Happy. Frightened. Worried. Hopeful.
I am happy.
I am frightened.
I am worried.
I am hopeful.
I am happy because we can now get married. The lover I've lived with for many years is now my husband. For the first time in my long-term survivorship, I can allow myself to feel safe. Past a certain age, it is not about sex or drug-fueled dancing till dawn. It is about lying side by side as we sleep together after having kissed good night, knowing that we'll each wake up smiling and that David will make me his special scrambled eggs. Legally. Our bedroom can no longer be invaded by the police, which happened to gay couples in Texas not so long ago. The Internal Revenue Service can no longer gobble up my whole estate when I die so David can't get it, which happened to countless gay men and women before the Supreme Court declared that we are the same as straights.
People tell me I should be grateful I'm still alive. I have almost died a couple of times.
Of course I'm happy to be alive. But I am not grateful for how awful my body often feels, a result of the not-quite-there-yet drugs that greedy pharmaceutical companies continue to foist on us because they make more money selling these than developing ones that cure us. Activists got us these drugs, but once we got them, we stopped fighting and returned to partying. We stopped celebrating the glory of our greatest achievement too soon to get back to where we left off when we started dying like flies.
I am frightened that everything gay people have fought for could disappear in an instant. There will be new attacks against us in courts and all across the country every single day as our enemies try to whittle away at our existence, just as the enemies of Roe v. Wade have. I am frightened we're not strong enough to fight back to save ourselves. There were so few activists fighting for the HIV meds, compared with our total numbers. I have never been able to satisfactorily answer the question I once asked all of the time: Why isn't every gay man in America fighting to save his own life? Of course now I say every gay person. Our lives will be filled with jeopardy, much of it quite ruthless. We have never lacked for enemies, and they are not going away.
So I am worried about a lot of things. We as a gay population have still not sufficiently solidified into the fighting force we must be if we are to continue to capitalize on this moment of our increasing and visible power. And we as this less-than-unified population have never really been good at fighting back. When you belong to a people who have been so condemned and excoriated and punished and hated and murdered for so many centuries, these traits of passivity and closetedness become part of the genetic makeup. Very few among us are activists for our rights. And being an activist is a seven-day-a-week responsibility. We must battle not only against our enemies but also against the straitjackets many of us still wear, which interfere with our ability to fight these enemies in full, free, and in-your-face unity. We must have a stronger presence in Washington. We must have lobbyists. More of us must step forth, willing to lead. How many gay leaders can most of us even identify? Rich gays must step up to the plate. The David Geffen Hall should be the David Geffen Foundation for LGBT Equality. There are many gay billionaires and many, many gay millionaires. Why aren't they fighting for their people with the strongest ammunition that any war requires to survive it?
I worry we'll never learn our history, in all its gore and guts and glory. It still isn't really taught in our schools. Gender studies and queer studies are not the same as gay history. Gay history is George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton and J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn and James Baldwin and Barbara Jordan and Anderson Cooper and Stephen Sondheim and Eleanor Roosevelt and Greta Garbo and Herman Melville and…and…and… Not to mention all of those ancient Greeks. We've been here a long time. A people, to be a people, must have a history to own and be proud of. We must learn who our heroes and heroines, along with our enemies, were and are—to teach all the world the respect we deserve.
I am hopeful because I can now see so many of us and we can all see more and more of us. Closets are disappearing everywhere. Some gays fear that legal marriage will assimilate us, but I predict just the opposite. Our culture will flourish mightily and even more imaginatively. It's no wonder our enemies are worried by such potential power. This hope excites me.
But hope has a way of disguising, if not downright obliterating, the realities of the moment. There is much work to attend to as we enter a new era.
WE MUST ALL LEARN HOW TO FIGHT BACK. AND THEN WE MUST DO SO.
I hope that our enemies expect this from the gay population from now on, SO WE CAN SHOW THEM WHO WE REALLY ARE AND WHAT WE ARE CAPABLE OF ACHIEVING.
Larry Kramer is a writer and AIDS activist. He is a founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT UP. His writing has brought him an Oscar nomination, two Tony Awards, one Obie, one Emmy nomination, a Master American Dramatist designation from PEN, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Yale. Volume one of his two-volume history of this country, The American People, has just been issued in paperback by Picador.
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