American writer, playwright and AIDS activist, Larry Kramer, talks with famed Canadian journalist and social activist, June Callwood (1924-2007), about his life as an activist writer, his struggles with censorship and apathy, his failed attempt at donating his estate to Yale University, and the complex relationship he has with the literary establishment. Volume 2 of Kramer’s The American People: The Brutality of Fact: A Novel, was released in January 2020.
Works by Larry Kramer
The American People: Volume 1: The Search for My Heart
The American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact: a Novel
The Destiny of Me: a Play in Three Acts
Larry Kramer: What Pride Means to Me (link opens Salon.com article from June, 2019)
About Larry Kramer
We Must Love One Another or Die: the Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer: In Love & Anger (2015 documentary)
Other Related Books or Materials
The Normal Heart (2014 film starring Matthew Bomer)
Larry Kramer is Still the Angriest Man in the World (link opens an Interview Magazine article from Dec 2019)
Books by or About June Callwood
Trial Without End: A Shocking Story of Women and AIDS
It’s All About Kindness: Remembering June Callwood
About June Callwood
June Callwood, often dubbed, “Canada’s Conscience,” was a journalist who wrote over 2,000 articles in her career, spanning six decades. Her work as a social activist made her a champion of free speech and intellectual freedom and she was the founder or co-founder or many Canadian charities including Casey House (Canada’s first hospice for those suffering from AIDS) and Jessie’s, the June Callwood Centre for Young Women. She also founded the Toronto Public Library’s annual lecture series, the June Callwood Lecture, which honours each year an activist who provides a platform for the exploration and discussion of contemporary social justice issues. Recent lecturers have included Albert Woodfox, Ahmad Danny Ramadan and Clara Hughes.
Born in 1924 in Chatham, Ontario, Callwood died, in Toronto, in 2007, leaving a legacy as one of Canada’s most important champions of social justice.
About the Host
Novelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.
Music is by Yuka
From the Archives
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations.
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
Writers Off the Page
A Life of Activism: Larry Kramer in Conversation with June Callwood
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT (2-3 seconds)
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: 40 years of TIFA produced by the Toronto Public Library. I'm Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, June Callwood interviews American writer and activist Larry Kramer.
TEASER: And I'm supposed to be dead now, so suddenly, I'm getting all this recognition from people important to me, so that's meant a lot. I learned how to be a playwright just like I learned how to be everything else, you know, how to write an op-ed piece for The Times...I guess what I've learned more to do than be a writer, I wanted to make people think. I wanted to shake them up, I wanted to make them angry, and I've learned how to do that. And I've learned how to make a living at it, which is even, I guess, more remarkable.
RANDY: Let me begin with a confession: I physically braced myself before listening to June Callwood’s 2002 interview with writer and activist Larry Kramer. I braced myself because I was expecting yelling, from the start, and every moment thereafter. That’s because the most memorable pictures I’ve seen of Kramer over his long life in public depict him standing before a crowd, usually at a lectern, yelling.
If Robert Frost could memorably write about having a lover’s quarrel with the world, Kramer’s someone who’s been in a knock-down drag-out fight with the world, and indeed with his own friends and lovers, for a long time. A colleague once observed that Larry Kramer “came into the world screaming.” Most of us did, but 85 years later, and even after at least one false news report of his death, he hasn’t really stopped.
The source of his screaming, his anger, his fighting? The refusal, on the part of political leaders and the medical establishment and above all, his fellow gay men, to acknowledge the gravity, the mortal gravity, of the AIDS crisis, and change their ways of life before they lost their lives and the lives of many others. Not that Kramer made it easy on people who might be open to hearing him out, well beyond the question of his yelling. In 1978, he published a novel entitled Faggots that took direct aim at the destructiveness of gay sexual culture, openly inspired by breaking up with a longtime lover who is harshly represented in the book. Ten years later, Kramer disputed a doctor’s work in response to the AIDS crisis with an open letter, published by the activist organization he founded, ACT UP, that was entitled “An Open Letter to Anthony Fauci, An Incompetent Idiot.”
