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The Pessimist
AIDS Activist Larry Kramer, Hoarse From Speaking Truth to Power
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By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 9, 2005; C01
Who will be the next Larry Kramer?
The man himself -- AIDS activist, writer, provocateur -- doesn't know. Right now, Kramer is fighting all this noise: the cell phones going off, the cash register ringing, the 2-year-old who keeps crying whenever she drops her pink pacifier. Then there's the front door that won't shut, people trickling in and out.
Inside Lambda Rising, a bookstore in Dupont Circle, he reads from "The Tragedy of Today's Gays," his latest work.
This is not an autobiographical play about AIDS in the mode of his 1985 off-Broadway work, "The Normal Heart." It's not another "Faggots," his novel set in a hedonistic Manhattan of the late 1970s, which made him persona non grata within segments of the gay community -- how dare Kramer, a gay man himself, decry a gay man's right to have sex and lots of it? "The Tragedy of Today's Gays" is altogether something else: the work of a tireless yeller who's now dead tired of yelling.
"Tragedy" was a speech -- delivered last November, five days after the election -- that he turned into a book. It's a sprawling polemic, a call to action, angry, frustrated, passionate. It's as if he views AIDS's continued existence, despite his nearly quarter-century of unparalleled activism, as somehow his personal failing. He might as well have titled his new book "The Tragedy of Today's Larry Kramer."
"From the very first moment we were told in 1981 that the suspected cause might be a virus," he says in the speech, "gay men have refused to accept our responsibility . . . and, starting in 1984, when we were told it definitely was a virus, this behavior turned murderous."
He regrets not using the word "murder" earlier. Use condoms, he's been saying all along; don't confuse sexual freedom with sexual promiscuity. In the introduction to the book, he writes, "How long can I go on making speeches that, it is more than apparent, few people listen to?" In the speech, he adds, "There is not one single person in Washington who will . . . give us anything but [expletive] and more [expletive]." He grew up in Washington yet hesitates to call it home. He's got no political clout, no access, no power. "I'm nobody here," he says simply.
Still, at age 69, he keeps on speaking, keeps on writing, keeps on, at this particular moment, sparking fire: "I've said it many times and I'm going to say it again."
He's been known as a shouter, a screamer. But his voice, breathy and low, is just above a whisper. The crowd of about 70, mostly gay men, leans forward.
"Washington gays have always been the most docile -- "
Frank Kameny cuts him off. "That is certainly not the case." Kameny, the father of the District's gay rights movement, is standing in front, sounding fierce, defensive, robust. He's 79.
"Washington, D.C., is the political success story of the gay movement. Quietly but effectively and don't say that we have been docile."
"So why don't we have more rights?" Kramer asks, finally getting a word in. "Why aren't we further along?"
"Compare where we are now with where we were 30 or 40 years ago. We certainly are very much farther as a people than we were then, and we're moving ahead," says Kameny. "There will be backlashes, we're going through one now, and we'll pass it fine and we'll proceed and we'll declare victory."
"I guess I just don't agree with that," Kramer says.
Kameny shoots back, "Then you're wrong."
Later, outside the bookstore, on his way to a late dinner, Kramer says, "I'm tired. I'm tired of saying the same things. I've said enough. People look at me for answers. But I don't know anymore. I'm gonna be 70 soon. It's your world now. Please do something with it."
Counting the Costs
The war against AIDS, Kramer will tell you, has been lost.
"Isn't it obvious?" he says flatly, sitting in the back room of Annie's, the after-the-gay-club 24-hour eatery on 17th Street NW, Washington's miniature equivalent of San Francisco's Castro Street.
It's been a long day and a longer night. The train ride. The book reading. Now this interview.
"Some 70 million people so far are expected to die from AIDS," he goes on, which is word for word what he says in his speech. It isn't at all rare to hear Kramer quoting himself.
Is there another living American writer whose politics are so thoroughly interwoven with his art? His most noted work cannot be divorced from AIDS. The plays "The Normal Heart" and "The Destiny of Me" centered on the life of Kramer's alter ego, Ned Weeks; one of his books of essays is "Reports From the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist." Sometimes critics have focused entirely on what he's saying, his politics, rather than how he's saying it, his art.
