Larry Kramer Made Us Move
Constantine Jones
Larry Kramer. photo credit: Interview Magazine
This is not about me & that’s the point. But HIV is a part of me the way I am a part of everyone whose lives the virus fundamentally altered. Whether those bodies still walk this earth or not, all of those bodies make up one larger body--a body bigger & more formidable than we could imagine; a body of the sick & the surviving & the living & the dead. But oh, if we could imagine it. If we could make it move it might topple every city.
Larry Kramer made it move.
I don’t know nearly enough. Not about most things, and especially not every detail of this man’s history.
What I do know is that in August of 2017 a woman pulled me into her office after hours at the local clinic & told me I’d inherited a whole new ancestry. These weren’t her words, of course. She was more concerned with the logistics--did you know you were positive (of course not, that’s why I came for the test), are you sexually active (yes, that’s why I came for the test), about how many partners have you had in the last three months (lady, I have no idea), can you provide me the names & phone numbers of the partners you’ve had in the last three months (I don’t feel comfortable doing that actually, no).
It took a year of weathering healthcare bureaucracy & feeling sorry for myself before I finally came to recognize my own bead on this long chain of history. Suddenly I wasn’t alone, but still I needed someone to talk to. Someone who knew. In art, writing, music, etc. the search came up the same--all the names I found were unreachable. They’d boarded the train already. There was no way for me to meet them.
On Tuesday, January 7 of 2020, I found myself sweating inside the marble gut of the NYPL at 42nd St., unfolding the wrinkled ticket email I’d printed at work that morning, asking a group of older men, am I in the right place? Larry Kramer was going to speak that night about the newest installation of his opus: The American People, Vol. 2: The Brutality of Fact. A dear friend, M., had sent me there because a friend of his was currently doing research for Kramer’s biography & would be in conversation with him that night. M. was out of town but wanted me to go. I’m glad I did. I was early in line & found a seat about 4 rows back from the stage. Kramer’s nieces were sat behind me & most of the room appeared to be over 50. The only other younger folks I saw were standing clustered in the back. How did they know him, I wondered. What was it sent them here?
Larry was wheeled out onto the stage & immediately the rows in front of me started waving, calling his name. I had a pamphlet of the event in my lap & whenever Larry spoke I scribbled like mad. By the end of the night, there was more of my blue ink on the pamphlet than printed text. I think, whether I knew it or not, I was already trying to keep him here.
I tore up my bedroom this morning looking for it, but that, too, has disappeared. I couldn’t explain it then & maybe still can’t, but I was completely overcome in my seat that night. Here was someone from the past all the sudden in my present. Someone who’d weathered a version of this city I can hardly imagine. The next day I was to make my weekly trip to the Archives at the LGBT Center, where the first ACT UP meetings took place. It was all too much. When Larry spoke, measured & aged as his voice had become, he was still so full of fight. But what I’ll never get out my head was how truly sad he sounded.
“The young people just aren’t mad enough.”
It hurt me, to see this 84 year old man who’d lived & fought through so many unimaginable years admit, finally, that he was disappointed in us.
When I said this wasn’t about me & that’s the point--this is what I meant. The us is important. This was not a father’s scolding of an individual child, but the quiet resignation of having worked to mobilize so much for so long & wondering, ultimately, what difference it made.
I don’t mean to put words in his mouth--I’m truly beside myself at having lost that document, my first & last record of him. But I felt I knew, looking again around the room at the evening’s close, at how few of me there were & how quickly we all filed out, that he was right. Legacy means leaving behind, but not just to look at--you got to carry it forward. This won’t matter, not really, in the long run--my writing this today with the sun coming through my windows when, only blocks a way, people are dying from COVID complications in overcrowded hospitals & police continue to take Black lives without hesitation or repercussion & the pharmaceutical company responsible for developing my own life-preserving treatment would charge me $3,200 per month were it not for NY State’s AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP).
Of course I’m sad--to add Larry Kramer’s name to the list of ancestors in HIV/AIDS who no longer walk beside. It shouldn’t take a death (or a life), but if his passing can inspire one thing, I think he’d want it to be rage. And I think he wouldn’t want us to simmer. He’d want us to move.
Constantine Jones is a Greek-American Thingmaker raised in Tennessee & housed in Brooklyn. They are a member of the Visual AIDS Artist+ Registry & teach creative writing at The City College of New York. Their work has been performed or exhibited at various venues across the city & their debut hybrid haunted house book, In Still Rooms, was released via The Operating System on March 4th, 2020. @storiesandnoise