And here’s the thing about Kramer’s Molotov cocktail charisma: he later reconciled with Webster, the lover I mentioned earlier, and the two were married in 2013 while Kramer was in a New York Intensive Care Unit; and following that letter to Fauci, the two of them became friends and Fauci has since credited Kramer’s aggressive public advocacy as being crucial to the development and expansion of AIDS research. This is all to say that Larry Kramer has never been an easy person to deal with, and he’s never felt the need to go easy on people, whether specific communities or public officials, or for that matter his readers.
A playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Kramer has recently completed a queer retelling of American history in the form of an 896-page historical novel. Oh, by the way, that’s volume two; volume one came out five years ago and, it should be noted, was shorter: it was only 800 pages.
Larry Kramer is a big presence with a lot to say, but there’s no reason to brace yourself, physically, for what you’re about to hear. There’s no yelling. There’s a lot of sarcasm, yes, and mordant humour about himself and lots of other people, but in general his voice is quiet, amused and bemused, now and then lamenting, even plaintive, and at times almost — almost! — soothing. His arguments never have been, of course, and that’s both because of what he saw in the world around him and his sense of what it took to draw attention to it, and also because, as he notes, he’s learned how to make a living by making people angry. That might be true of a lot of people these days, but they’re mostly talking heads on television and meme merchants on Twitter: Larry Kramer is an American original for lots of reasons, as you’ll see, and he’s still with us, against long odds and apparently thanks to all things turquoise.
____
June Callwood (JC): I got all dressed up. You did too, eh?
[laughter]
Larry Kramer (LK): I put on a cashmere sweater.
[laughter]
JC: And I know there's a story about all the rings, about the turquoise.
LK: Oh, yes. It gets silly by now.
JC: Well, maybe it's working.
LK: It is. [chuckle] No question, that's why... When I was 22 or three, just down from Yale, for whatever reason, I went to a fortune teller in New York City and she said to me, "You must always wear something turquoise. It will take care of you. It will look after your health." Well... And I always have. I always was a little more modest in the amount I wore, maybe just one ring or something. And then when I...
JC: Well, your health has gone through some shocks, you can't count on one ring being enough. [laughter]
LK: The sicker I got, the more I loaded myself up.
JC: Yes.
LK: And I think I probably overdo it. But I've actually cut back a little since I had the transplant.
JC: I wanna talk about that, but let's start with Faggots. What astonished me about reading that book is how you found a publisher in a time when pornography was a very difficult subject for feminists, and they were... In this country, they were stopping stuff at the border. How did you get a publisher?
LK: I think it actually was stopped on the way to the border here.
JC: At a Canadian border? Yeah.
LK: Yeah, at one point.
JC: Oh, I think so.
LK: It was stopped going into England. I remember a copy was sent to Thomas Pynchon, and it was impounded by British customs. And I've never met the man, but he evidently made a big stink about it, which I thought was... I mean, about getting his copy, which I thought was nice. I don't know that it was thought of as pornographic. I think it was just thought of as gay. And...
JC: Oh, come on. There was...
LK: I don't think it's pornographic.
[laughter]
JC: No, you don't, but this is a perspective because there was a newspaper here called Body Politic, gay newspaper...
LK: They hated it. They hated it. Oh, I was...
JC: Body Politic hated it? Tell me.
LK: I was in Florence with my sister-in-law, and the book wasn't due to come out 'til October, and I was there with her for the month of August. And I do not know how I got a copy of Body Politic in Florence, whether I found it or somebody sent it to me. But I was sitting in this park, reading Portrait of a Lady, and then I opened this just excruciatingly awful review. It was crucifixion. It was just awful. And I'm sitting there, and the book hasn't even come out, and this person, this gay person, whom I didn't know, was telling everybody in the reviews... He literally said, "Tell everybody you know not to read this book." It was George Whitmore, who I subsequently came to know, obviously, never liked.
[laughter]
LK: He was a member of the Violet Quill. He died, unfortunately. But that was my introduction to it. But it wasn't pornographic. I wanna get back to that.