"How are they going to save all the infected people? It's too late," says Kramer, who's dressed in his usual Oshkosh overalls and turquoise jewelry -- four bracelets, three rings. ("It's a silly superstition, but I've been told that wearing turquoise will keep me healthy," he says.) He underwent a liver transplant three years ago -- "AIDS Activist Larry Kramer Dies," read the headline of an erroneous Associated Press wire story -- and a hernia operation a year later. He has a peculiar gait, slow and careful, which you could call leisurely if it were not caused by pain, and a lot of it.
"We told them early on, but what did they do?" Kramer asks. To be clear, "they" means "the U.S. government." To a certain degree, "we" means "I."
The Reagan White House did nothing about AIDS in its early years, Kramer says, and the White House of the second President Bush -- even with its five-year, $15 billion global AIDS program -- does an "inadequate" and "pathetic" job of dealing with it now. The White House of the first President Bush didn't do nearly enough, he adds, and the same can be said of the Clinton White House. In his speeches, in his writings, in his interviews, Kramer spews this out: There were 41 cases of "the gay plague" when he first started yelling about "whatever it was" in 1981, and there are now more than 40 million people, gay and straight, who are infected with HIV -- a figure he attributes to a 2002 U.N. report, which also said that some 70 million will die from AIDS in the next 20 years.
Those with money and health insurance -- like Kramer, who tested HIV-positive in 1987 -- can afford the expensive "cocktail" of drugs to treat it. But what about the rest of the world?
"What if, one of these days, the drugs all of a sudden stop working?" Kramer, ever the pessimist, asks.
"There's a grimness in Larry's politics -- it's not a sort of politics of feel-good exhortation," says Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of "Angels in America," subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes." "In a way, like a lot of Jewish men of Larry's generation, the Holocaust is a defining historical moment, and what happened in the early 1980s with AIDS felt, and was in fact, holocaustal to Larry."
"Larry wanted to do things now, quickly, strongly. He's always been that way," says Tim Westmoreland, who has known Kramer since the early 1980s. A law professor at Georgetown University, Westmoreland is a longtime adviser to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).
In April 1982, Waxman, then chairman on the House's Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, organized the first congressional hearing on AIDS. That year Kramer -- in response to what he perceived as the government that didn't want to hear about this mysterious disease and the gay community that was reluctant to face it -- co-founded Gay Men's Health Crisis, the first and one of the largest AIDS service organizations in the United States. But GMHC's tactics weren't confrontational enough, not fiery enough, not explosive enough. So in 1987, he founded the protest group ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.
ACT-UP lived up to its name -- at its height, it boasted more than 130 national chapters and Kramer, as its leader, became the most iconic figure of the AIDS movement. He was intimidating. He was outrageous. He was relentless, helping to stop trading on the New York Stock Exchange floor, staging mass "die-ins" in front of the White House, interrupting Dan Rather's "CBS Evening News" broadcast. It's hard to overestimate the impact of these protests, and Kramer, a very public face of an increasingly public disease, was in everyone's face. Some people, both gay and straight, thought he was going too far. The whole "right message/wrong messenger" concept that he heard one too many times.
"He's like the drill sergeant of the AIDS movement. Everything's too slow for him -- and that's good. God knows we need a prophet in the wilderness who's always saying what people don't want to hear," says Westmoreland. "But, at the time, if you were working within the system" -- at the National Institutes of Health, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or on Capitol Hill -- "you wanted to tell him, 'Be reasonable, it will take a while,' but he'd say, 'No, do it now.' "
Anthony Fauci, director of NIH's program on infectious diseases, couldn't escape Kramer's scorn in the early years of the epidemic. Fauci was a "criminal," Kramer wrote in a scathing open letter to Fauci published in the San Francisco Examiner. Fauci was "incompetent." In his 1992 off-Broadway play, "The Destiny of Me," mostly set in Washington, Kramer changed the name Fauci to Della Vida, "but there's no doubt that was me," says Fauci.
"What Larry did, by his provocative approach, is change the medical landscape in this country for the better. How patients talked to their doctors. How constituencies interacted with researchers at the NIH and regulators at the FDA," says Fauci, who says he considers Kramer a "close friend."
Their relationship has indeed evolved, and Fauci credits it to a long walk he and Kramer took on a spring night at an AIDS conference in Montreal years later: "I have a phenomenal amount of respect for Larry, a tremendous amount of admiration. He's been a lightning rod, no question about it."
