By Judy Wieder
he following conversation took place at the Union Square Cafe in New York City, June 16, 1999:
The Advocate: Larry, you're always saying that nobody cares about anything anymore and, what's more, that there is no one for you personally to turn to and say, "I'm tired. Take over. It's your turn to fight." The magazine is doing a special issue on activism.
Kramer: Good luck.
Do you really feel as bitter as you say you feel?
Kramer: I feel alone and isolated and disbanded. I don't feel the support of a concerned community. I was the pariah for so many years, then I was the prophet and everybody loved me. Now I'm the pariah again. There was this article about all the gay organizations that said the number of people donating money has really declined. What does that say about us and the organizations? That they are not providing what the community needs--support and inspiration. They're becoming bureaucracies.
Kushner: The pendulum really swings. I'm not entirely sure I agree. I think that the organizations that exist now do a reasonably good job. I attribute the lack of response from the community to a complacency that has overwhelmed progressive people across the United States. It's not just lesbian and gay organizations that are suffering. And yet I think there is incredible activist energy. Holly Hughes just did this great thing at the Public Theater in New York raising, like, $10,000 for lesbian and gay youth.
Is there any possibility that because things are slowly getting better, it feels like we don't have to be as angry?.
Kramer: No question. People are not afraid. So if you say anything like "You should be worried," you are immediately crucified as an alarmist. People do not want to know that AIDS is still here, that the protease is not going to work, that there is something bad around the corner. And if I say that, then I am classified as being a part of those horrible people who created the alarm in the first place. And we're now old farts who ought to be silent.
And you have the emergence of really dangerous crazies--and I wish you would list them--like Mike Petrelis and Bill Dobbs. People who basically, because of the Internet, get their word out there. And they are picked up by the straight media as representatives. For some unknown reason, they were all attacking Elton John.
Oh, geez, yes ...
Kramer: Mary Fisher called me and said, "What are we going to do? The lady who runs the Elton John AIDS Foundation is beside herself because Bill Dobbs and Michael Petrelis have said he's a hideous person because he won't come out against the death penalty, or whatever." And I sent e-mails to all of them and said, "Are you out of your fucking mind? This man has done more fo rAIDS and for raising the visibility of homosexuality than anyone I know. Why are you attacking him?"
Kushner: I think that there's a dialectic at work. Petrelis has always been Petrelis.
Kramer: He's calmed down; he's done some good things. And then he goes off the deep end.
Kushner: Well, I think that people are occasionally going to do that.
Kramer: [Laughing] Oh, who? Me?
Kushner: I always think that in any progressive movement there's going to be people who work primarily in kind of a hyperbolic key, and anything that they say is going to need the leavening of a dialectical sensibility.
Kramer: The trouble is that we don't have leaders.
Why?
Because anybody with half a brain would be out of his or her mind to be a leader of this community. You get nothing but shit, and in the end you cannot take it anymore.
Kramer: Because anybody with half a brain would be out of his or her mind to be a leader of this community. You get nothing but shit, and in the end you cannot take it anymore. If you give your opinion and it happens to be a strong opinion, you get letters from The Advocate, or shit sent to you. When you're young you can take it. But after a while you can't, and I don't know any gay leader who wouldn't say the same thing. Whatever they did to Elizabeth Birch ...
Kushner: Well, Elizabeth Birch ...
Kramer: Ah, see! That's it. This whole business about the march on Washington, I mean, the whole thing is just ludicrous. Somebody had an idea. Robin Tyler had an idea, "Let's have a march on Washington." It's a good idea.
Kushner: No, it's not a good idea, Larry. It was a terrible idea. It was an idea that, insofar as it was being presented, was allied with a religious organization espousing traditional sorts of family-based values that a lot of people feel enormously uncomfortable about.
Kramer: But it was all sorts of people—not the enemy.
Kushner: No, not the enemy certainly. Marches on Washington at this point have become of very questionable value. They're enormously expensive.