JC: Well, I'll tell you why I think so. Because...
LK: I don't wanna know why you think so.
JC: No, because I was defending Body Politic, which ran an article about certain kind of sexual congress with a closed fist. And it was charged with the... Against the obscenity laws in Canada. And there I am, a sweet little old lady in the stand, defending Body Politic's right to speak about sexual congress with a closed fist. So that...
LK: I just wrote about what I saw, and I didn't think of it as pornographic, and I didn't think of it as anything that would make anybody angry. I enjoyed writing the book. It made me laugh a lot, and it also is very, very much about a... It was written for the dedicatee, David, who was my lover, David Webster, with whom I had just very painfully split up. And it was about my view of the relationship. And it was really saying, "Can't you see it my way? I love you very much, and you went away from me." So...
JC: It ends, though, with that prophecy, the prophetic fear that there will be a price to pay.
LK: Well, I don't know that I was that [inaudible], I just knew that we were going too far, and I... There is a section in there where I said, "We're all gonna fuck each other to death," but that was, at the time, hyperbolic.
JC: Years before AIDS, '78.
LK: So, again, to get back to... All my writing is about what I see, it's not... Until this new book, which I'm working on now, there's been very little in my writing that's been what you would call, for want of a better description, imaginative. It's all very journalistic, perhaps. "That's what I saw. This is what I thought of it." And I've always thought of myself not so much as a quote 'artist writer', but as a...
JC: You're a realist writer.
LK: No, just... I'm a message queen.
[laughter]
LK: And this is what I think, and words are tools for me to get a message across. That's why I've been so unwelcome in the community of writers, or gay writers. I've always been exiled. I cannot tell you how utterly baffled I was when I was invited to come and speak here. I have never ever been invited to a literary anything before.
JC: Oh, you must be joking.
LK: Never. Never. I am a pariah in my country because there's no such thing as a quote ‘writer, artistic’, whatever you wanna say, 'writer and an activist'. That tradition, which is familiar perhaps to us through German writers like Grass or Boll or...
JC: Nadine Gordimer.
LK: Nadine Gordimer, certainly, or... And certainly in South American countries. That doesn't exist in America. It's just the reverse. You think of the great, great... The writers like John Updike or... I mean, they wouldn't begin to say what they think. Even our great playwrights. You cannot name a major American writer who has written about AIDS, who has said anything decent about AIDS. Name me one. I'm talking about straight.
JC: Oh, not straight. I was thinking of Kushner, of course.
LK: Who?
JC: Kushner.
LK: Yeah, but that... Tony's gay as they come. One of my best friends.
JC: I don't think...
LK: But that's also... Tony wrote in the '90s. I'm talking from the beginning. You couldn't get anybody to say dip shit. This is going on television?
JC: Absolutely. [laughter] It's going to every daycare centre...
LK: Dip squat.
[laughter]
JC: It's going to every daycare centre in the country.
LK: That's a good one. Hi, kids.
JC: You write with...
[laughter]
JC: You write very...
LK: Get used to it. What?
JC: You write very sharp, clean [inaudible]. It isn't easy to mimic it, as it is with Hemingway.
[chuckle]
LK: Thank you.
JC: But it is the way you write. Is that the product of editing? Do you take away the peacock feathers, or do you write that, think that way?
LK: What do you mean peacock feathers? Is that like pornography?
JC: No, it's like vanity. When the writer puts in a lot of curlicues to show how smart he or she is.
LK: I have to tell you I don't know. I came to writing late. I didn't write my first anything important until... I guess, I wrote the screenplay to Women in Love, which was...
JC: You got an Oscar nomination.
LK: I was late 20s, early 30s, and I didn't really write anything prose until Faggots, which I started writing in '73, when I was... Oh, I can't remember, 45?
JC: '73, and came out in... Yeah, in '78.
LK: And it's very different when you become a writer so late, in terms of being able to talk about style or why you do certain things. It was very... It's been, and it continues to be, a very hard job. I enjoy it, I couldn't do anything else, but it takes me a very long time to write anything and to make it please me. I mean, I can write it, and know that it needs... That I'm not happy with it, and it needs more work. And is it shaving stuff? I guess it is. It's polishing and walking down the street and remembering, or thinking of a better way to make the sentence that you worked on last night. But then, most writers work that way, don't they?
