Playboy Interview: Larry Kramer

He's been dubbed "America's angriest activist," "the Paul Revere of the AIDS epidemic" and "one of America's most valuable troublemakers" (the last courtesy of writer Susan Sontag). Then there are other comments. His critics--and even some friends--have called him nasty, tiresome, rotten, ineffective, self-loathing and a bully. Will the real Larry Kramer please stand up? Or, as his targets keep hoping, would he please sit down and shut up?

Don't hold your breath. Playwright, novelist, polemicist, movement maven and one of this nation's leading AIDS activists, Larry Kramer uses words the way that Norman Schwarzkopf used cluster bombs--and with similar results. Always passionate, often grating, Kramer is a master of ad hominem invective, as is best reflected by his arsenal of missives. On a typical day he launches them by the salvo, as with a recent note to journalist Robert MacNeil ("You pompous, heterosexual twit, how loathsomely uncaring can you be?") and one to Senator Edward Kennedy ("I believe you know that when I don't like something, one way or another the world gets to hear about it").

It is that same relentlessness--that unique blend of idealistic fire and activist smoke--that has propelled Kramer to international fame. A founder of two of the world's most prominent AIDS organizations, Kramer specializes in go-for-the-jugular attacks that combine the oratory of William Jennings Bryan with the subtlety of Saddam Hussein. He has frequently--and unapologetically--shredded his adversaries in print, calling Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institutes of Health's AIDS effort, a "murderer"; San Francisco's leading AIDS researcher, Dr. Paul Volberding, "a very efficient supplier of bodies to the local undertaker"; and Dr. Mathilde Krim, co-founder of the American Foundation of AIDS Research, "a dumb incompetent." Calvin Klein? "Married to his dick." David Geffen? "I don't know how he holds his head up." Even Elizabeth Taylor has been labeled "a dilettante."

But Kramer cannot be shrugged off as a reckless blowhard. Indeed, "Reports from the Holocaust," a collection of his articles reaching back more than a decade, includes essays written as early as 1981 that predicted--with frightening accuracy--the devastation that would be wrought by AIDS. Equal parts educator, philosophizer and nag, Kramer shows no signs of slowing down in the Nineties--neither in his playwriting nor in his activism--even though this decade may be his last on earth.

It was in 1981 that Kramer convened 80 gay friends in his New York apartment to warn them of a new disease, news of which had been filtering out through medical journals. That night, Kramer co-founded Gay Men's Health Crisis, the first grass-roots organization in America formed to combat the AIDS epidemic. Twelve years later, GMHC is the largest AIDS service agency in the country (its budget is $25 million), and is credited with helping thousands of people with AIDS as well as shaping national and international health policy. Only a few years after the organization's founding, however, GMHC broke publicly with Kramer (citing irreconcilable differences) in the kind of acrimonious parting that would become common in his career.

In 1987, frustrated by bureaucracy, the snail's pace of progress and a rising number of dead and dying friends, Kramer decided enough was enough. In a cri de coeur at New York's Gay Community Center, Kramer called for fellow activists to take off their gloves and take to the streets. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (Act Up)--Larry Kramer's second scion--was born.

It didn't take long for Act Up to swell into an international army of pissed-off, streetwise, in-your-face AIDS activists. They were as skilled in the rules of civil disobedience as they were in the fine art of crafting sound bites. Their clever tactics of demonstrations, infiltrations, die-ins, kiss-ins and political funerals put them on the evening news everywhere from Burbank to Bangor.

By its fourth birthday, Act Up, Larry Kramer's demon child, had battled the Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York's then-mayor Ed Koch, the National Institutes of Health, multinational drug companies and the top brass of the Reagan--Bush junta. In an incendiary game of bluff, Act Up also joined a Catholic cockfight with New York's archconservative Cardinal John O'Connor, taking the AIDS battle to New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral. It invaded the perimeter of George Bush's summer house in Kennebunkport and stormed the National Institutes of Health with plumes of multicolored smoke.

Such high theater, combined with practical knowledge of the complexities of drug research and testing, earned Act Up credit for changing how the government tests and develops drugs. It also spawned a new era of street activism, speeding the release of drugs for people with AIDS and forever changing the public image of the gay community. Then, just like GMHC before it, Act Up distanced itself from the ever volatile, ever malcontent Larry Kramer.

