids now. Activism is, you know, you're either liberal and understand or you're not and most people aren't. We did not give a good shit about what anybody else thought and that is very important for activism. You have to be angry and you have to be afraid and you only had to come to a weekly meeting and look around at the audience and see how sick people were and yet they were there to go to a meeting, yet they were there to go to a protest and it was hard but I would go, there wasn't a meeting where somebody wouldn't come up to me and say, tell me don't you know anything about something that I'm going to be able to take soon that you can't talk about because this this guy didn't have law and that was major motivation for everybody, the straight people who worked for us as well and that's again why we're success. You like us tying up the tying up the the bridge and tunnels tough shit. You know, we handed out fact sheets about all of what was not happening to the cars as they went through or wherever we were protesting. With that we had to get, you have to also realize that newspapers wouldn't write about this. Want to talk about the New York Times? The history of the New York Times is heinous. Starting with, I don't know when, I mean they didn't even report Stalin and starving all his people together in Russia in the 30s. The New York Times reporter won a Pulitzer Prize for completely, who was stationed over there, for completely ignoring all this. The first New York Times article on HIV after the first one was, you know, a year and a half later, Abe Rosenthal notoriously vitriolically homophobic. He fired gay reporters rather than having them there. This is a known fact. The managing editor of the New York Times didn't want this written about and so if he's not writing about it, no other paper in America or the world is writing about it because that's the New York Times, hey? You couldn't get television. You know, if I got a story on the radio, I was lucky. You know, Tom Brokaw to this day gives me the credit for finally, you know, practically, well, we have mutual friends and go to the same parties and I finally just gave it to them. And that's what you had to do. Remember the days when we would look through obituaries to determine cause of death because they wouldn't even say the word AIDS in the obituary? Yes. Well, I mean still there's a little bit of that now too. Yeah, nobody, they wouldn't say. You would always say died from pneumonia, which was the buzzword for AIDS. You know, it's there drugs out there, but and we are, of course, hey, I'm alive, right? But just this past week, the Global Fund for AIDS, which has been trumpeting their great successes, announced that the money has run out and that all the countries who had pledged so much money to it are not giving the money and that they will not be able to make any more grants until the year 2014. So all these people in Africa who were supposed to be getting all these drugs now and Obama, not my favorite person, is made a speech today or tomorrow telling the world how wonderful America's been giving so much money that these people are going to get drugs in Africa lies. Read. Well, I don't know where you read it. Bob Bezel on it on on on his blog from for NBC News has written a brilliant piece about it. Lori Garrett has written the piece at the Council on Foreign Relations, but you're not seeing it again in the New York Times. You know, there's no one out there. There's no one objecting to this. There has never been anyone in charge of this, which has always been a problem. Fauci, Fauci's like like the Jew who is put in charge of the of the ghetto and has to somehow keep these people alive, but keep the Germans from murdering everybody. I never made that analogy, and it's much too, it's much too kind to him, but he had to walk many tight ropes, literally to stay in office. You have President Reagan literally saying that he would not endorse anything that could be remotely connected to homosexuality. If his people said it once, they said it a thousand times. He did not say the word AIDS in public for seven years. So we are an expendable population. Gay people, black people, not so much Jews anymore, but certainly they were. We are expendable. They don't care about us. They don't. And one of the things the major lessons that I have learned is that we refuse to face up to the fact that we are hated. I do not mean disliked. I do not mean make people uncomfortable. We are tangibly hated when you come to the bottom line, still and continuing as our black people. And until we learn to absorb that fact into our being and respond to it, we will continue to be expendable and be denied the rights that the bill of rights presumably entitled us to. Thank you, Larry. I thought we'd open it up to the audience. If anybody has any questions or comments that they would like to ask Larry. Can you all hear me now? My name is Barry and I not happen to be gay, which is the same. It's true of the disease. I'm Barry. I'm not gay. But the disease is no longer gay. Age is no longer. And when you're talking about those poor people in Africa, this is no longer a gay disease. It's changed dramatically to be a disease mostly of heterosexuals passed on in Brussels. And you know, it should