JC: Yeah. Well, but you're... You don't do the visuals so much. Your genre is dialogue, but the characters come fully formed out of the dialogue. I think that's a hard trick.
LK: Well, thank you. Bless you. I always think I should describe more.
JC: Yeah, he's tall, he's short. You never know. I wanna look at these people, but I get to know them.
LK: You write the way you write, I guess, and if you're lucky, you get a style. And I think one day I woke up and realized, for better or worse, I had a style. I don't know that I could...
JC: Yes, you do.
LK: I don't know that I could describe it, but I know it's a voice, and...
JC: You've been across a lot of genres.
LK: I have. I have written...
JC: All of them.
LK: I'm proud of saying that I've been successful in all of them.
JC: Yes. Anna Quindlen had a piece in the New York Times a week or so ago. She said it was... The transition from being a journalist to a novelist wasn't hard because both have to pay attention. That struck a bell for me, paying attention.
LK: I don't know that I pay attention. My lover, David, would say I don't. I live in my head mostly, and there's certain things that make me mad and upset, that I want the world to know, so I pay attention to the things that make me upset, which are usually easily locatable on the television, in reading the newspapers, talking to people like you, hearing stories, whatever. So I'm not a particularly observant person about... If I were on... There are all these things they tell you whenever you're starting to write a good... Go on a bus and describe everybody who's sitting on it. I don't think I could do that at all. If the bus were in my mind, I could see everybody, and... But I'm not... Like I said, I'm not an imaginative writer, per se. The new book is...
JC: The American People?
LK: The American People has got a lot of... I hope, more description in it. But I think, because I was a playwright, whether... Writing a play is the hardest thing in the world for me. It's much harder than...
JC: People say that, of all the things to do, that that's the worst. And yet, you started with Normal Heart, which was such a winner.
LK: Well, I actually didn't. I started with a play called Sissies' Scrapbook, which you've never heard of. And...
JC: Have I missed something?
LK: Well, interestingly enough, I'm sorry the poster isn't here, but Grove is bringing out the most gorgeous edition. It will be out in October. It's called Women in Love and Other Dramatic Writings, and it's got the most gorgeous cover. And it has a wonderful introduction by Frank Rich, who is very important in America.
JC: Yes, I know. He's in today.
LK: Grove has just been wonderful. They've gotten these incredible introductions to all my books. They got Reynolds Price to do Faggots, and they got Tony Kushner to write that incredible...
JC: He wrote a beauty.
LK: Yeah. And suddenly... And I'm supposed to be dead now, so suddenly, I'm getting all this recognition from people important to me, so that's meant a lot. Anyway, in that book is not only Women in Love, but Sissies' Scrapbook, my very first play, and a couple of other plays. I learned how to be a playwright just like I learned how to be everything else, you know, how to write an op-ed piece for The Times, or how to... I guess what I've learned more to do than be a writer, I wanted to make people think. I wanted to shake them up, I wanted to make them angry, and I've learned how to do that. And I've learned how to make a living at it, which is even, I guess, more remarkable, because I remember once I was invited to this school, Miss Porter's School, in Farmington, Connecticut. Miss Porter's School, in our youth, was for all the rich kids, girls. And it's now very different, it's filled with a rainbow of people, colours. They're still all women, young ladies. A lot of them people from Africa, a lot of them people of colour. And they invited me there for one reason, and they grilled the hell out of me. They wanted to know, chapter and verse, in detail, how I made a living with my anger, 'cause they were angry about so many things. And they wanted to know everything. They wanted to know the financial stuff and how you got to the New York Times, and whatever.
JC: And your brother invested the money for you.
LK: Yeah, that was lucky. [chuckle] Anyway, I thought that it was a very moving experience. I've always been able to write exactly what I wanted to do, and that...
JC: You're not afraid of your anger, right?
