Faggots

by Larry Kramer

Failing to reform urban Western queer customs in the late 1970s, Larry Kramer absorbed the abuse his vision received and when—all too quickly—his dread began to realize itself in an epidemic that has proved far more ghastly than any critic could have imagined, he turned his unsleeping insight and energy into powerful social action, into the creation of eminently practical means of combating both the plague and society’s refusal to acknowledge the plain humanity of its victims. No prior satirist known to me has waded, blood-drenched, into such useful work. The fact that a mind with the observational and analytic powers of Kramer’s became the terrible and largely successful foe of Federal, religious, and private sustainers of the viciously passive witness of disaster is still as astonishing as it is admirable.