also therefore change because the gay population reacted appropriately. They've done safe sex and has a very small part of the ongoing gay crisis. Now why is your thinking changed because of this? Now you have millions of people non gay people who are in the danger zone and the gay people aren't. It's no longer gay. But you're talking about it's only a gay problem. And I want you to address that. I'm not sure I understand. But yes, but it is still perceived primarily as a gay problem by the people who don't want to do anything to help us. And we have never been able to escape that. And if it's not the biggest percentage of cases of AIDS in America now are in black men who are the figures keep rising. So that's the figure that gets put out that it's happening in Africa. And the rest of the world, let me tell you, is not of major concern to many people here. And they take great pride on saying that drugs are now being provided not free of charge, but at low cost to, I don't know, it's up to three million people when there are, you know, 20 people, 20 million people who need it. You don't want to talk about greedy drug companies. You know, they've all made fortunes out of these drugs. They could afford to give them out to free to dying people, to starving people. The only drugs that they'll give out free are the ones that we've long discarded, which are hard to take. There's not a good word to be said about anybody, for anybody in all of this. Of course, this is what they all wanted. And that's why it's even more important that those of us who are alive and capable of fighting have to. And the same, I was going to say in the same way that, of course, gay people are considered expendable, so too are other parts of the world. So the metaphors are the same. It's a population that is not worth fighting for. You don't know what's going on about against gay people all over the world. The mayor of Moscow and St. Petersburg have issued dicta that anything can't be written about. They call it propaganda. Every time there's a gay protest or a gay pride, they all wind up in jail. Russia, where the people who take drugs to constitute the majority of cases, is so overwhelmed with AIDS. I was in Moscow a couple years ago. You can't get anybody to talk about it. They're a huge percentage of the population. They don't know what to do about it. Same with China. The war has been lost. The war was lost a long time ago. It advances faster than we can prevent what's happening. Now, there have been in the last months some marked scientific discoveries toward a cure. It's going to be a long time before any of it. It can be a fruit, but they've discovered certain things that have given them hope that if they can continue along these lines, there are several people have survived bone marrow transplants and gene genetic transplantation of certain cell lines that prohibit replication of HIV. It's needless to say enormously complicated, enormously expensive, but they have lived. How they can take that to the next step, I don't know, but our wonderful generous National Institute of Health or National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Fauci, has allotted the grand sum of some five million dollars a year toward looking for a cure. Other questions? Hi, my name is Ann. You've brought so much of this time back to me. I have to tell you, Mr. Kramer, I was actually working at the Public Theater in another show when your show was up. I was doing the human comedy at the Public Theater when your show was playing there, and I was 14 years old, and I remember at the time, I mean I was 14, and at the time two of the actors in my company were sick. The stage manager of the play I followed was sick. The marginalization that was happening and the infighting that was going on within the gay community, within even that company of actors in that theater where your play was taking place. The debate between as is, which was the warm and fuzzy play compared to your play, which had such passion and such anger in it, was such a flash point at that time. And then the next thing we knew, you had left act up, and you alluded to this argument, and I just want to know what that was, because it was, when you departed, I remember that time very, and I mean I was 14 years old, but I remember that, and I'm so honored that I could actually ask you, what happened? What was it? Can you talk about that? What happened? Yes. When? When you left act up. I've never left that time. Well, no, I'm sorry, when you left the board, when you got your dog and went to Dachau. When what? When you left gay men's health crisis. I'm sorry, they threw me out. But what was it? What was it? What had happened? Well, because I was, I was calling the mayor gay publicly for a start, and I was, and I was criticizing Reagan, and I was criticizing the New York Times, the big three. And I wasn't, and they were, they were, you know, they were just guys, they were uncomfortable with this. The irony is that my brother's law firm incorporated gay men's health crisis, and, and I had to find a board to put on the papers. So, you know, I pulled in my friends, knowing nothing about boards, and knowing not that you put on boards, not your friends, but the peoples who will support you when push came to