LK: Oh, honey, it took a long time. No, I was never afraid of my anger, no, 'cause I didn't have it, it was so submerged. I was afraid to be me. And when I had enough therapy, they put me in touch with that anger. And of course, that's a whole different thing in America, then, I guess, you have in Canada, the whole...
JC: No, none of us are angry here. [laughter]
LK: Yeah. Well, the whole thing of therapy.
JC: Nothing to be angry about.
LK: No, I mean the whole thing of therapy and analysis and... It's not so much now, but when I was in the... When I was young, 20s and 30s, that was the thing to do.
JC: To cure you, to cure you.
LK: To cure you, or just get in touch with your anger.
JC: Well, yes. We had a psychoanalyst also. Was he a... No, he was a psychiatrist here, Daniel Capen, he wrote a book about how he had cured 11 homosexuals. I did the review of that, and all that long ago, I was a little skeptical.
LK: I hope you called that pornography.
[laughter]
JC: Yeah. No, the thing about anger is if it's... If there's too much of it, people can't hear what you're saying.
LK: They heard me.
JC: There's no doubt they heard you.
LK: I guess I don't... There's anger, and there's anger. All the stuff I wrote, the political stuff, which no one has ever remarked upon... Talk about... Worked on the prose style. Talk about shaving away the feathers and going for hard-hitting stuff. All that stuff, if he asked me what I think are some of my best writing, I think some of my political stuff... And of course, From the Holocaust.
JC: Was that the first one that you did?
LK: Reports from the Holocaust is a collection...
JC: This doesn't make you mad, something or other, you started it, it was in a daily...
LK: Sorry?
JC: The first thing that you did about AIDS, something or other, 1,112 and counting?
LK: Yeah, that's in this book. It's a collection of my...
JC: That's a marvelous piece.
LK: It's a collection of all my AIDS writing. I'm sort of sorry that St. Martin's... The book is still in print, and St. Martin's told me they would have it here with the Grove Press stuff, and I'm sort of annoyed that they haven't, could've sold a couple.
JC: What was that... What year was that? '81?
LK: Well, it's had two editions, one is twice as thick as the other one. I don't remember. It was late 90s.
JC: What I said before, though, about paying the price... It was something that Katharine Hepburn once said, that she's done all her life, whatever she pleased, and paid the price.
LK: Well, you could hardly say she paid the... You can hardly feel sorry for her.
JC: No, I'm talking about you. [laughter] You're supposed to have picked up on that. I'm talking about you.
LK: I don't think I've paid a price. I didn't wanna join that club. And the fact that The Violet Quill and Edmund White and all these so-called serious gay writers didn't want me…didn't bother me. I didn't want them, and I still don't.
JC: It bothered you, must have, I'm just projecting here, to be thrown out of gay organizations that you started.
LK: That was different.
JC: You bet.
LK: But I was only thrown out of GMHC, and I wasn't really thrown out. I taunted them into throwing me out. And it was more complicated than that. But as my friend Rodger McFarlane has always said, he thought that my subconscious was saying I had to move on, and I was ready to write The Normal Heart, and that's the way I had to do it. So let's use that version. Whatever.
[laughter]
JC: I'd like to get out of going to meetings, so therefore, I'm going to be obnoxious?
LK: No, it was awful. It was very painful afterwards.
JC: Of course it was.
LK: Had nothing left to do but write, because I had been so busy before.
JC: How do you handle being in despair?
LK: In despair? Oh, I don't think I've ever been in despair. I was unhappy and I yelled at them. I wrote letters to them, calling them murderers. That's how I deal with them.
JC: Nazis, murderers.
LK: I didn't call them Nazis. I said, "akin," that's what I said.
[laughter]
LK: But I was right.
JC: You saw the neglect, as many people did, straights as well... The neglect of AIDS in the beginning...
LK: Still is.
JC: As a kind of genocide.
LK: Still is.
JC: What we're beginning to see, I think, is the neglect... In countries like Africa, the neglect by the Western world is a kind of genocide again.
LK: You're absolutely right. Africa is gonna be nothing compared to what's gonna happen now in India, and China, and Pakistan, and Indonesia, and Russia. The numbers are gonna be grotesque. There are reports out now... Literally, the CIA, of all people, put out a report talking specifically about India, Pakistan and Russia... No, Pakistan, Russia and China. Sorry, no one pays attention to poor India. India, I think, right now has way surpassed Africa, South Africa, and Africa, in general, in terms of cases, that it's gonna ruin the economies of all these countries, which it certainly will.
JC: That's the children, they're orphans. It's a country of orphans.
LK: The whole thing is just beyond... Beyond comprehension.
JC: Could it have been stopped?
LK: Yeah, if we did it... It could have stopped if the people in the beginning had paid attention. Mathilde Krim, Dr. Krim had said if we had just paid attention in the very beginning to she and me, it could have been stopped. If the New York Times had written about it, if Ed Koch had attended to it as a public health measure in New York, yes, people would have put on notice much earlier. I mean, Ronald Reagan didn't say AIDS for seven years in office, didn't say the word, and by then, it was already too late. It's too late now, I think... I know everybody's right, it's unfashionable to say that, but there's no way that these hundreds of millions of people can be saved now.
JC: But you've been HIV positive for maybe 20 years. And so aren't young men beginning to think, "Oh, it's a piece of cake." Isn't that happening? There seem to be more infections among young men than there have been a few years ago.
LK: That's another thing I cannot understand, the... The mindset of kids who know that what they're doing is endangering their lives, and it's very... It's been very painful to me because it's as if everybody we fought so hard for, who died, died in vain. There's absolutely no memory, no sense of community memory, of the hundreds of thousands of gay people who are gone in America. It's as if...
JC: You're losing your history, aren't you?
LK: Well, I don't know we're losing our history. We're losing some generations, but the history will be there. Enough people are beginning to write about it.
JC: Now, this wasn't all about AIDS but about the state of your liver. First of all, Newsweek said that you were dying, and then AP said you were dead. Was that a little disconcerting? [laughter]
LK: By the time the AP said it, I'd already had... I'd just come out [chuckle] I'd literally just come out of the operating room, where I think I was in intensive care one day, and was not very compos mentis. And David and Roger rushed in and said, "Newsweek... " I mean, "The AP has just said you're dead." And I sort of looked like this and I said, "Well, deal with it."
[laughter]
JC: And Mark Twain did something else, he said, wasn't it?
LK: Well, when Newsweek wrote the article, I was... I only had six months to live. I was... I had accepted it. I totally had accepted it.
JC: The problem with its liver transplant is... Maybe most people know was a liver transplant. The problem is that the drugs that you're taking so that you don't reject the liver are not the best drugs for an HIV positive person to be taking. So, there's a more...
LK: In my case, it was a little different, but you're right, and it's gonna become an enormous... That's the next great... I don't know what you call it. The next great world crisis is that, as people live longer, because we have the drugs now, their organs are gonna cave in faster. And they're gonna be more need, particularly in people, with one of the Hepatitises as well as HIV for all organs. It's now safe to say, and the doctors in New York are actually saying it, that people with HIV today, with the drugs that are available, can actually expect to live normal lives, which is, hey, unheard of.
JC: They're mild or strange, or something, isn't there? That...
LK: No, I just think the drugs have been very... Which our activism has delivered to the world, have actually proved to be much more... Far more successful than even we dreamed of. And there are enough of them so that if you don't react well to one, there's another one to try. But the Hepatitises are a different matter. Hepatitis B, there now are two, and soon to be three, really excellent drugs which will control the Hepatitis B, Epivir, Adefovir and Tenofovir. But Hepatitis C, which affects far more people around the world, and is a very deadly form of Hepatitis, and very, very hard to treat, only has several very ineffective drugs right now, although they're more in the pipeline.
JC: Your long wait for a donor, for a liver donor led you to another cause that, in your spare time, you're beginning to pick up, I hear.