What Could Have Been
For more than 20 years, Kramer has been working on "The American People," a history of the United States as he sees it, "a great deal of it" set in Washington. It's now some 3,000 manuscript pages, and he'll finish it when he finishes it.
"It defies categorization," he says of the book. "Some of it has to be fictionalized for legal reasons. Some of the people in it are still alive."
It goes without saying that the forthcoming book "deals with a lot of stuff that's controversial."
"Forget 30 or 40 years ago. We're not living 30 or 40 years ago. We're living in 2005," he says. "You have to look at the present situation -- what laws are in place today, not just in Washington but in the whole country, that give gay people truly equal status?"
He's disappointed -- at himself, at other gay people, at straight people, at everyone. The HIV infection rate among gay men is on the upswing in many parts of the country, with men hooked on crystal meth (who are more likely to have unsafe sex) fueling the rise, according to Randy Pumphrey, director of the Lambda Center at the Psychiatric Institute of Washington. The legal battles, from "don't ask, don't tell" to same-sex marriage to gay adoptions, haven't been won. If the United States is a country of laws, he says, what does that say? If the United States is also a country of culture, he adds, is it enough to say you don't miss an episode of "Will & Grace" and you know a friend of a friend who's a lesbian?
The artist and the activist and the pessimist feels more and more bogged down. He wanted to be a Moses and lead a tribe. Instead, he could only be a Cassandra, the Greek heroine who had the gift of prophecy but was never believed.
Even that has come at a price.
"Larry is more honored as an activist than as a writer -- and I think that's a terrible thing," Kushner says. "In truth, Larry would have preferred to not have gone to war.
"How many gorgeous passages are there in 'Faggots'? How many beautiful pages of prose?" Kushner adds. He wonders, as do others, "Who knows what Kramer might have written had he not taken it upon himself to shape a whole movement -- a whole movement -- in response to the epidemic?"
Kramer would love to have been a comedy writer -- a Broadway comedy writer. Think Neil Simon, or George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart of "You Can't Take It With You" fame. He would have written more successful screenplays; his screenplay for the 1969 film "Women in Love," based on the D.H. Lawrence book, was nominated for an Academy Award, after all.
"There wasn't a casting call for Larry. When AIDS began, before we even knew to call it AIDS, he recognized a historic opportunity and he had the courage to speak the truth," says Rodger McFarlane, a longtime friend. He met Kramer in 1981, in the same Greenwich Village apartment Kramer now shares with his lover of 10 years, David Webster, the same apartment where Kramer started GMHC. McFarlane and Kramer were lovers for some time, though McFarlane considers "lover" a "reductionist term."
"We were many, many, many things beyond that, and I happen to know that Larry sincerely believes the fight, both against AIDS and for our equality, is lost for now," McFarlane continues.
"Sometimes I ask myself, 'Who is going to be the next Larry Kramer?' That's a good . . . question, isn't it?
"When Larry was writing" the "tragedy" speech, "he was trying to come up with a solution. We'd be on the phone together, and he'd ask, 'What do we tell them to do?' But he's exhausted. I'm exhausted. You want to kill yourselves, go kill yourself. You want your civil rights, come fight."
A Marathon Crawl
The question is whether Kramer is right in thinking that his life -- his life's work -- has been for naught. That nothing has changed.
"Look, I wish this struggle was a 50-yard dash," says Jim Graham, one of two openly gay D.C. Council members. For 15 years, from 1984 to 1999, Graham served as executive director of the Whitman-Walker Clinic, the largest provider of AIDS-related services in the Washington area. Kramer called Graham on several occasions, and it's no surprise that Kramer, true to form, advised Graham on what to do during those years. "But I've been a gay activist in a very open way since 1981 and I know that this is a long-distance run."
The District, with regard to the gay community, was a very conservative Southern town for a long time, Graham says, and in some parts of town, he continues, it still is conservative.
Graham goes on: "But things are changing. Not to Larry's speed, I'm sure, but they are changing."
Washington, with a sizable gay population, was for two weeks waiting to learn if a gay couple who got married in Massachusetts would be allowed to file a joint city tax return. Sam Brownback, a Republican senator from Kansas, would rather they did not. "I was hopeful we weren't going to be confronting this issue," Brownback, who chairs the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the District, told The Washington Post on April 20. On Tuesday, the city's top tax official ruled that married same-sex couples may not file joint returns, but Edward G. Horvath and Richard G. Neidich, the couple involved, may decide to file suit.