Kramer: But if there's an energy for it by some people, why do other people have to destroy that energy?
Kushner: Because other people can weigh in and say that a march--a march that's supposed to represent the whole community--can be questioned. We're now at a point where there's a great deal of redefining going on. I think this is a time when the movement has to argue more than organize.
Kramer: We've been arguing since day one.
...people felt that the movement was becoming increasingly monopolized by voices that were discernably right-winged...
Kushner: But I think that the march idea came at a point where people felt that the movement was becoming increasingly monopolized by voices that were discernably right-winged and that we've reached a point where a kind of co-opting by the Right, by people like Elizabeth Birch, Andrew Sullivan ...
Kramer: You really don't think of Elizabeth Birch as right-wing?
Kushner: Well, I think anybody that leads an organization that endorses Alfonse D'Amato is right-wing.
Oh, dear ...
Kushner: Yes, the idea that you can have anything to do with Alfonse D'Amato and not be right-wing is ridiculous.
Kramer: I don't approve either, but again I think we tend to...to...annihilate?
Kramer: Annihilate, yes. We go too far when we get angry. [Smiling sheepishly] It's sort of hard for me to say that.
Kushner: Well, obviously I'm not in anything like your position as an activist ...
Kramer: Yes, you are.
Kushner: No, I'm not. I mean, I've never organized anything in the sense that you have. So I haven't been subject to the same kind of history or attack ... Well, Rich Tafel doesn't like me, but I don't like him or any Republicans ...
Kramer: Activism can never work unless we learn how to deal with people we don't agree with. The great thing about the early days of GMHC and ACT UP was that people had a lot of different opinions and they were able to put them aside and work together toward a common goal. I think it was because we were terrified. You learn how to work with Michael Petrelis, with Rich Tafel because they are here and they have energy and they have money and they have resources. Recently Petrelis has done some interesting things. He's got a boyfriend; he's calmed down. Like me.
Kushner: Me too. However, I don't actually envision myself in a future where I work with the Log Cabin Republicans.
Kramer: Why not?
Kushner: It seems that everything that has worked in the world, including liberation for lesbians and gay men, is actively opposed by the Republican Party. If George W. Bush says (as he apparently did) that we shouldn't be fired for being gay, although we shouldn't be allowed to adopt children or get married--I suppose that's some kind of a progress. But it doesn't come from the Log Cabin Republicans. It comes from the fact that when the Republicans sound like homophobes and haters as they did in the last election, they're losing because the American people have gone far beyond them in terms of this particular social issue
Kramer: Everything you say is trUe, but then you become a prisoner of your theories. The way to get to them is to have 20 million people marching on Washington to scare the shit out of everybody! Activism works when it's visible!
Kushner: Yes, it works when it has a clear agenda, as it did in the days when you started ACT UP. Time will tell.
Kramer: If anything, it will show what a stupid community we have.
Kushner: It's interesting how many flip-flops we're guilty of here. You can't ask people to be activists and then to behave. When you ask people to become activists, which is to rise to a sense of their own urgency in history, as many people as there are, they're going to develop twice as many ways of being active.
Kramer: There isn't any movement. I think there have been times in our history where we have, in spite of all this or because of it, been able to work together.
Kushner: No, but you have to ...
Kramer: Will you let me finish? I'm delivering a monologue here. Obviously people don't think there's anything to be afraid of. The activism that's going on today is done by a minuscule number of people. How do you motivate them?
The issue that we never seem to deal with is that the only thing that works is money. Every movement that has failed, has failed because it doesn't have money. This is a very rich community. You'll never get anywhere without that money! What about my idea that if you gave one party a year in 50 different cities around the country to raise $100,000 in each of those cities, that would pay for a lobbyist in Washington ... 60 lobbyists. I've been floating this idea for 15 years.
Kushner: It's a wonderful idea. Can I say something now?.
Kramer: My monologue is over. Judy, you do know we love each other.
I believe that. Before you go on, I want you to get back to art as activism.
