I've touched on the topic of the AIDS Pandemic and the inneffective prevention campaigns in its 30 year span many times before. There's this article, then this one, oh and this as well. I've discussed it ad nauseam.
However today someone shared this article with me and it moved me in more ways than one.
It is written by Larry Kramer, the disillusioned founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, author and LGBT rights activist from before most of my readers were a stain in their daddy's tighty whities.
Larry Kramer is the Bill Cosby of the gay community in the west: The Glitterati's elder statesman.
He has been accused of having great contempt for the young twinks that twirl the streets of NY and other major cities, post-coital from a tryst in the club bathroom stall, high on party drugs, and with highly active man-seeking accounts online. He doesn't mince words about how he feels young gays have wasted the gift he and other activists have given them. This hedonistic lifestyle is among the reasons that the spread of HIV and AIDS will not be curbed, in his estimation. Of course his other reasons speak more to institutionalized homophobia and a bureaucratic campaign to eliminate the undesirables, but the influence of the gay man on his own mortality should not be understated.
One of his critics, Richard Kim, had this succint critique of Kramer:
"He recycles the kind of harangues about gay men (and young gay men in particular) that institutions like the Times so love to print -- that they are buffoonish, disengaged Peter Pans dancing, drugging and fucking their lives away while the world and the disco burn down around them."
While I would not disagree with Kim's view, I think there is much truth to this caricatured representation.
Kramer knows what he's talking about. He was there in the beginning before this "thing" even had a name, and before its moniker was politically corrected so as not to identify the group most vulnerable to its lethal touch. He admittedly is no stranger to the peen and probably got and gave many blowjobs in those steamy bathhouses... this was the 70s after all.
Therefore I think his opinion matters as he has a broader perspective than most and as much as it may be slightly tinged with cynicism and he may come across as quite jaded, can you blame him?
That Kramer believes that HIV and AIDS have been allowed to continue almost unabated is not shocking to me. I have long been disenchanted with the prevention message and also with the attitudes of those most vulnerable in these serious times. That it was a deliberate move to eradicate unwanted populations may be a bit of a stretch for me but evil should never be underestimated.
Assuming there is any truth to what he asserts (and he has yet to be discredited, strangely) what does that mean for the entire AIDS movement?
Sure they'll call him a lunatic, but will anyone actively engage with his points of view?
Failure to do so gives them validity and broadens the axis of evil to include the do-gooders many of us so often eulogize.
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2 comments:
Interesting..
I adore Larry Kramer. People tend to shrug him off as a bitter old queen; however, he was in the trenches. Kramer knows the irreparable consequences of unabashed hedonism.
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