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My rage is my freedom.” Is that true for you? He paused, looked at the interviewer, and said, “My rage is my art. So here is my question: There’s a Senegalese filmmaker named Ousmane Sembène who was asked if his anger and his rage got in the way of his art. LARRY KRAMER: You were brilliant in the play.īARKIN: Well, that’s the Larry Kramer effect. When I was doing that play, I felt like I’d never do anything more important. You also brought back an art form sadly missing. That’s you, fighting, and out of that came a revolution and the salvation of hundreds of millions of lives. Wolfe says something like, “One person said no, and then another, and that’s how you make change, and that’s how you start a revolution,” I thought, that’s the lesson of Larry Kramer to me. I re-watched the documentary Larry Kramer in Love and Anger last night and when George C.
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CHRISTOPHER BOLLENĮLLEN BARKIN: Since I did your play in 2011, my life has changed, my world has changed, and my response to the world had changed. Late last October, Barkin stopped by Kramer’s apartment off Washington Square Park to talk to the famously angry activist about fights both old and new. Barkin went on to star in the 2011 Broadway revival of The Normal Heart, for which she won a Tony Award, and the two have been good friends ever since. The actor Ellen Barkin first met Kramer in 1995 when they both appeared on a talk show. It picks up the plot in “postwar America,” although, we quickly realize, we have never been without war. This one bears the face of Kramer himself. The first volume, published in 2015, finds the founding father (and, according to Kramer, the homosexual war hero) George Washington gracing its cover. This January, Kramer is publishing The Brutality of Fact, the second volume of his novelistic meta-work The American People, in which the author has taken it upon himself to amend American history from its delusional straight domain with the willful insertion of high-spirited gayness. His battles have been legendary, his willingness to engage profound. When Kramer finds an enemy, good luck to that person. The heroism of that movement, with its strategies for civil disobedience, has not been matched to this day. By the time it came out, Kramer had already co-founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis and, in 19 8 7, he took his anger and defiance to the streets with the formation of ACT UP. The Normal Heart is a bellwether work in its power of art and provocation. When AIDS began to devastate that very community in the early 1980s, largely due to the cruel indifference of the culture at large, Kramer penned a play, his third, that soared and raged and howled about the suffering and losses of this new disease while the politicians looked away and the medical experts wringed their hands. In 1978, he wrote the controversial gay-life novel Faggots, incendiary for its frankness even among its own community. After clocking time as a burgeoning Hollywood screenwriter in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Kramer returned to Manhattan, and so began one of the most radical, trailblazing careers in American letters. The longtime New Yorker has spent most of his life standing up, shouting from the top of his lungs, blocking doors, and naming names for the purpose of saving lives. For him, it is not his memory that is sick, but the country itself-particularly its conscience. My memory is sick.” No writer has been able to chronicle the horrible, maddening, delirious depths of the AIDS epidemic in America like the 84-year-old activist, writer, and gay icon Larry Kramer. “In the end that is the short and simple.
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“Nobody lives,” we’re told toward the conclusion of The American People, Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact.