Larry Kramer Quotes & Sayings

Straights don't compare themselves to us! — Larry Kramer

The media in America is not covering American AIDS very much. They're covering African AIDS as if somehow miraculously it's all stopped here. Well, it hasn't, and the one thing they're not saying about Africa is that all those people are going to die; there's no way these people can be saved - none. — Larry Kramer

By nature, I'm an optimistic person. No one believes it, but I am. — Larry Kramer

It's happened before. It's all happened before. History is worth shit. — Larry Kramer

No religion wants us. We're going to have to invent our own. — Larry Kramer

When would insight, knowledge, hope, and beauty meld? — Larry Kramer

I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don't like that feeling. — Larry Kramer

I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people would have gotten sick. — Larry Kramer

Living with AIDS is like always having the sword of Damocles over your head. The disease is scarier than death itself. The disease is so messy, so devastating, so pervasive. It robs you of everything you hold dear. — Larry Kramer

And every faggot couple I know is deep into friendship and deep into fucking with everyone else but each other and any minute any bump appears in their commitment to infinitesimally obstruct their view, out they zip like petulant kids to suck someone else's lollipop instead of trying to work things out, instead of trying not to hide, and ... unh ... why do faggots have to fuck so fucking much?! — Larry Kramer

You're the cure? I hope you come in a portable version, like a laptop. Can you find me a boyfriend while you're at it? — Larry Kramer

We didn't exist. Ronald Reagan didn't say the word 'AIDS' until 1987. I've tried desperately to get a meeting in the White House; Gay Men's Health Crisis is already an established organization. I have a certain presence. — Larry Kramer

AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning. — Larry Kramer

It's so wonderful being a gay person. I said that before. I'm going to say it again. I love being gay. And I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do. I think we're smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. And I think we're more tuned in to what's happening, tuned into the moment, tuned into our emotions, and other people's emotions, and we're better friends. I really do think all of these things. And I try not to forget them. — Larry Kramer

That Massachusetts Bay Colony had been set up in England as a corporation, enabling one hundred white male religious fanatics to elect their leader to rule in a completely totalitarian way. — Larry Kramer

I do not think the gay population has been all that rabid for gay marriage. Note that I do not use the words 'gay community.' Expunge that expression from your vocabulary. We are not a community. — Larry Kramer

And then he thought, profoundly, how there was something grand about living in hope, but also something terribly unreal and incomplete about it, because when you were hoping, you were not doing or living or experiencing the Now, — Larry Kramer

Holy shit," somebody muttered in the dark.
"A virgin," sputtered another.
"I didn't know they still made them."
"He just did. — Larry Kramer

For he knew there was a pit of sexuality out there and that he longed to throw himself into it. — Larry Kramer

The straight and narrow, so beloved of our founding fathers and all fathers thereafter, is now obviously and irrevocably bent. What is God trying to tell us ... ? — Larry Kramer

I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do. I think we're smarter and more talented and more aware. I do, I totally do. I really do think all of these things. And I try very hard to remember all this. — Larry Kramer

Looking thirty, claiming forty, actually forty-five. — Larry Kramer

You do not get more with honey than with vinegar. — Larry Kramer

All your life has been a journey to find an identity. — Larry Kramer

Religion is such an icky, sticky thing, full of tortuous - well, everything. Why is it so essential for man to be forced, for that is what religion relies on, force, to believe in anything but himself? And this is what John Winthrop should represent for us: the utter disdain he and Puritanism have for the self, for the human, for the human being. — Larry Kramer

Too many people hate the people that AIDS most affects: gay people and people of color. I do not mean dislike, or feel uncomfortable with. I mean hate. Downright hate. Down and dirty hate. — Larry Kramer

The only safe place left is the dark. — Larry Kramer

And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are like Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds. That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself Surely you see that. — Larry Kramer

Like the deepest secrets in a psychoanalysis, our lives stay hidden, harboring our precious information like a piece of decaying food behind a major molar in our country's maw, — Larry Kramer

I forgot that San Francisco is not an angry city like New York. Gays have gotten what they wanted there over the years, unlike New York, where we had to fight for everything. — Larry Kramer

Mr. Do-Nothing Obama will say today, 'Lets think of all the poor dead people' - or 'let's honor all the dead' instead of fighting for the living. He has been really useless in terms of both HIV and gay issues. He is simply not a leader. He may be president, but he is not a leader. — Larry Kramer