Kramer, of course, is following the case.
In the late 1980s, Kramer moved back to Washington, subletting a spacious two-bedroom apartment on California Street NW, off Connecticut Avenue. He couldn't stand it. "If I lasted two months, that was a lot," he says. So much for the local boy done good. "It's easier to criticize Washington from afar than it is to be here."
On the morning after the book reading, Kramer, for the first time since he graduated in 1953, set foot in the corridors of Wilson High School in Tenleytown. Because he lived in Mount Rainier in Prince George's County, he wasn't supposed to go to Wilson, then as now considered the best public high school in the District. But his older brother, Arthur, came up with a plan. Take German. Only Wilson High offered German. "I knew that he had to go to Wilson in order to get into Yale," says Arthur, 78, also a Yale alumnus.
From the look of it, the campus has not changed at all -- "that's really creepy for the students who now go here," Kramer says -- but, inside, in ways both big and small, it has.
Three floors down from his homeroom -- Room 331, he remembers -- is a locker with a blue flier taped on it. The flier is for a Gay-Straight Alliance meeting, held on Thursdays at lunch in Room L26.
Michael Garbus, a social science teacher who is openly gay, is the adviser.
He lives in Adams Morgan with his 4-year-old adopted son, Keyon, who is Korean and black and now a converted Jew.
From salon.com
Sex panic
Veteran AIDS activist and playwright Larry Kramer is still denouncing young gay men for spreading HIV through reckless sex and drug use. He needs to drop the angry-prophet pose and start talking to the people on the front lines.
By Richard Kim
May 7, 2005.
AIDS activist and playwright Larry Kramer has a lot in common with the late Andrea Dworkin: a Manichaean worldview, a penchant for hyperbolic speech and dowdy dress, a murky relationship with empirical truth, a quixotic tribalism that manifests all at once as genuine love and venomous contempt for their respective kin -- women and gay men. Like Dworkin, whose screeds against pornography were so laden with pornographic content and style that they were banned by the very anti-porn ordinances she helped author, Kramer possesses an uncanny ability to mime the putative object of criticism -- in his case, homophobia.
To some, Kramer is a narcissistic gadfly whose passion for controversy and flagellation undermines the causes -- AIDS and the gay movement -- to which he so passionately devotes himself. To others, he's a brilliant and misunderstood prophet who dares to speak the hard truth nobody wants to hear. Indeed, this is how Kramer styles himself, as a Cassandra in the desert whose warnings in 1981 about a mysterious, unnamed plague went unheeded, whose call to arms in 1987 to fight the criminal lack of funding for AIDS prevention and treatment rallied precious few, and whose current campaign -- laid out in his new book, "The Tragedy of Today's Gays" -- to reinvigorate a gay movement he sees as "completely inept," "powerless" and "disposable" will, he predicts, fall on the deaf ears of today's "tragic," "fucked up," "blind" and "ignorant" gays who "richly deserve" their fate.
Anyone familiar with Kramer's overheated polemics knows to take such fatalistic rebukes lightly, or at best as a kind of provocation. But why -- this time around -- do they come wrapped in such false modesty? After all, his early alarms about AIDS laid the groundwork for the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), an organization started in his living room that has since become one of the country's largest AIDS service providers. His 1987 speech at the Gay and Lesbian Center in New York sparked ACT UP, the radical collective whose spiky tactics are now imitated by activists of all stripes. Along with Tony Kushner -- who generously blurbs Kramer's book -- he is one of the most celebrated chroniclers of gay issues in America. He publishes in the editorial pages of the New York Times. His autobiographical play-cum-jeremiad "The Normal Heart" continues to be canonized in classrooms across the country and was recently revived at the Public Theater in New York. A speech he gave shortly after the 2004 election in the Great Hall at Cooper Union -- and which provides the basis for this new book -- drew 700 rapt listeners and several hundred more were turned away.
Indeed, this public embrace of Kramer seems so at odds with his persona that it's hard to explain. How can someone who's such a self-professed pain in the ass to both the gay movement and the mainstream establishment receive such accommodation? Perhaps it's because, as Naomi Wolf unwittingly hits upon in her introduction to "The Tragedy of Today's Gays," Kramer is a "humanist writer in the humanist tradition," someone who "reclaims the language and consciousness of morality" and transcends "identity politics" to speak of "universal love." Wolf intends these as compliments, but they might be considered indictments as well.
