Subject: Larry Kramer finally finds his voice: activism, death, riots, $million bail and personal responsibility
From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2000 15:22:02 EDT

As soon of you know I am not the world's biggest Larry Kramer fan ... but 
this speech is the clearest reading of where we are in the fight against AIDS 
of anything I have read or heard since the speech given by the President of 
South Africa. Please take a few moments and read.
jim fouratt

by Larry Kramer 
Speech for Stephen Gendin's Memorial, 
Lesbian & Gay Community Center 
27 July 00 

What can we do to honor Stephen? And to honor ourselves? I feel distinctly
bereft of anything honorable about my life and Stephen's death only makes
me feel worse. 

He was a gentleman, a soft-spoken, kind-hearted, very very sweet and very
very smart young man. No, we didn't always agree with each other, but I
don't want to talk about that. We never fought about anything. If we
disagreed, we disagreed. A disagreement with Stephen did not require, or
demand, that the AIDS activist movement be rent into pieces. 

This fine young man is dead now. In his death we see what awaits us. He
went on the very first drugs, and he took every drug and pill and
treatment there was for him to take. Look into your future boys and girls
and have a more fear and trembling than you've been showing these past few
years. Why, at Durban even Dr. Fauci said that taking these drugs for the
rest of our lives is "not an option." Interesting choice of words,
"option." We now officially know we can choose which way we want to die. 

Stephen was a poster boy. You looked at that open and kind and interested
face and as it smiled at you, you felt good. He and Mark and their friends
were "the look" of that new organization coming into being called ACT UP. 
Because of how they looked, and how they acted, and how they talked and
what they said and did smart thoughts came out of their mouths and they
spent a lot of time doing deeds beside dancing, other smart young people
flocked to ACT UP to be like them. This was the new activism. Do you
remember it?  It's almost as dead as Stephen. Well, like Stephen, it was
wonderful while it lived. Fighting the enemy with devoted comrades-in-arms
makes you feel wonderful. And clean. 

Is your life wonderful now? Do you feel clean? Have all these shitty drugs
we fought so hard to get made you feel wonderful and clean? 

A few years ago we were having some sort of think-tank bull session at
Sean's trying to decide what we should do. God haven't we had a lot of
those!  With no great ideas forthcoming and everyone weary of the
exercise, Stephen looked at me and said softly: "You started all this and
now you've abandoned us." It didn't register at first. I was walking home
before it hit me. I've never been able to forget that. It made me feel
shitty. Still does. 

Sean said this to me about today's memorial: "I want to slam Stephen's
death up the butts and down their throats of the whole fucking world to
try and get people to do something about it." I suspect that's why he
asked me to speak.  Somehow I have a reputation for getting people off
their butts. 

People ask me why I wear overalls all the time now. You want to know the
real reason? I don't have a butt anymore. Pants fall off of me when I wear
them. I have to walk down the street with my hands in my pockets holding
them up.  Unless I have my hands in my pockets hiking up my underpants. Or
my Pampers.  Stephen and I had an inimitable conversation not so long ago
exchanging stories about shitting in your pants before you could get to a
john.  Yeah, I feel dirty and shitty in lots of ways. 

No, I, and you, all of us, never finished the job. We started something
and when a bunch of rebels left us we let them get away with it, almost
grateful that somebody else was going to be doing the work now. Let them
have their turn, even if they shut out everybody who didn't think the way
they did.  After all we'd been rebels ourselves once, hadn't we. But in
their leaving, ACT UP pretty much fell apart. 

The new rebels haven't turned out much better. They can't finish the job
either. They're on the same shitty drugs we are and feel just as shitty as
we do. 

Maybe we can't do it, either side, without the other. Has anyone thought
like this recently? Not so I've heard it. 