Born in 1935 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Kramer grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., the son of a Red Cross social worker mother and a government lawyer father. He remembers his childhood as truly miserable. An imaginative, artistic boy who hated sports (at which his older brother, Arthur, excelled), he spent his days scripting and performing imaginary plays. The boys' father openly disdained his bookish son, berating him publicly as a sissy and, when words failed, lashing out in violence. But Larry soon learned to stand up and give as good as he got.

By the time he turned 12, Kramer knew his father was right about one thing: He was different--and unhappy. In his freshman year at Yale, lonely and isolated, Kramer attempted suicide by swallowing 200 aspirin. Recovering, he told his only confidant, his brother Arthur, that he was gay.

After college the young dramaturge landed a messenger job at New York's William Morris Agency at a salary of $29 a week. There, driven by uncommon talent, a sharp tongue and incandescent energy, Kramer began his rapid rise. By the early Sixties he was a producing executive for Columbia Pictures, working in London on such classics as "Dr. Strangelove" and "Lawrence of Arabia." He ultimately left Columbia and moved into an executive suite at United Artists. There, in 1969, he produced and scripted "Women in Love," directed by Ken Russell, winning a 1970 Oscar nomination for his screenplay.

By the age of 35, Larry Kramer was a certified Hollywood name. He had also made peace with being gay (though in the closeted world of Sixties Hollywood, that still meant arriving at screenings with a woman on his arm). But Kramer grew restless and returned to New York to write. In 1977 his first novel, "Faggots," appeared with a bang. Skewering the sexual mores of the Seventies gay male culture, the book became a best-seller, establishing Kramer's literary reputation. "Faggots" also made Kramer a pariah among many gay New Yorkers who considered him misinformed and a prude, primarily because the book condemned promiscuous sexuality.

Then, on a summer evening in 1981, Kramer visited a Fire Island friend who was cradling his wasted, frail lover against his chest. Nobody knew why the young man was dying. It was Kramer's first glimpse of the then unnamed disease that would become known as AIDS. The next month he helped launch GMHC and the fight began.

Throughout the Eighties, between GMHC and Act Up meetings, Kramer chronicled the epidemic in a torrent of articles that appeared everywhere from the gay press to "The New York Times." He also became a playwright, churning out the widely acclaimed "The Normal Heart" (which, after 600 productions worldwide, is now being filmed by Barbra Streisand) and "Just Say No," a blistering satire of Reagan-era sexual hypocrisy--and a critical flop.

But it was in 1988, with his professional star reascendant and his writing and activism hailed worldwide, that Larry Kramer learned he was HIV-positive. Since then, Kramer's most faithful companions have been his anger and his words.

To grill the man who stands at the center of the AIDS storm, Playboy sent journalist David Nimmons to track down Kramer in his lair. Kramer spends most of his time writing in a quiet beach house on New York's Long Island. Nimmons reports:

"The best word to describe Larry Kramer is busy. During our three days together, he spoke with five television and radio reporters (including Larry King), sat in on auditions for his latest play, the frankly autobiographical 'Destiny of Me,' negotiated with London's prestigious National Theater to take the play to England, met with leaders of Act Up New York to plan the next morning's picket and unwound at a charity auction supporting the Gay Games, where he bid $1500 for an evening on the town with one of New York City's most handsome gay bartenders.

"In between, we talked in his Manhattan residence, a swank Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Washington Square. Walking down the building's well-appointed halls, one instantly recognizes Kramer's front door: It's the one that looks like a freshman dorm room door, plastered with 37 different AIDS stickers (Save Homo Sapiens--Find A Cure and The AIDS Crisis is not Over--Act Up!).

"Inside I was met by someone who looks less like a fire-breathing bogeyman than a mellowed-out college professor. Kramer stands 5'7? in stocking feet and was wearing a neat pair of jeans, a cardigan sweater and a silver earring. He proudly introduced me to the significant other with whom he shares his life: Molly, his wheaten terrier. With a warmth verging on courtly, Kramer walked me into what he calls the living room, a 9800-volume library of works ranging from Euripides to Michel Foucault to 'The New England Journal of Medicine.' The walls drip with memorabilia: his Academy Award nomination for 'Women in Love,' posters from two decades of Kramer plays, his framed Yale diploma. And photographs are everywhere--of the famous (Colleen Dewhurst, Glenda Jackson, Martin Sheen, Brad Davis) and infamous (a gaggle of Act Up activists, and of Kramer himself being led away in handcuffs).

