Larry Kramer, writer of the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Women in Love, and author of the 1978 novel Faggots, passed away last week at the age of 84. His name might draw a blank, but Kramer’s significance during the current pandemic is greater than people might think.
“Larry Kramer was one of the first activists against AIDS, back when the disease didn’t even have a name,” recalled NPR. “In the early 1980s, Kramer witnessed hundreds, then thousands of gay men die before the government took action to stop the spread of HIV. He became a high-profile, high-volume, one-man crusade against the disease.”
In 1981, Kramer read a newspaper story about “gay cancer,” then starting to claim lives. In 1982, Kramer teamed to found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and in 1983 wrote the essay “1,112 and Counting,” in the New York Native. “For the first time in this epidemic,” Kramer wrote, “leading doctors and researchers are finally admitting they don’t know what’s going on.” The possible causes included “promiscuity, poppers, back rooms, the baths, rimming, fisting,” and so forth, along with “a new virus.”
A similar picture emerged in the 1983 How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, by Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen, endorsed by Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, one of the first to identify AIDS.
Sonnabend thought the cytomegalovirus (CMV) could be a factor but as the pamphlet explains, no “new” virus had been shown to play a “causative role in the disease.” To avoid AIDS, the pamphlet warned about unprotected anal sex, along with “swallowing piss” and the practice of “rimming,” also known as analingus, activity that could not be made “risk free.”
How to Have Sex in an Epidemic also cited the amyl and butyl nitrite “poppers,” heavily used in the bathhouses. In conclusion: “the party that was the ‘70s is over,” and “the AIDS crisis may prove to have been a crystal clear reflection of just how little we knew about protecting our health.”
Kramer became convinced that the real problem was government inaction, and in 1987 founded ACT UP, the “AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power,” which staged demonstrations at the Food and Drug Administration while accusing officials of “murder” and “genocide.” In a 1988 open letter in the San Francisco Examiner, Kramer called out Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
“Your refusal to hear the screams of AIDS activists early in the crisis resulted in the deaths of thousands of Queers,” Kramer wrote. “Your present inaction is causing today’s increase in HIV infection outside of the Queer community.” That caught the attention of Fauci, who reached out to Kramer and began hailing HIV as the official cause of AIDS.
Scientists who questioned the HIV cause included Kary Mullis, winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). In his foreword to Peter Duesberg’s Inventing the AIDS Virus, Mullis wrote, “We have not been able to find a good reason why most of the people believe that AIDS is caused by a virus called HIV. There is simply no scientific evidence demonstrating that is true.”
Fauci, a medical doctor, not a molecular biologist, never refuted Duesberg’s work. Instead Fauci claimed it amounted to “murder” and predicted a vast breakout of AIDS among heterosexuals. As Michael Fumento showed in see The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, that never happened. AIDS was supposedly an “epidemic,” but from 1981 through 1990, a ballpark figure for the number of quarantines is 10, and no economic shut-down took place.
Dr. Fauci got it wrong but in bureaucratic style suffered no penalty for his mistakes. When the coronavirus arrived from Wuhan, Fauci said China was being transparent and parroted the propaganda of WHO boss Tedros. Fauci was on every side of every question about the pandemic. He shunned hard data and touted meaningless figures from “models,” to recommend that the entire country be shut down. The NIAID boss wanted to keep it that way, based on prophecies of a new outbreak.
An entirely fallible federal bureaucrat, who in 36 years never once had to face the voters, justified vast economic destruction and suffering for American workers. If the workers saw that as white coat supremacy in action, it would be hard to blame them. It all traces back to Anthony Fauci, who made a name for himself by caving to militants like Larry Kramer.
His passing was “a very, very sad day, the passing of a true icon,” Fauci told the Associated Press. “I had a very long and complicated and ultimately wonderful relationship with him over more than three decades. We went from adversaries to acquaintances to friends to really, really dear friends.” This was a man-crush with enduring consequences.
Larry Kramer believed that, facts aside, if you yell loud enough, government will give you what you want, and there’s no two ways about it.
“It’s very hard to deal with Mr. Kramer,” complained Ed Koch, mayor of New York City from 1978-89. “No matter what you do, you’re going to be attacked and pilloried and smeared and slammed, no matter what you do!” On any issue, that is now standard operating procedure for the left. Larry Kramer is forgotten, but not gone.
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