http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/04/23/larry_kramer_interview
Although I disagree with many of Kramer’s ideas, including those in this interview by Salon, I think the problem is not modern gay men, but the actual interview and Kramer’s contradictions.
Thomas Rogers, the interviewer, aimed at writing a provocative piece (and he failed). Rogers wants Kramer to be angry, and he is. But Kramer’s anger is not the same as it was twenty years ago. He is angry at young gay men because they are not living their gayness as he did. He is angry at the State denying same sex marriage. Yet, he is angry at other gay men (perhaps including his own partner) who ignore him as a sexual body. He wants to be married. He wants to fuck around having “meaningless sex.” He does not care anymore about those gay men seroconverting. He is full of contradictions.
Rogers sets up an artificial separation between the young (post ACT UP) and the old (AIDS era) gay men. From his very first question, Rogers places AIDS and ACT UP as an “exotic” past, Kramer as an old (angry white) gay male, and himself as the young gay man wishing to have lived such past. Well, Kramer, as an old man, is still a gay man (as Rogers is) and Rogers is living AIDS and its movement, albeit in a different phase. A better narrative could have been the continuity of being gay, AIDS and the gay movement (with their own fissures), rather than artificial antagonisms.
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