shove. And I terrified them. I truly terrified them. I tried the letter that is read to me in the play, word for word, is the letter that was read to me. They didn't want me. And it was talk about painful. Talk about having, you know, 15 messages on your answering machine one day and none the next day. It hurt. I can't believe that actually was real. I can't. And that's why I ran away to you. I didn't run away. Just, I went to Europe, and that was the birthing of the play. I tried four times, three times to get back on the board. They didn't want me. So, it was life. Well, it was, we got a great play out of it. And that has endured. Thank you. Other questions? Hi. Hi. I'm fascinated by this point in history where the artists and the activists knew what this, you said the scientists were doing all the clinical trials wrong, and that you went in there with a group of artists and activists, and they were able to tell the scientists how to do a clinical trial. And to me, since that's sort of like a point of hope for me, you know, that somebody, an artist or an activist could tell a scientist what to do, like to say, ongoing to go into where this crisis is in Africa right now. So, I was wondering if you could give us like a specific example of what you told the scientists. Like, how did they run that clinical trial? What, what particularly, what particularly in terms of the scientists when you were first having your meetings with ACT UP, did you tell them to do? Oh, I told you we had prepared these smart kids had prepared this 50, 60 page report that we gave out. It was very detailed, scientific statistics, things that had to be studied in terms of what we knew about T cells, and why they weren't, and they weren't studying any of these things. It was very specific. Drug testing protocols that were... And the protocols that would prove such things. Yeah. And we also got rid of the, for the first time in history, the placebo. In a clinical trial, every clinical trial, I had always had a plus, some people got a placebo and we said, uh-uh. You know, people who are dying aren't going to take placebos because what we would do is the minute you got your drugs on a clinical trial, first thing you did is you went to the pharmacy or a chemist and he studied to see whether you were getting the real thing or not. And if you weren't, you stopped taking the drugs so the trial was worth shit. And the trials were showing up very poorly. Pardon my French. So that kind of thing. We... Go ahead. Is that okay? So I'm not the person to talk. I don't own anybody from whatever. But it's interesting when you don't know and you're exposed to a lot of people who presumably do. It's interesting how you can often tell who's full of shit and who isn't. Jonathan and I had wanted to talk about something a little different if we have time for that. Sure. It might be a bit of a long one, but it was kind of both of you. It's about this hatred idea about that still happening that's continued and about how you say that, you know, you're not allowed and politicians aren't allowed to talk like that about Jews now or about Black people. I wanted to ask if you could hash out some of the ideas about why it is like that. What are the roots of some of those issues of hatred that exist so much? Like why do you think it is or what are some of the roots? What are the roots of homophobia? What? What are the roots of homophobia? Why? People don't like people who are different. I think it's as simple as that. This... I've been right working for the last 30 years, whatever, on a book called The American People, which is my attempt to write a history of America putting gays in it from Vigetco because we were here from the beginning, whether we had names or not. It's about 3,000 pages long now, down from 4,000. Frere Strauss has bought it and we're editing it. It's appalling what you discover when you go back to early American history. The great men like John Winthrop or the great preachers like the Mathers and the Hookers and and were as bigoted as they come. John Winthrop hung gay men, hung them, and that was 16-something. And that's... law stayed on the books. George Washington, who was gay himself, had several officers hung for being gay. I like to think he did it uncomfortably, but he did it. And people don't like different people. I think it's as simple as that. We scare them somehow. I think gay men scare straight men because it's some kind of challenge to their masculinity. It's amazing how many politicians who are so rabidly anti-gay are found in men's toilets and get picked up. Wide-legged stances. With wide-legged stances. Yeah. Do you read about the sheriff of the year in Arkansas who's retired, who was literally chosen the sheriff of the year, of all America, the sheriff of the year, and he's retired and he's just been thrown into jail for trying to buy sex from guys with methamphetamines. Jonathan and I first came to know each other around the year... when did we start it? 2000? 