If you’ve ever wondered why there’s a dearth of radical older gay men, mostly in the range of 50+, it’s at least in part because of that. Puritanical anti-sex assholes like Larry Kramer managed to survive for obvious reasons, and then got to revise history and sound like an unheard Cassandra, when the reality was that a lot of the damage had already been done by the time he started his own activism.
In my view, this led to a rightward shift in the activism of the gay community, which ended up hijacking a lot of the hard work that lesbian and trans activists had built up, and moved towards respectability rather than queer liberation.
All the more reason to say fuck Reagan for ignoring it for nearly a decade. Even Thatcher did something about it and that’s saying something.
This isn’t even my take, it’s something that an AIDS activist in the late '80s said, that AIDS killed off the interesting gays. But thought it would be
This is why I don’t go to pride any more. The seething contempt from heteronormative assimilationist gays towards anything weird or different was too much.
I have railed against charging money for pride (since I’m in New York they act like it’s normal to pay $100 a ticket to see Madonna say the n-word on a barge or whatever) and for making it more accessible, and all the asshole older gays have had the most blisteringly bad takes on it
It’s dipping into media-analysis libtube I know, but Lindsay Ellis’ video on RENT (and why it sucks) starts and ends with this very theme. The cruelty was the point, and the very administration was so set to allow it to happen. That final quote by Larry Kramer she uses to end the video, the whole end really, just gives me shivers.
I feel stupid that I hadn’t realized that. I thought it was just contempt.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Fuck, I didn’t think my hatred could get purer but it has.
I can witness to this because some of those people you’re talking about are my dead friends. I’ve got in my closet right now the diaries of one of the most interesting men I have ever met, he escaped HIV but he still caught Hep C and his liver eventually failed at age 65. I cared for him in his final days, so I inherited his diaries and his dog. The dog has since died too but I still have the diaries.
I really want to figure out a way to tell his story. A lot of the witnesses to the events of his life have died as well, so time is running out. He fled his home in Pickens, Mississippi in 1961? I think and on his way to the emerging gay scene in San Francisco at that time he stopped at a monastery in Santa Fe to try to “cure” himself with Catholicism. I have all his old Bibles from that time too. He eventually gave it up as a bad job and went on to become the PR director for the San Francisco Opera. Opera was his passion until his very last day on this planet.
I have so many good stories with that guy. One time he got so angry at a mutual friend that he shit on their doorstep, but I was homeless and crashing there that night, so I was the one who stepped in it. When we met up shortly afterward for our morning Bible study, we solved the mystery of why I stepped in a giant pile of human feces and the motherfucking aliens in space could have heard his laughter. There was no one else like him, and there never will be again.
My humble suggestion: just get him talking and record it. You will have the raw materials from there to then write something or give it to someone to write.
Also lmao that is some beautiful petty shit
Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman is sorta about this, how an entire generation of thought and its proponents were destroyed and papered over. Good take.