I believe the main thing that makes a person into a good activist is fear. 
When you're afraid enough and you want to live enough, you find your butt
and get off of it. I'm not so certain, though, that we all want to live
anymore.  We're so sick of feeling sick that in some deep part of our
souls we almost wish it all would be over. Hush says among the last words
Stephen said were, "Please, I'm tired. I really want to rest." He didn't
want to die, of course, and he expected to get up the next day feeling
better and fight some more. But he really was tired, as we all are, as we
all are, tired of not quite making it to the toilet before it's too late. 

"We're turning AIDS into a manageable disease, like diabetes." What
bullshit.  It's dangerous to think and talk like this. AIDS is not
manageable. 

"Living with AIDS" is a bigger bullshit expression. As Stephen can tell
us, you can't live with AIDS. 

I spoke to some big-deal NIH scientist today. 2050. That's a year. 2050. 
That's the year he thought this might be over by. That's how fast those
fuckers work. Research, very little of it very original, is still in the
hands of an only few people. We know who they are. We kiss their asses and
pal around with them and go to conferences with them and pretend they're
our friends and we're they're friends. 

Where has it got us? Here. 

Oh, another thing this scientist told me: one billion people? That figure
is going to turn out to be low. Low. 

Betrayal. We have been betrayed at every turn. Getting inside the NIH got
us dipshit. The drug companies? We gave them our bodies, an army of
bodies, to be their guinea pigs, so they could develop decent treatments
that could then be exported to the rest of a desperately needy dying
world. We got them fast track so they could make billions instead of
finishing their work, refining their product. They used our bodies to
create poisons that kill HIV and kill us too, and then they decamped
without improving their wares, and without any consideration for all the
dying people everywhere. This is immoral. Can't you feel hate in your
heart for every greedy slimy bastard who works at a drug company? 

Isn't this a good time to scare the shit out of them because now they need
us desperately? We're a huge market now, one they count on for huge
profits.  If we don't buy their product, if we bad mouth their product, if
we tell the world Dupont's Sustiva is one of the most inhumane medicines
ever launched into the bloodstream of man, maybe they'll become so afraid
of us they'll start behaving like scientists and not like Nazi
experimenters. Why, if we all stopped our drugs every other month their
profits would be halved.  That would be a strategic drug interruption
indeed. Yes, we're in a wonderful position of bargaining now, better than
ever before. 

They blame us, you know, for their crappy drugs. We're not compliant
enough.  What kind of medicine requires 95% adherence? Stephen was 100%
compliant.  Stephen is dead. 

There has to be a way to make all these bastards work for our money,
harder and faster. 

There are two types of doctors that we go to: 

One is the self-proclaimed expert who is on the payroll of the drug
companies, who does studies for them, who talks for them, who goes on
vacations with them. They don't talk to other doctors, or listen to us. 
Because of managed care, if you're not on a drug they don't make any
money.  You can only make money by being a bad doctor. 

The other type of doctor is the kind who doesn't see many HIV patients; 
the few he or she has are just part of a larger practice. These doctors
don't know enough about HIV. They practice by recipe, do what they've
vaguely heard or read about. They really shouldn't be seeing PWAs. 

Do you go to one of these doctors? Of course you do. There aren't any
other kind. 

Like most of our best activists most doctors have been co-opted by the
drug companies. I guarantee that 95% of you go to a doctor who pimps for a
drug company. And the more hard-up doctors are becoming on Managed Care,
the more they sign up for a drug company assignment. 

What does it take for us to learn once and for all that we mustn't be
co-opted, that we only fool ourselves when we think having so many of our
people on the inside will save Stephen. 

You people on HAART, for whom HAART is working now and who get angry when
anyone says anything against HAART -- you're being selfish, thinking only
of yourself. You feel okay now. You're not going to for long. Stephen was
one of the first to take every drug you now are taking. How long do you
think you have? Dr. Ho has disappeared into the miasma of never-never land
and Dr. Fauci says taking these drugs is "not an option." How good and
clean and wonderful can you feel? 

I would like to say a few words to those of you who are HIV-negative. 
Where are you? You are shits. Mass genocide is going on. This is no longer
just the opinion of a crazy man but a fact. Entire populations are being
eliminated.  This is mass genocide we have never seen the likes of in the
history of the world, on a scale unrivaled in history. It is population
control on an enormous scale. Yes, you are total and utterly useless
shits. At least we know what it feels like to be dying. 