"The private Larry Kramer is disarmingly funny, self-critical and not a little insecure. Intellectually, he is smarter than any three people combined and assumes that you are as fully conversant as he is with the collected works of Anton Chekhov, Hannah Arendt and Thomas Jefferson. Restlessly, he'll tug at his whitening beard, grasping for the right words to convey his personal truths and demons. More than once during our interview his temper flared, moving from zero to 60 like a Maserati, but subsided just as easily, giving way to soft introspection.

"In our three days together, only one thing really rattled him. At the end of our first meeting, the great and terrible Larry Kramer, scorched-earth scourge of America's high and mighty, found himself facing a moment of abject dread: He was about to leave on a blind date. Did he look OK? he asked. I told him sure. And he actually did."

[Q] Playboy: Let's start with the early days of the epidemic. In 1981----

[A] Kramer: This isn't an epidemic. This is a plague.

[Q] Playboy: In 1981 you were among the first to predict that AIDS would sweep through America and ultimately change the world. Why was it obvious to you so early and not to others?

[A] Kramer: I'm always perplexed when people ask me this question, as if I had some insight or prescience. It was as obvious as the nose on everybody's fucking face. How could you not see it?

[Q] Playboy: A lot of people didn't. A lot of people haven't.

[A] Kramer: Well, that was my first clue that we were in trouble and that a lot of dumb people were walking the streets. You're talking about a virus being transmitted sexually in a world that fucks plentifully. Two plus two equals four. What kind of brain or crystal ball do you need to figure that one out? I don't think I was any great prophet.

[Q] Playboy: Was there one thing that brought it all together for you in 1981?

[A] Kramer: No, but I did get a little shiver of apprehension: "Hey, this is scary. It sounds like we're in trouble." I talked to the doctor who reported those cases. Fade out, fade in--he came into my apartment and talked to about 80 guys. He said, "We think it's a virus, we think it's spread by having sex, it seems to be happening now mostly to gay men. It's only the tip of the iceberg and nobody's going to pay any attention because it's spread by sex." He said that in 1981. And with the exception of "it's happening mostly to gay men," you could make exactly the same speech today.

[Q] Playboy: So nobody paid attention because they figured the disease would stay confined to the gay community?

[A] Kramer: I don't think people cared, so in the initial years it remained unattended to. "If it gets worse, so what? If it goes away, then we don't have to worry about it. And if it gets out of hand, we won't worry about that, either." The irrefutable, indisputable fact remains that this is an epidemic that need not have happened, that was allowed to happen, that is still being allowed to happen. By that benign neglect, 41 cases have become a billion cases.

[Q] Playboy: A billion cases? That dwarfs any number we've heard.

[A] Kramer: Shit, the previous high was 150 million--God knows, that was awful enough. Dr. William Haseltine, one of the most prominent AIDS doctors in America, now estimates 1 billion cases worldwide by 2025. Frankly, I use the highest figure I can because it scares the shit out of people and helps my argument.

[Q] Playboy: The Centers for Disease Control reports a much smaller number.

[A] Kramer: The CDC is perhaps the single most concentrated group of idiots in one building that this government finances. They give you a different figure, a different flavor of the month on anything. So to whom does one listen? The World Health Organization? The CDC? Take your pick. There's no way to extrapolate the numbers accurately. Two billion, half a billion, even if it's "only" 100,000--what difference does it make? These are people that we're talking about.

[Q] Playboy: When you look at the history of the epidemic----

[A] Kramer: In 1981 it was an epidemic. That became a pandemic. Now it is a plague. And what I find most amazing is how few people have come forward to be leaders or role models, to be courageous and gutsy and confrontational, to be all the things that wartime usually inspires in a population.

[Q] Playboy: Wartime?