LK: I actually was very lucky I didn't, in retrospect, wait that long. And I have no idea why I have been so lucky my entire adult life with this illness. I've never had an opportunistic infection. I've never had... I never took AIDS drugs, per se, I never took a protease until I had the... Until I had to after the transplant, which they required. My T cells were always in a fairly normal range, my viral load was always fairly low. And then one day I had had Hepatitis B for a very long time, but it had been dormant, and this drug Epivir, suddenly... Which I had taken for a number of years, suddenly gave out at me. I became resistant to it, and I got very sick, and that's when I really started getting sick. And then, again, luck came my way, and I was told it was... This experimental drug was still then in trial, as Adefovir, at the NIH. So I had to go to Washington and get this drug every month, and that really brought the Hepatitis down to manageable levels. And then one day, even though my liver... I was told the liver, whether the Hepatitis was active or not, only had about six more months left. And like I said...
JC: You were told six months...
LK: Oh god, yes.
JC: What did...
LK: I was told by more than one person. Dr. Fauci told me at the NIH, and my doctors in New York, and I...
JC: If we'd knew when we might die, what does...
LK: Well, they can know, they can see...
JC: No, no, I'm going somewhere else with this. If we knew when we were gonna die, what would we do for the next six months? If, for sure, in six months, we'll be dead... What did you do?
LK: Well, I accepted it, and it wasn't so long after the Newsweek article came out that I was told that I might be eligible for a liver transplant. And the minute I heard that, I knew I was gonna get that liver if my life depended on it, and indeed, it did. And it was, again, just sheer luck, they were beginning to transplant what are called co-infected people, with HIV and one of the Hepatitises. And there was a... There were a few hospitals willing to do it. Not many still will do it. And it happened that a couple of very courageous pioneers, in fact, wanted to do it, including the man who transplanted me, Dr. John Fung, at the University of Pittsburgh. And it had nothing to do with who I was, thank goodness. He didn't know...
JC: You didn't yell at him, though.
LK: He didn't know who I was. He had no idea who I was.
JC: And you were polite. I'm just...
[laughter]
LK: So I was lucky and I got the transplant, and I'm here to tell you that I have a 45-year-old man's liver, and I feel 45. And he said, Dr. Fung, that you are as old as your liver, and I believe it.
JC: Tell me, if you went back, writing this, you've been working for about 100 years on this for The American People. How is it coming?
LK: For The American People?
JC: Are you ever gonna finish it? Just curiosity... It's 2000 pages long.
LK: 2500 so far.
JC: What does your publisher think of that?
LK: He thinks...
JC: Goodie, oh, goodie, it'll be this big.
LK: He thinks it's wonderful, thank God. Only one person, two people have read it, David and my editor, Will Schwalbe.
JC: I just mean publishing a book that big, have you thought of bringing out...
LK: Who cares? You find a way.
JC: Two parts.
LK: Who cares, whatever the technology is at the time.
JC: Who's gonna be able to lift it?
LK: You'll be able to lift it if you wanna read it. So to put it... I don't know, it comes out in volumes, whatever. I've never done the same thing twice in my writing. All my plays are different, the screenplay, all the essays. I don't like to do the same thing twice, which is probably really why I haven't written more plays, 'cause I've done it already, and somehow I wanted to write something really long. I didn't know it would be this long, but technically, it's very interesting, it's a challenge. How do you make people read something that's that long technically? How do you keep them going?
JC: A lot of sex, I suppose, that kind of thing.
LK: Pornography.
JC: Yes, I hit a nerve there.
LK: Well, what it is, it's about... It's a history of America, and it's a history of how homosexuals have been oppressed in America from day one. And it's a history of disease, it's the history of AIDS, except it's called the underlying condition. And where did it come from? And I start with, literally, the monkeys in the Everglades, before anything else, and it goes through those thousands of years until today. And it's been fascinating. I've never once gotten bored with doing it. It challenges me, it's very hard to do. My brother, my lover, nobody thinks I'm doing anything because it's taking so long, but I am. I'm a slow writer, as I told you. But it's a huge, huge challenge. It's enormously ambitious, and probably too ambitious, and I don't know if I can bring it off... And of course, I didn't think I was gonna live to finish it. When Dr. Fung asked me why I wanted to live, if he gave me a new liver, I said, "I wanna finish my novel and I want more time with David." And now, when he sees me, he keeps saying, "Alright, where's the book?" [laughter] As David keeps saying.
