For reference in an upcoming posting about small worlds: brief accounts of Larry Kramer and John D’Emilio, two (justly) celebrated and very public gay men, of extraordinarily different natures, who I happened, once, to get linked with as a member of that category. (Blame it on my man Jacques, who knew the complexities of my nature but still managed, in his love, to think of me as genuinely heroic.)
Larry Kramer. From Wikipedia:
Laurence David Kramer (June 25, 1935 – May 27, 2020) was an American playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London, where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for the film Women in Love (1969) and received an Academy Award nomination for his work.
In 1978, Kramer introduced a controversial and confrontational style in his novel Faggots, which earned mixed reviews and emphatic denunciations from elements within the gay community for Kramer’s portrayal of what he characterized as shallow, promiscuous gay relationships in the 1970s.
Kramer witnessed the spread of the disease later known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) among his friends in 1980. He co-founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), which has become the world’s largest private organization assisting people living with AIDS. Kramer grew frustrated with bureaucratic paralysis and the apathy of gay men to the AIDS crisis, and wished to engage in further action than the social services GMHC provided. He expressed his frustration by writing a play titled The Normal Heart, produced at The Public Theater in New York City in 1985.
His political activism continued with the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987, an influential direct action protest organization with the aim of gaining more public action to fight the AIDS crisis. ACT UP has been widely credited with changing public health policy and the perception of people living with AIDS, and with raising awareness of HIV and AIDS-related diseases.
John D’Emilio. From Wikipedia:
John D’Emilio (born 1948) is a professor emeritus of history and of women’s and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He earned his B.A. from Columbia College and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1982
… his most widely cited book, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, … is considered the definitive history of the U.S. homophile movement from 1940 to 1970
The scope of his books:
Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983; 2nd edition, with a new preface and afterword, 1998)
with Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988; 2nd expanded edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997; 3rd edition, 2012)
Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992
The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002)
Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022)
Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist (Duke University Press, 2026)
The three of us. I am, in age, right in the middle between Kramer and D’Emilio: Kramer born in 1935, me in 1940, D’Emilio in 1948. Kramer was Jewish, but not at all observant; D’Emilio was conspicuously Roman Catholic as a boy, but long ago left the fold; I was brought up in socially progressive Protestantism (liberal Lutheran and Episcopalian), but am now explicitly a non-believer. Then, beyond our shared sexual desires, practices, identities, and public activism, we also share very keenly felt moral worlds that impel us to that activism.
But I am a minor figure, a kind of foot soldier in our army; the world needs a great many people like me if we are in fact going to make things better in the ways we passionately care about.
More to come.
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