[A] Kramer: I see this as something worse than wartime. This is a plague! P-L-A-G-U-E. Plague. It's amazing, for instance, how silent the church has been, how few religious leaders have come forth to confront the presidents for their inadequacy. It's amazing how silent major university presidents and the American Medical Association and the doctors themselves have been. Who knows better what's going on than the doctors? As a group and as individuals, they have been dastardly in their silence. As historians have written, benign neglect is just as heinous and destructive as intentionality. When Hannah Arendt wrote about Germany, she talked about "good family men"--the ones who carried out Hitler's orders, who knew their jobs depended on it and had families to support. The responsibility, for the most part, of exterminating so many Jews was spread around quite cleverly, so that few people had guilty consciences. They were shuffling papers or performing small tasks, just minute cogs in a large wheel. They could pretend they didn't know about the other things. A bureaucrat doesn't tip the boat, doesn't criticize his boss. He does what he thinks a good boss expects him to do.

[A] My coreligionists, the Jewish leaders, have been grotesquely silent about AIDS. And yet it's a holocaust that matches--surpasses--the one we went through in World War Two.

[Q] Playboy: Wait a minute. A lot of people might not agree with that. Defend it.

[A] Kramer: A billion people potentially dying by the new century is a far superior number than the 6 million Jews killed in World War Two. I know people resent the comparison, but tough shit.

[Q] Playboy: A biological catastrophe is quite different from the conscious and premeditated acts of Hitler.

[A] Kramer: I'm sorry. I consider George Bush and Ronald Reagan's actions to be conscious and premeditated. With regard to AIDS, they were equivalent to Hitler's actions with the Jews. There is no question in my mind. None. Underline it. Put it in capital letters. Bold type. These people saw AIDS as a useful way to get rid of a lot of people other people didn't want. We have been allowed to die and are being allowed to die. I have absolutely no qualms about saying that this has been an intentional genocide of the black community, of the Hispanic community, of the gay community, of the community of drug takers and the community of unmarried mothers. I know there are a lot of noble people working on this, helping us, but there were a lot of noble people who harbored Jews, too. It's amazing that there's not more outcry about this.

[Q] Playboy: There's been plenty of outcry from Act Up, which is often credited with single-handedly changing the image of gays from limp-wristed to pissed-off. How do you see that shift?

[A] Kramer: I'm proud it happened. You know, as someone who took a lot of shit as a kid by being called a sissy--who got physically ill every time he saw Bob Hope or some other comedian making a joke about limp-wristed fairies--I hate that stereotype. I'm thrilled that there's now an alternative image--one that's more butch.

[Q] Playboy: Many Americans outside the gay community have found it difficult to accept Act Up's strategies. They charge that its slash-and-burn tactics do more harm than good. Are they right?

[A] Kramer: All we're doing is learning to make as much noise as the right is making, and that's good. Actually, I'm amazed Act Up isn't bigger. I'm amazed at the inability of people to fight for their lives. I may be very proud to be a gay person, but I'm not proud of my community. We have been so meek, recalcitrant and useless in fighting this battle. When you consider how many of us there are, how much money is in our community, what power there is among prominent gay people, you'll see that we haven't put up the fight that we are capable of.

[Q] Playboy: Not everybody finds it as easy to fight as you do.

[A] Kramer: I'm aware that a person in a workplace situation can't be as obnoxious as I am. Nevertheless, I never will understand--until the day I die--how few people are actually frontline, everyday fighters. When you are facing death, as so many of us are, you don't just walk so willingly into the gas chamber.

[Q] Playboy: So why are people doing that?

[A] Kramer: Why, shmy. Who knows? If I knew the answer I'd be Martin Luther King or John Kennedy.

[Q] Playboy: You don't even have a hint of what's going on?

[A] Kramer: Well, a lot of it has to do with the atmosphere Reagan and Bush created in this country. An atmosphere of fear, of worse than that. The door to the White House was cemented shut on anything that remotely went against their agenda. Talking to them was like howling in the wind. We could have had people by the hundreds setting fire to themselves in front of the White House and it would not have made the slightest bit of difference. They were simply not going to pay any attention. Reagan was out to lunch, and the person who was in charge of AIDS under Reagan was a horror show called Gary Bauer. He was just a beady-eyed shit. He still is a hateful man who loathes every homosexual who ever walked the earth. He was going to see to it that we couldn't get anywhere near the White House. And the same held true for John Sununu and the Bush playhouse.