JC: Did you use a researcher?
LK: No, I've done it all myself.
JC: All yourself.
LK: Yeah, still... It's still has a ways to go.
JC: What happened with your fight with Yale? You'd finally reconciled?
LK: Oh, it's wonderful. It took me 20 years.
JC: You were gonna give them the million dollars, and they said, "No thanks"?
LK: My brother gave them a million dollars. It turned out wonderfully well. I don't know if any... I went to Yale, and I wanted... I'd been trying, for great many years, to get them to teach gay studies, to teach anything gay. And when I grew up, my will, many years ago, long before I had any money, I put in that I want all these things, that if I had any money, I would leave it to Yale before David, if there ever was a before David in my life. So, when I got sick, I called up Yale and I said, "What do I do? How do I... " And they said, "Well, send us your will." So, I sent the will and you would have thought, again, the... All hell... All [inaudible]... I don't know. They couldn't believe it. I was told, in no uncertain terms, they didn't want my money. They would not do any of the things I wanted, like get a professor of gay studies, or teach gay studies or acknowledge gay studies, and they didn't wanna separate gay kids from other kids, and just sort of hateful.
LK: And the New York Times, for once, picked up... Picked up, I had nothing to do with it, somebody else told them, and they wrote a big story about it. And Yale looked awful because, by then, everybody… Every other college in America was teaching, or had some kind of gay... Important university had some kind of gay academic presence, and they looked so foolish, and they knew it. And then, I'm very close to a classmate of mine, you may know Calvin Trillin, and Calvin was on the board of the university, and he called up the president, and he said, "Enough is enough, you guys have really gotta do something." So, at that point, my brother said, if they do do something, I will give a million dollars for it. And so, Calvin brokered this whole thing, where there's now... And his wife Alice, now unfortunately deceased, gave it its name of The Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies. They wouldn't call it a center, so we had to have a think tank about what we could call it if they wouldn't call it a center, and it's there. And they've hired an incredible man, Jonathan Katz from The University of San Francisco, and we're up and running.
JC: I can't imagine if there's ever before, in the history of academia, that people had to fight in order to give money to a university.
LK: More than you know, evidently, more than you know. They turned down something like $20 million from one of the Basses... Maybe it was $100 million, I don't know, it was a lot, because they felt he was trying to dictate what he wanted the money spent for, and they got very high and mighty about it.
JC: Oh? You should try U of T, they'll take anything.
[laughter]
LK: Well, so would anybody else... I cannot tell you. I got way over 100 letters after the New York Times article from everywhere, Harvard, Princeton, UCLA, Berkeley, The University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, everywhere. Cornell... Cornell sent me the plans of a building they were prepared to build, things like that.
LK: So we wound up talking about activism and not at all about literature.
JC: We did so talk about literature. You told me how long your book is. [laughter] Thank you very much, Larry Kramer.
LK: That's a beautiful gift, literally.
[applause]
OUTRO:
RANDY: Larry Kramer was born in Bridgeport Connecticut, in 1935 and graduated from his father’s alma mater Yale in 1957. He moved to New York following a stint in the army, and thereafter devoted himself to writing plays and screenplays, including the script for the 1969 cinematic adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He went on to write plays and novels, including most notably Faggots, The Normal Heart, and The American People, and he emerged as the most prominent AIDS activist in America during the 1980s, founding the organization ACT UP in 1987. Kramer has received a series of accolades throughout his career and was the first winner of the Larry Kramer Activism Award. His death was reported in 2001, and as of 2020, Kramer’s still going, still writing, still talking and, when necessary, screaming.
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is a year-long podcast series that celebrates 40 years of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. It's produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou and Michelle De Marco, and marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and research support from Marcella van Run.
For more about Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in the TPL’s collections. For all of Toronto Public Library’s podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: 40 years of TIFA.