Apr 15, 2005  |  By: BRIAN MOYLAN  | COMMENTS     

IT’S STRANGE THAT someone as outspoken as activist and writer Larry Kramer is so soft-spoken on the phone. But even when speaking quietly, Kramer knows how to cause a ruckus.

The author of the best-selling 1978 novel “Faggots” and the groundbreaking, AIDS-inspired 1986 play “The Normal Heart” made headlines last November with an incendiary speech he gave at New York City’s Cooper Union Library just days after the presidential election.

“I hope we all realize that, as of Nov. 2, 2004, gay rights in our country are officially dead,” the 70-year-old New Yorker said in a speech titled “The Tragedy of Today’s Gays.” “And that from here on we are going to be led even closer to the guillotine.”

After founding the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York and the activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), Kramer is again trying to inspire gay people to act. He blames the growing rate of HIV infection, the rise of crystal methamphetamine addiction and general political apathy for the failure of gay civil rights. He urges gay men to, “Grow up. Behave responsibly. Fight for your rights.”

Now, the speech has been published in book form, with a new introduction by Kramer, a foreword by feminist Naomi Wolfe and an afterword by AIDS activist Rodger McFarlane.

On Thursday, April 21, Kramer is scheduled to return to D.C., where he grew up and went to high school, to read from and discuss his latest book, “The Tragedy of Today’s Gays,” at Lambda Rising, 1625 Connecticut Ave., NW, at 7 p.m.

Washington Blade: The speech you gave at Cooper Union was widely reported on and is easily available on the Internet. Why print it as a book?
Larry Kramer: Penguin came to me. I never thought of it as a book. It’s really twice as long altogether as the original speech was.

Blade: In the speech, you take gay people to task for not getting the message. Do you think they’ll get the message now?
Kramer: I don’t attribute the power of the written word to that degree of success. One always hopes, but I don’t. That doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t keep yelling.

Blade: What is it that keeps gay men from getting this message?
Kramer: If I could answer that, I would be a very wise man. I have no idea. I don’t understand this population that we belong to. And I don’t think anybody does.

Blade: As you point out in the book, the largest problem here is sex. Gay men are being infected through unsafe sex and society’s disgust with and refusal to talk about our sexual practices is what keeps us from getting our rights. Is the essential problem that this subculture is one that is defined by its sexual practices?
Kramer: Who says it’s defined by our sexual practices? I don’t define it like that, exclusively. We have to get beyond that. We have to stop thinking with our sexual organs.

Blade: You say that to survive we need to present a united front. Isn’t that what the gay civil rights organizations are doing?
Kramer: What gay civil rights organizations? I think all of them are pretty worthless, because we don’t have any civil rights.

Blade: Do you think we will gain our rights based on militant activism alone?
Kramer: I think that militant activism doesn’t work anymore. We’re only going to make it through money and the rich gays really have to start ponying up, and there is a certain attempt to do that. We have to do something like that. I’m not poo-pooing militant activism, it got us the medicine, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten us anything else. We have never financed ourselves as a movement to the extent that we must. There are an enormous number of wealthy gay men and women out there, and we have to get them to join forces and work in collaboration, just like our enemies do.

Blade: In the speech, you repeatedly tell people that they need to do something. What should they do? Is it time to try something new?
Kramer: The book is a very morbid view of where we are and where we’re going. I think it’s the most depressing ...