Although Kramer claims several times in "The Tragedy of Today's Gays" to "love gay people," to think them "better," "smarter," "more aware" and "more talented" than other people, it quickly becomes clear that he doesn't know a whole lot about them. 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. Sure, Kramer occasionally mentions a young gay man he finds laudable, like the playwright Jeff Whitty, who wrote a musical about plushy puppets finding themselves on the subway ("Avenue Q"). But really, must we all be marionettes singing the same tune night after night? In Kramer's view, today's gays are a lot like yesterday's gays. "Does it ever occur to you that we brought this plague of AIDS upon ourselves?" Kramer asks in "The Tragedy of Today's Gays," but this rhetorical question is virtually identical to the invectives spewed by Ned Weeks, hero of "The Normal Heart," in 1985. And now, 20 years later, according to Kramer, "You are still doing it. You are still murdering each other."
It's a shame that Kramer's attempt to address young gay men ultimately devolves into the same pathological, self-destructive plot that has guided all of his writing on AIDS, for there is a glimmer of sympathy in this book that deserves consideration. Kramer writes that there's "a big empty space" in young gay men's lives; "America let these men who should have been your role models die." So, according to Kramer, this "big empty space" leads today's gays to "disdain anyone older who was there" and "condemn [our] predecessors to nonexistence."
This generational rupture, overstated as it is in this book, hasn't been fully addressed by the gay movement and AIDS activism, and it's important that it is. Gay people don't learn about gay sex and relationships in their families, and with the Bush administration's assault on sex education, they certainly don't learn about them in school. So the sort of cultural memory that Kramer wishes were there is vital, not only to acknowledge the devastating impact AIDS had on gay culture, but to fully understand how gay culture itself pioneered the safe-sex programs that significantly reduced HIV infection. This kind of historical reflection might also take into account the fact that today's gays are the first generation to grow up entirely under the shadow of AIDS. It is fundamental to how we think of sex and gayness. But maybe we need a different kind of safe-sex message than the sort of fear-mongering that Kramer thinks so effective, since to fear AIDS is to fear our very capacity for sex and intimacy.
Sadly, Kramer doesn't go there. For him, history and destiny are one and the same; time is circular. Would that this tendency were particular to Kramer, but anyone who followed the Times' badly mangled coverage of the new drug-resistant "superbug" can find parallels not only in Kramer's work but also in the sensationalistic media coverage of AIDS in the '80s (see David France's excellent anatomy of a panic in New York magazine). Both substitute actual compassion and understanding (never mind reporting) with a deeply familiar drama ("Tragedy" is no accidental title) of a doomed people whose pathological predilection for sin invokes the wrath of an angry God. This is a kind of "morality," I suppose, but whether it reclaims or merely recapitulates the moral language that emanates from biblical fundamentalism is subject to debate.
The difference of course is that Kramer means well. I believe it when he says that he loves gay people, even as I believe that he reserves for them a special kind of scorn born of impossible expectations. Kramer is agitated about a lot of things: the election in which "60 million people voted against us," the "cabal" of religious and
financial elites who have seized this country's public and political institutions and turned America into a "classist, racist, homophobic, imperial army of pirates," the Bush administration's $100 billion war on Iraq that has diverted much needed funding for AIDS and other humanitarian causes. But these political transformations -- geopolitical and world-historical in scale, complex in nature -- have a curious way of settling upon what Kramer deems the "murderous" behavior of gay men who "get hooked on crystal," and engage in "endless rounds of sex-seeking" and "fucking without condoms." He moves jarringly -- sometimes within the same paragraph -- from a recount of right-wing machinations to dire statements about how gays "shrank from our duty of opposition," slunk off to "a disco, or to the Fire Island Pines or South Beach, or into therapy, or onto drugs" and are thus responsible for our own erasure "into nothingness." "What do you do with yourselves all week long, seven days and nights a week, that amounts to anything really important?" "We stand here and let them do it!" "The Tragedy of Today's Gays" is peppered with bolded sentences such as these, and each one is directed like a bullet at the souls of Kramer's beloved clan.