Well, kid, I have seen the future and it shits. — Larry Kramer

We shouldn't have to be faithful, we should want to be faithful. — Larry Kramer

I...I...I...want...your...other...arm! — Larry Kramer

And you can't do anything without God. God hates us, you know. That's why so many believe we have to love Him so much. What feeble goddamned pussies we are. — Larry Kramer

Was it not better to wear it, do it, live it, than suppress it? That only leads, on an international scale of course, to war. — Larry Kramer

Of the 2,639,857 faggots in the New York city area, 2,639,857 think primarily with their cocks.
You didn't know that the cock was a thinking organ?
Well, by this time, you should know that it is. — Larry Kramer

We're all going to go crazy, living this epidemic [AIDS] every minute, while the rest of the world goes on out there, all around us, as if nothing is happening, going on with their own lives and not knowing what it's like, what we're going through. We're living through war, but where they're living it's peacetime, and we're all in the same country. — Larry Kramer

Most of the Michelle Bachmanns and Mitt Romneys who say such terrible things about us actually is a positive force, because it allows sensible people to realize how stupid and vile their beliefs are. — Larry Kramer

How to phrase it? Ma, I want to fall in love with a fella. — Larry Kramer

One should be able to have the man one loves. — Larry Kramer

Saying someone is gay who is gay no longer constitutes defamation or slander or libel. You cannot defame someone by telling the truth. — Larry Kramer

The True End of not only therapy but Maturity is to learn to live with the inescapable fact that 97% of all human beings are getting fucked and 97% of all faggots are, too. — Larry Kramer

Being gay is a natural normal beautiful variation on being human. Period. End of subject. Therefore, any argument which says differently is an immoral supremacist one. Call it out as such ... Be outraged, offended, angry and intolerant of any discussion or any one who describes you as unequal, undeserving or unnatural for being just as you are. — Larry Kramer

If Fred's history will seem less unbiased then some would wish, let it never be overlooked that it is no small task to record a history of hate when one is among the hated. — Larry Kramer

Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I'm telling my story as a political document. — Larry Kramer

Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn't take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn't exist. I don't even think the word 'gay' was in existence. — Larry Kramer

I think being gay and gay people are the most wonderful things in the world. I wish all of us could have the power and pride to benefit from what is rightfully ours. Why isn't there an enormous building in Washington called the 'National Association of Lesbian and Gay Concerns' to lobby for us? — Larry Kramer

All I want is someone who reads books, loves his work, and me, too, of course, and who doesn't take drugs, and isn't on unemployment. — Larry Kramer

The tyranny of the blood test. — Larry Kramer

The point about L-O-V-E is that we hate the word. Because we vulgarize it. It should be taboo, forbidden from utterance for many years, till we've found a new and a better idea. — Larry Kramer

The guys in New York don't know the new media. San Francisco takes more risks as a culture. — Larry Kramer

Buy a dog. Dogs are faggot children."
"Nonsense. It is possible for two intelligent men to be turned on to each other in totality: emotionally, physically, and intellectually. Though I am about to become middle-aged, I shall not become a bitchy, middle-aged queen. I shall not turn sour."
"I tell you, buy a dog. — Larry Kramer

And what has been so awful in your life that you have to write about it? Mrs Lincoln, a definite gall bladder, persevered. — Larry Kramer

AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one. — Larry Kramer

There is no love in Puritanism. It turns out that these monsters that won't allow any deviation from that rigid orthodoxy are obsessed with frigging, fucking, wanking, twatty sex. Don't do it, they screamed, while that's exactly what they did. My mother's cunt was all bent out of shape to prove it ... All those Puritan preachers were vindictive, vengeful men spouting hateful thoughts and threats, and it's disheartening that they're still taught in the schools with reverence. They were shits. And they spouted shit. And a goodly portion of the world is still spouting shit. — Larry Kramer

Have you listened to your heart? — Larry Kramer

Ah, did he not hate that word 'gay'? He thought it a strange categoriser of a life style with many elements far from zippy. No, he would de-kike the word 'faggot', which had punch, bite, a non-nonsense, chin-out assertiveness, and which, at present, was no more self-deprecatory than, say, 'American'. — Larry Kramer