This puny little virus, which can be killed with alcohol when it's on a
needle, is outsmarting us every single second of our lives. It simply
should not take so long to outsmart it. That is the opinion of this crazy
man. 

It is taking so long because too many people want it to take so long. 

We're here at Stephen's memorial. No one fought harder to live than
Stephen.  Isn't it time we faced up to the fact that we have to do
something whether we want to or not. We cannot walk so obligingly into the
arms of death.  Tired as we are, reluctant as we are, powerless as we
feel, we must stay alive for those we love and for those who love us. And
so that the future will not be able to say: they fought hard but not hard
enough.  I do not want to start another organization. Marching all the
time is only an endless list of righteous grievances that the media bores
of quickly. 

But I do not want to go gently into that good night. 

If we no longer have enough rage left in us, we have something else. We
have learned, have we not, how to be clever and crafty. With this we can
forge a quiet activism that could be much more sinister. Speaking softly
without smiling can be scarier than chants and screams. 

Do you know what a cell is? Cell is a revolutionary word. A cell is a unit
of a few people who know each other secretly and decide their activities
secretly and tell nothing to anyone else, nothing. They swear secrecy and
pledge complete trust to their cellmates. The French Resistance and the
Israeli Irgun was made up of cells. The use of cells is the next phase of
any movement when progress has stopped, when a dead end has been reached,
when death stares you in the face unless, when the only next step can only
be revolutionary acts. Remember, America itself was started by a
revolution.  There were many cells indeed then. 

Remember the "affinity groups" ACT UP once used to stage zaps and actions? 
Take this idea one step further. Cells can do anything. Cells of lawyers
can threaten class action law suits against drug companies not dissimilar
to what is happening against tobacco. Cells can plaster cities to tell
people to stop taking their drugs every other month. Cells can play havoc
on the Internet, the most valuable tool ever put in the hands of activism.
Yes, cells can do anything they want to. That is the beauty of the cell.
It is a secret and private place. It has many lives. Lewis Thomas
called his famous book "The Lives of a Cell." 

I challenge each and every one of you to form a group of your own and pick
things you can accomplish to ruin a pharmaceutical's day. The drug
companies are our main target. They are rich beyond belief. This is the
only country in the entire world where drug companies are free to charge
what they want.  Scare the shit out of them. Scare their stockholders to
death. For every slimy pill of shit they pump out for us to pump in. 

I challenge each and every one of you to form a group of your own and pick
things you can accomplish to ruin a politician's day. Have you heard Al
Gore or Junior Bush tell you what he's going to do to save us? I haven't.
If they haven't heard us let's see to it that the world doesn't hear them
either.  Make every appearance of either of these dangerous simpleton
turds a nightmare. 

Find the things you can do exceptionally well and that will drive people
crazy and do them. Stop going to all those meetings with the FDA and the
NIH and the CDC, and Abbott and Glaxo and fucking Dupont. That is
conspiring with your murderer. 

Form a cell, like the Mafia, like the Irgun, the French Resistance, and
keep them small and secret and only tell the people in your cell what each
of them needs to know to do a specific job. Thus if one person or cell
goes too far we are able to deny knowing anything about it. 

There is only so much that can be said about this publicly. I have given
you a blueprint. A road map. Plan your own route. I think you get the
general idea. 

I hope this plan pleases Stephen and that he will no longer think that I,
and you, have walked away from him. He is watching us you know. I have
never stopped believing two things. That there is a cure. And that we will
all meet again. 

I'm afraid this idea won't catch fire. I'm afraid I must live through
another patch of being called crazy. I'm afraid not many of us are going
to live as long as, just a few years ago, we thought we would. I'm afraid
it is time for us to be heroes again. I'm afraid you are not afraid as
much as I am afraid. You must be afraid to be a useful AIDS activist.