At the point in Kramer's essay where he really gets a full head of steam going, he cites a series of unsourced AIDS statistics, among them: "HIV infections are up as much as 40 percent," "some 70 million people so far are expected to die," and "there are now more than 70 million who have been infected with HIV." The first is, if not an outright lie, a hyperbolic and misleading untruth. Kramer never does specify to whom, when and where this statistic refers, but according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that relies on limited data, HIV infection rates for men who have sex with men (the population Kramer is almost exclusively concerned about) rose 11 percent over four years (2000-03) after steadily declining throughout the '90s. This rise, coupled with increases in syphilis and other STDs among gay men, has rightly concerned HIV prevention experts who are still debating what factors contributed to this spike. But in any event, Kramer's "40 percent" increase is a gross exaggeration.
As for Kramer's second and third statistics -- the "70 million" who are "expected to die" and/or "who have been infected with HIV" -- the context in which these two figures are presented would lead one to believe that Kramer is referring to the number of current HIV-positive people worldwide. But in fact the "70 million" who are "expected to die" refers to a UNAIDS projection for 2022 if treatment and prevention programs aren't significantly ramped up -- an alarming, but still avertable, possibility. The "70 million who have been infected with HIV" refers to the total number of HIV infections since the beginning of the epidemic, of which some 30 million have died. The current number of HIV cases worldwide is somewhere near 40 million, 95 percent of which are in the developing world, an indication of tremendous global inequalities in wealth and healthcare that Kramer never bothers to discuss. These loony and inflationary statistics are familiar territory for Kramer. In 2003, he published an Op-Ed in the New York Times that began with the claim that "50 million people around the world are going to die in a matter of days or months or at the most a few years." Days? Months? Even a few years? These dire predictions have, thankfully, not been fulfilled -- although too many people have died in the interim. But despite being taken to task by Andrew Sullivan for these factual errors, Kramer has only amplified them in "Tragedy," and it speaks ill of the Times and Tarcher/Penguin's standards that they ever made it to press.
But why quibble with Kramer over these numbers? Thirty, 40, 70 million -- these are all holocausts. Any rise in incidence rate, or even stagnation at current levels, is troubling. That Kramer has printed these misleading statistics can mean only one of two things: either 1) after 25 years of AIDS activism he cannot understand simple epidemiological data; or 2) he has carefully and willfully manipulated these figures. Since the first possibility is too loathsome to bear let us assume the latter. Kramer's intention then is to instill a panic in his audience, and indeed grandiose scare tactics are his preferred mode of address. Responding to reports of the new "superbug," Kramer said, "You can never be scared too much. Fear is the only thing that seems to work in controlling people's suicidal, murderous behavior." I'll leave it to HIV prevention experts to debate Kramer's vision of "safe-sex education," and simply point out another victim of Kramer's casualness with truth: hope. "We have lost the war against AIDS." "As of November 2, 2004, gay rights in our country are officially dead." These kinds of proclamations, along with manipulation of AIDS data, are symptomatic of Kramer's Cassandra complex; he conflates the very worst possible future with the uncertain present. So intent is he on being accurate prophet that one has to wonder whether Kramer really intends to provoke action at all. If the apocalypse has already happened, what's a would-be activist to do?
In this sense, Kramer leaves largely unexplored what the relationship might be between the rightward political lurch and the state of AIDS politics and the gay movement. Analysis is not his forte, and besides, it would mean actually engaging the gay men and lesbians (women are conspicuously absent in Kramer's book except as silenced "helpmates") who do the kind of "backbreaking, grinding, unglamorous work" that he finds so commendable among the right's foot soldiers. He might have mentioned, for example, how the Bush administration's Department of Health and Human Services instituted new funding guidelines that make it virtually impossible to use federal funds for explicit prevention work among gay men, drug users and sex workers. Stop AIDS, a San Francisco community-based prevention organization that does exactly that, was one of the first groups defunded under this new mandate. But for Kramer to notice what happened to Stop AIDS or the dozens of other community organizations under threat would mean to surrender the rhetorical privilege he has so scrupulously hoarded. It would mean leaving behind the Cassandra routine and making contact with the "unglamorous." "But I am so very, very tired of fighting with so few troops," Kramer laments. And so, like a general who fails to notice that the war has long since moved on to new frontiers, Kramer keeps beating the drums and waiting for people to show up.
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