Larry Kramer help me help you

Author: Rebecca Jones '08

Larry Kramer's lecture made me angry, which is both good and bad. It's good because I think his goal was to make me angry, so he succeeded. It's bad, however, because I don't think he meant for me to be mad at him.

Kramer meant to make me angry at the right wing cabal that has taken over America, and in that he failed. I was already angry with them, long before Kramer came to speak. Now, I'm angry with him and with the elder generations of every activist movement in America. I am angry that Kramer and other older activists constantly tell our generation that we are lazy and complacent. I am angry that, when our generation gets mad and does take action, the older generations don't give us the credit we deserve.

I am not alone. Third Wave, "Girlie" feminists like Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, authors of the book "Manifesta," have made careers of similar anger. So much of these women's time and energy is being dedicated to proving their worth to their elders that they are often unable to focus on the actual work of feminism! They are not the only ones fighting this fight - the same things happen in the gay activist communities, the African-American activist communities and any other group that has not been accorded its rightful place in the American public sphere.

Some of Kramer's comments specific to the gay activist community made me the angriest. For example, Kramer was off-base when he said that bisexuality is a cop-out. Not all bisexuals are people afraid to identify as gay. If men can love men and men can love women, why is it somehow inconceivable that men can love men and women? Mr. Kramer also referred to the current lack of activism in the gay population. While I agree that there has been no socio-political movement equal to the power of his ACT-UP group, I would argue that there is a powerful undercurrent of sexual activism in American culture. Television shows like "The L Word" or "Queer as Folk," whatever your objections to their aesthetic realism, are nothing if not new forms of activism.The existence of the Logo network and other emerging queer television networks mark not only the continued action of gay activism, but the incredible advances the next generation of gay activists has made!

While ACT-UP certainly accomplished a lot within a political context, it is the cultural and social contexts in which current activists are working.

The thing that probably upset me most about Kramer's speech was the audience reaction. Larry Kramer stood up and, basically, insulted a large number of us, and we gave him not one but several standing ovations! Although some of us did so in deference to his previous work for the cause, some of us were probably just so glad to have someone standing up and talking about our issues that it didn't even matter what he said. It saddens me and sickens me that we are so desperate for voices that in some way represent us that we applaud past generations even when they get it wrong and ignore the people currently fighting for us even when they get it right. I am an activist. Moreover, I am an activist filled with righteous anger, which inspires me daily to fight against the "right-wing cabal" of the American government and the smaller every-day inequalities and discriminations to which I am subject. It saddens me, however, that for me and activists like me, much of the time on the battlefield is spent fighting against the men and women who should be our biggest allies - the generations who came before us.