Perennially starved for funds, the Bailiwick Arts Center decided earlier this year to write to prominent gay individuals, acquaint them with the theater’s work and ask for money. Larry Kramer, the famous gay author and political figure, was on the list of targets.
But the irascible Kramer faxed back the fundraising letter without a cent.
“He’d scrawled across the lists of our past seasons, `Why no Larry Kramer plays?’ ” says David Zak, the Bailiwick’s artistic director. “So I called him, asked him to come to Chicago and said we would do a reading of something new.”
Thus Kramer could be found Sunday night on Belmont Avenue, watching agroup of actors perform “Just Say No,” a typically mean, funny and apocalyptic-toned satire on the Reagan years and their effect on AIDS politics. The play, hurt by a negative review in The New York Times (and hardly fashionable in an era when the ailing former president and his wife are regarded with sentimental affection) has almost sunk without trace since its East Coast premiere.
“This play,” Kramer told the audience at Bailiwick Sunday night, “is like a child of mine that was wounded in the world.”
The reading (which featured, among others, E. Faye Butler and the splendid Mark Silvia) was too rough-and-ready to afford complete healing. And this political allegory in the form of a comedy only makes complete sense to those well-acquainted with the public and — alleged– personal lives of political figures in New York and Washington during the Reagan presidency (names are not used, but Kramer targets specific individuals with an intensity that would make lawyers nervous). But with Alexandra Billings causing gales of laughter as a character based on Nancy Reagan, Kramer’s avowedly political message is still perfectly clear: People in very high places during the 1980s, he is arguing, did and said little about AIDS because they were worried that their own sexual proclivities and peccadillos would risk exposure.
So it’s understandable that not everyone was delighted that Kramer was in Chicago. Anonymous and unpleasant voice-mail messages were left at the Bailiwick over the last few days suggesting that little of the controversy over this man has abated.
“Larry’s still a lightning rod, ” Zak said Sunday. “And he still upsets a certain kind of person.”
Kramer has been a controversial figure ever since the publication of “Faggots.” A graphic and intensely critical description of sexual hedonism among wealthy New Yorkers, Kramer’s 1980 book argued that the East Coast gay community was then so obsessed with carnal exploration there was no energy left to fight back against homophobia in the political arena, or fall in love for with one person forever.
Regarded as negative and self-loathing, the deadly serious book was removed from the shelves of what was then Manhattan’s only gay bookstore. The author quickly became a persona non grata. But when the sudden high incidence of Kaposi’s sarcoma (a usually fatal form of cancer) among gay men in New York and California attracted attention a year or so later, Kramer began to look like an accurate prophet.
The ever-confrontational Kramer fought from the very start against AIDS. Holding meetings in his apartment, he badgered The New York Times for press coverage, wrote to prominent gays asking for research money, bitterly and publicly attacked New York Mayor Ed Koch for his inattention to the crisis, and tried to persuade gay men to change their sexual behavior. In 1982, in the first major network news story about AIDS, Kramer pleaded for more research.
Kramer’s 1985 drama, “The Normal Heart,” was the first major theater piece to deal with AIDS, and its premiere provoked a rash of publicity for the author and rivaled the death of Rock Hudson in its ability to raise AIDS awareness.
These days, Kramer spends most of his time in seclusion in Connecticut, working on a 3,500-page historical novel about AIDS in America.
“The pendulum keeps swinging,” Kramer says. “I’ve gone from pariah to prophet to pariah again.”
“He’s like a really necessary and really annoying voice,” said Eric Rosen, artistic director of the About Face Theatre, a gay Chicago theater company. “We don’t perceive ourselves to be living in the same kind of crisis time. But he reminds us of things we’d rather forget.”
“One of the most profoundly depressing things I have ever lived through,” observed Kramer last week, “is the rise of a philosophy that wants to return to what it was like before AIDS. It’s like Jews forgetting the Holocaust. People desperately want to move on in life and get beyond AIDS, but unfortunately AIDS is still here.”
Himself HIV-positive, Kramer argues that the recent news from the World AIDS Conference is “a very mixed bag.”
“The good news is that there will soon be more than 2,000 different combinations of drugs that people with AIDS can take,” Kramer says. “The bad news is that the side effects are proving to be considerable.”
These days, Kramer has the air of a saddened and resigned activist who walks his dog, speaks in long phrases full of sighs and is forced to watch journalists continually reinvent the AIDS wheel. “The headlines about AIDS from year to year,” he says, “recycle all the same words.”
But Kramer has not lost his pugnacity. Aside from the novel, he is in the process of developing a secure Web page that will allow HIV-positive persons to enter information on the side effects and benefits of their drug treatments so that massive amounts of information may become quickly and widely available. Kramer hopes that 250,000 participants will be signed up worldwide over the next year or so. His partners in the endeavor include Lotus, IBM, Blue Cross/Blue Shield Health Plans and Harvard University.
“I’m still angry and ready for the next fight,” Kramer said. “I just fight more quietly and with different bedfellows.”