Kushner: [Laughs] We don't want to talk about it.
Oh, I never would have guessed.
Kushner: Things have changed enormously since—the days of our youth.
Kushner: In the travels that I've done, I met so many young lesbians and gay men and bisexuals and transgendered people, and they seem very active in their own way. They're very confused. They don't know what form activism should take. So I think that we're in a time of great bewilderment, where a search for theory is incredibly important.
Kramer: I don't think that people really change all that much. What you just said about what's happening now would apply to 1960 when I was just coming out of college and dealing with being gay and being a Jew. I do not think that bureaucracy and government change that much. I don't consider myself a Republican or a Democrat. I don't vote for anybody anymore. I don't think it makes any difference who is elected.
O-o-oh, Larry! Presidents appoint judges who can carry on doing damage long after the president is gone.
Kushner: E-e-ew, Larry!
Kramer: Well, let me tell you something: The drugs that we are taking now to extend our lives are here more because of Republicans than Democrats. Yes, they hate us. But they are also capitalist enough to know that that makes the drug companies earn more money, so it's better for business. George Bush changed the FDA, where the Democrat wouldn't or didn't. I don't like George W. Bush, but I would rather have him in government than William Clinton.
Kushner: Stop!
Kramer: Oh, I don't know what I want next. I'm just saying, you can't make it all black and white.
Kushner: The NEA started under President Nixon. Republican presidents aren't uniformly monstrous, but in terms of the advancement of a civil rights agenda, there's very little to draw from.
Kramer: That's true, but you gotta do good cop, bad cop. I think Clinton will probably go down in history as one of the worst presidents we ever had.
Kushner: I disagree with that.
Kramer: I totally think he is a pig. I think the fact that Hillary wants to come here and be our senator is such an insult to us. That people are taking that seriously, it makes me livid. I hate them both. Talk about family! Talk about a slap in the face!
Kushner: I don't want to be in a position of defending Clinton. I think that Clinton is a better president than Bush.
Kramer: They've all been terrible.
Kushner: I actually think that Bill Clinton-in spite of the unforgivable fact of signing the Defense of Marriage Act and then bragging about it on Christian radio--will go down as a significant president in a number of ways.
Kramer: I'll bet you money on that.
Kushner: I'll bet you money. I think the debate over the military was a transformative debate.
Kramer: What was transformative about it? We got kicked in the ass.
I don't hear anything about art as activism, gentlemen ...
Kramer: We're afraid ...
OK, do you remember a time when you actually felt supported, Larry?
Kramer: The first year of GMHC and the first four years of ACT UP were some of the most exciting years I have ever felt in my entire life. I have never felt such love, support, and energy among all of us fighting for common goals.
Did you write during that time?
Kushner: Oh, clever.
Kramer: Yeah, a writer always writes.
Kushner: Mostly essays, right?
Kramer: Yeah, but I left GMHC to write The Normal Heart. I don't know about Tony, but it's hard to talk about writing and activism separately.
I don't see them as being separate.
Kramer: We write what we write because we care about it and it's our subject matter. As you become a writer you find that you're given your subject matter. And you don't want to write about anything else because it's your subject matter--and in my case it's about being gay: what makes me angry, the bureaucracy, why people hate us, all these things which tie in with my activism. Here in America you can only be taken seriously as one or the other. If you're an activist, you're looked at as crazy. And if you're a writer, you're a writer who's an activist, which somehow demeans you. So what we do--and I think I speak for Tony here--we do at enormous costs to our professional careers. We are not taken seriously as writers because we are activists. And that's hard. Quite frankly I would much rather be thought of as a good writer than as a good activist. But my writing never gets reviewed. I get reviewed. It's not Just Say No or The Normal Heart. It's the loudmouthed Larry sounding off again.
Kushner: I think Larry's right. It's certainly the case where the socially engaged content of any work of art is immediately dismissed by critics as a kind of static that one has to get through if one wants to see theatrics. And I think that there's absolutely a case that when one becomes visible as an activist, one is to some degree targeted.