2000. My brother, Arthur Kramer, the most wonderful of brothers, said he would give a million dollars to Yale to do whatever I wanted them to do. We come from a long line of people who had gone to Yale, which was a big deal because we were all Jews. And when my father and uncle in 1912 and 1916 went there as Jews, it was a big deal. Anyway, it took a long time to get Yale to agree to doing any of a number of things gay that I suggested to them. A long time. And it was finally because of my straight friend Calvin Trillin, who was a beloved Yale alumnus who literally called up the president and said, in essence, you know, grow up nicely that we sat down and talked. And it took, I would say, two years until we arranged this plan for, they wouldn't even call it a center. We weren't allowed to call the Larry Kramer Center for Lesbian and Gay Anything. We had a, Alice Trillin came up finally with the word initiative, which I guess means nothing, the Larry Kramer Initiative for Gay and Lesbian Studies. And what I wanted and what they wanted became increasingly obvious were different things. I was writing this book about, I had discovered George Washington was gay, and I had discovered Abraham Lincoln was gay, and I hadn't discovered that. Others, before we had, but I had become convinced that they were, along with many, many other people. Like J. Edgar Hoover. And this new movie is so full of shit. And I wanted that. That's my idea of gay studies. You know, you should learn who we were. Black history was changed overnight when it could be proved that Thomas Jefferson really did have a black mistress. It was no longer just gossip. And the minute that happened, you could start talking about black people. You could start talking about their history in ways that had simply not been allowed before there anywhere. Well, I wanted that to be at Yale. Fortunately, the provost with whom I did become after calling her many names a good friend. And she found Jonathan Katz to be the first head of LKI. I mean, how that happened, I don't know, because you were so, in their terms, unsafe in big letters. But somehow you got the job. And then began our journey into hell, basically, where we discovered that no matter what we wanted to do, they didn't like it, somebody didn't like it. And that somebody who didn't like it was always invisible. You didn't know who it was. They watched when Jonathan went to the toilet. He had to practically get permission anytime he wanted to go on a trip anywhere. This did not happen for any other department at all. He wanted to go to a gay conference somewhere. Of course he should be there. They had to know everything. One of the first things that we discovered, there's another Jonathan Katz, in addition to this Jonathan Katz, who was Jonathan gave a fellowship too early on, discovered that one of the great benefactors of Yale, one of the greatest benefactors of Yale, of John Sterling, the founder of the famous law firm Sherman and Sterling. Half the things that Yale are called Sterling this and Sterling that was gay and had been gay all his life and lived with a gay lover and left everything to the gay lover. Not only did he discover this, he discovered it in the Yale library where Sterling's papers had been there all these years. And it was a gay librarian who said to him, I want to show you something. The minute we found it, Jonathan put it, this Jonathan put it out to the world. Well, you could have no idea the hell that caused from Sherman and Sterling on up or down. People would threaten to give, to stop giving money to Yale. The Yale alumni magazine was filled with hateful mail and they certainly were not about to teach that Abraham Lincoln and George Washington were gay. They were going to teach queer studies and queer theory and all this stuff that is incomprehensible to me. Theory. Theory is very safe. Jonathan is indescribable in his greatness to how hard he has fought this exhibition upstairs of gay art. That exhibition in an embryonic form was presented at Yale. On the night before his departure, after having been fired, he presented this unbelievably brilliant lecture at the Yale Art Gallery with a lot of these artists on display. The discovery about Sterling and other things were then put up on an exhibition that we did in the Yale library called the Pink in the Blue, Blue being the color of Yale. And one of the objects that we discovered in investigating the archives of Yale for evidence of same-sex life, going back from the very earliest days, was a book from 1843 about Yale men. Of course in those days there were only Yale men. And it said on page 57 that one of the great concerns of the administration was the flourishing of the vices of the Greeks and that the Yale administration was working very hard to stamp that out. And I just think they haven't changed all that much. Anyway, and I have found out even equally damning things about my alma mater which I'll deal with in my book. Basically having to do with the Cold War and where the philosophical permission to behave as we did all started at Yale. All those professors who went over and became OSS men during the war promulgated America first. Many of them were gay. Most of the major spies were gay anyway. All those Brits. James Jesus Eagleton. Eagleton, yes, Eagleton. Eagleton, I get him. Anyway, who was head of the of the new CIA. Gay is a coot. Anyway, I don't even know if coots are gay, but whatever. What's a coot? I have no idea. Larry, we're out of time but I want to I want to ask everybody to join me in thanking Larry Kramer.