What we have invented, Hans, is a new religion. Oh, not the moralistic and old-fashioned theological kind with that God who does not want us, but one with brutal splendours, magnificent contemporary rites and rituals, scenes, gestures, sacrifices, humiliations, terrors, tremblings, mortifications, degradations, phantasmagoric transfigurations into other realms of feeling, new realisations that will come from this cleansing purge, and then transcendencies unto a New World of our own making, with our own new rules and rewards and justifications. — Larry Kramer

We were the generation psychoanalysts tried to change. — Larry Kramer

Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists. — Larry Kramer

I gave you books. You gave me plants. Books live. Plants die. — Larry Kramer

There are three roles one can play as a homosexual: one involving being the daddy to someone who is the son, another, therefore, being the sonny to that pop, the third involving looking for yourself in someone approximately identical to you. — Larry Kramer

We have to think bigger as writers. We have to try and change the world. — Larry Kramer

We're all different in many ways and alike in many ways and special in some sort of way. — Larry Kramer

Humiliation is so essential to Catholics. And to faggots! — Larry Kramer

When he really wanted to get juicy, he would write in Latin. Remember? I was seventeen before I realised that immissio penis in os meant sticking it in the mouth."
"And immissio penis in anum, those who practiced that, he called us moral imbeciles and moral depravities, certain barbarous races devoid of morality. I grew up in constant fear! — Larry Kramer

Indeed, to be fucked pleasurably is a gift. — Larry Kramer

Don't lose that anger. Just have a little more patience and forgiveness. For yourself as well. — Larry Kramer

Irwin F. Gellman's Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles, — Larry Kramer

We have created our own aesthetic!"
"You mean our own Ghetto. — Larry Kramer

I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a very opinionated man who uses words as fighting tools. — Larry Kramer

Cock-a-doodle-do! Any cock will do! — Larry Kramer

The warring conflict in man between the intellect and the libido shall never be twinned. — Larry Kramer

I've spent fifteen years of my life fighting for our right to be free and make love whenever, wherever ... And you're telling me that all those years of what being gay stood for is wrong ... and I'm a murderer. We have been so oppressed! Don't you remember how it was? Can't you see how important it is for us to love openly, without hiding and without guilt? — Larry Kramer

The system will always be here. The system doesn't change. — Larry Kramer

The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there
all throughhistory we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organise ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed. — Larry Kramer

How needy man is. — Larry Kramer

The most important fact is that gays have been here since day one. To say otherwise is a gross denial and stupidity. We played an enormous part in the history of America. — Larry Kramer

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were gay, just for starters. They didn't have a name for it, but their primary affections and intellectual attractions were all for other men. — Larry Kramer

Almost more than talent you need tenacity, and an infinite capacity for rejection, if you are to succeed. — Larry Kramer

When in doubt, eat donuts. — Larry Kramer

I don't mind about the dead ones. They're dead. The worst of it is, they cling to the living and won't let go. — Larry Kramer

Activism is very seductive, and writing is painful and hard. It's very scary to have a death threat living over your head. Activism is very sustaining. But I don't view myself as a political person. I'm just someone who desperately wants to stay alive. — Larry Kramer

Dangerous, free time on your hands. You can only jerk off so often. — Larry Kramer

This is always history's greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees. — Larry Kramer

There's no question that the gay movement would not be as far along as it is without AIDS. But how can there be any other issue in the face of death, possible extinction? — Larry Kramer

There will always be enemies. Time to stop being your own. — Larry Kramer

You'd think one day we'd learn. You don't get anything unless you fight for it, united and with visible numbers. If ACT UP taught us anything, it taught us that. — Larry Kramer

A penis has never been something that you pick up and put down and put away idly without consideration. — Larry Kramer

Some reporter called me 'the angriest gay man in the world' or some such. Well, it stuck, but I realized it was very useful. — Larry Kramer

We're still leaderless. We still don't have strong organizations that are fighting for us; there isn't a national AIDS organization out there worth squat in my opinion. — Larry Kramer

Have you any idea how long a ten-inch cock is? — Larry Kramer

Why listen to me? I can only predict epidemics and plagues. — Larry Kramer

I was at Yale from 1953 to 1957, and I tried to commit suicide in my freshman year because I was gay, and I thought I was the only person in the school who was. I was just totally and utterly miserable. — Larry Kramer

Closets, schmosets, everyone's out of the closet. Now where the fuck are the men! — Larry Kramer

I now realize that I am a gay man before anything else. Other gays may think they're a Jew first, or black, or a banker, but I'm gay. — Larry Kramer

It's the oldest story in the world. You want him back, don't you? — Larry Kramer