My anxiety is that I find myself constantly in a state about how to stay active, which requires a certain amount of energy. I think that there are times when you're working on a gigantic novel that requires an enormous amount of your time ...
Kramer: And I'm not giving enough to it. You have the same problem with the big play after Angels in America. To be a serious artist takes solitude, grit, and withdrawal from the world. We have not been able to give to our art the time it requires because of the needs of our activism.
Kushner: Some people manage a tremendously successful synthesis of the two energies. It's such a stupid thing to talk about because you might not have written anything at all if you weren't an angry, concerned, and gay person. Writers who aren't activists in any way, who really feel this active devotion to their art, I admire in a way, but I also feel a little angry.
Kramer: They don't write about what's important to them.
Kushner: Well, sometimes they do. Sometimes they write about the human heart with incredible depth and beauty. Their work may, in history, be more lasting than the work of the people who can't help writing about the pressing moments.
Kramer: Nothing you ever do is enough. I sit in a room every day surrounded by the books of Proust, Henry James, Ibsen, Chekov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, whatever. So it's hard to hold your head up.
Kushner: And of those people you named, half of them hated everything they did and the other half ...
Kramer: I don't know why people become activists. I think different people do it for different reasons. Tony is interested in politics; I'm not. I'm not interested in theory. I'm interested in "what's the problem, what's the goal, and how do we get there?" It's like producing a movie. I've always said--and I come out of the movie business--that the similarities are exceedingly similar. How do you produce this play? How do you produce the crisis? How do you get results?
Tony, do you see your work in the theater as activism?
Kushner: I think there's a point where one really has to admit that what can happen even in an incredibly galvanic evening at the theater is not the same thing as an activist organization that is engaged directly in the political arena. You can't win it just culturally. You can have a bad sitcom like Ellen that has this sort of appealing star who turns out to be a lesbian and that could make the earth move. But finally, there has to be a group behind the event ready to capitalize on what has been accomplished culturally.
But you're talking about links in a chain of change. The cultural event, whether it's Angels in America or Ellen, is what sets off the activity.
Kushner: I think that art is important and never enough. One thing I think is true about art is that although there are right-winged artists, most tend to congregate on the Left. That's because people on the Right are wrong. It's not a debate. Being an artist, the better you want to be, the more you have to push yourself to ask questions, to see bravely, without fear, what's in front of you. I think that's going to lead you to a very unjust world where there are a lot of things that are very fucked up, and that will lead you to want to attempt to transform them because you simply find the smell of injustice too intolerable.
Kramer: I don't like to talk about art. It's not for us to call what we do art.
Kushner: I don't feel that I'm in the same league remotely, as far as activism or writing goes, as Larry. There's a certain way in which your activism seems to proceed from a kind of despair. The power of negative. That's one of the great discoveries of ACT UP. That's why SILENCE=DEATH is a much better logo than ACTION=LIFE. In the middle of a Holocaust, you need to be able to say, "This is a Holocaust" and not, "Wouldn't it be nice if everybody was happy?" The negative has a tremendous power. I tend to be, in general, very grimly optimistic. I don't agree with you, Larry. I think homophobia has really taken a big kick in the shins.
Kramer: I don't disagree with that
But you always say, "They hate us worse than they ever hated us."
Kramer: Well, we both talk in hyperboles. Of course, we've come a long way, and, of course, we haven't. The glass is half full or half empty.
Kushner: I just want to say something about this Republican thing. While I agree with you that we have to learn to work with one another, we're really struggling right now to figure out where the line is between success as a movement and the co-option by people who essentially are welcoming us into a world that we don't want to be welcomed into.
Kramer: We have certain things we have to get, and we've got to get everybody in a room together in order to get them. This is one of the great interviews, I hope you know. Is it all going to be reduced to 300 words?
Not 300, no. And we'll run the whole thing on our Web site.
Kramer: O-o-h, Tony, we'll be on the Web too.