[A] The forces of evil are much more powerful now than in the old days. Back then people like Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan would never have been given such a national platform for their hate--not on CBS coast-to-coast or CNN all over the world. Hate has been legitimized in this country over the past 12 years.

[Q] Playboy: Why is it, in the face of all that, we seem to see less of Act Up on the evening news?

[A] Kramer: There was a moment when it looked as if Act Up could be an international army. Chapters were sprouting up all over the world, people were flocking to meetings. For the few brief years of our flowering, that's what Act Up was all about. It was immensely moving and showed what the gay--lesbian community was capable of. The answers seemed so certain, the path so clear. We got great things done.

[Q] Playboy: But you're speaking in the past tense.

[A] Kramer: Unfortunately, it didn't last. There were terrible disagreements, some of them irresolvable. The fights got too enervating. We were efficient when we were really rolling. There was much more consensus and everybody was of one mind. Now, if there are 50 people, there are 50 minds.

[Q] Playboy: You describe a movement gone sour. Why is that?

[A] Kramer: People couldn't see results from their work. They came in thinking we could change the world, but the world doesn't get changed quickly. Most of them were young kids and they got impatient and moved on.

[Q] Playboy: What about you?

[A] Kramer: Personally, I came to find Act Up constraining because so much of its success is based on consensus and process, which drive me nuts. It suffers from the same problem the NIH has, or any bureaucracy where a bunch of disparate people have to compromise. I can't stand the imprecision of grass-roots activism anymore.

[Q] Playboy: Have you officially left Act Up?

[A] Kramer: I still participate in events I believe in. We had a demonstration a few weeks ago where I really got my rocks off by overturning tables. But I don't want to get sucked back into that again. I only have so much time and energy.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe you've begun to mellow. Would that be so bad?

[A] Kramer: I don't think I should become less angry or less abrasive. I don't consider anger unhealthy or infantile. The thing that has driven me nuts all these years--and I still get it now--is that wretched line everybody throws at you: "It's much easier to get something with honey than with vinegar." Well, it isn't. Being nice gets you nothing in this country politically. Government responds to one thing only: pressure. There's no such thing as honey pressure. There's only vinegar pressure. It drives me nuts: people refusing to confront the system that is shitting all over them.

[Q] Playboy: Meanwhile, AIDS continues to affect both gay and straight America's sexuality. How can we maintain healthy sexual attitudes in the face of this?

[A] Kramer: I don't know. I have no idea what our sex lives are going to be like. I don't know if sex will ever again be as it was in the Sixties and Seventies--even if AIDS is cured. Look at Hugh Hefner and The Playboy Philosophy. It was his intention--and it was certainly the intention of the gay movement at the time--to make sexuality a full, free, liberating experience. Well, it's turned out to be everything but that.

[Q] Playboy: Hold on. Nobody would disagree that the costs of AIDS have been tragically high. But the arrival of a deadly epidemic can hardly be blamed entirely on people's exploring sexual knowledge and freedom.

[A] Kramer: But whatever benefits the sexual revolution brought, it also brought AIDS. The road was taken for the most logical and, perhaps, virtuous reasons. But in the end it proved to be the wrong road. Let's face it: That's the life we were all leading, gay and straight. But it cost too much. I tend to be very hard on the sexual revolution.

[Q] Playboy: Why is that?

[A] Kramer: Because something inside me rebels against the notion of using the body as a thing. I think that's the bottom line with the sexual revolution. I don't think of myself as some holy vessel or any of that Catholic claptrap. But I don't think of myself as a piece of meat, either.

[Q] Playboy: To suggest that the bottom line of the sexual revolution was that everyone is a piece of meat is absurd.

[A] Kramer: But look at the Playboy centerfold. Look at all the pictures of naked models. Now, I have nothing against pornography--indeed, my main sex life for the past five years has been jerking off over gay porn videos, and quite frankly, it's been useful to me. But let's not make any grand claims for it being anything more than that.

[Q] Playboy: You sound as if there's a pretty big gap between sex and intimacy for you.

[A] Kramer: How can I get intimate with a porn video or a Playboy centerfold? Sex has to be returned to a more special place, saved for a more special occasion. It's like reading a good book for pleasure instead of reading a potboiler.

[Q] Playboy: We've always maintained that sex occupies a special place in life. Are you saying that no positive social effects came out of the sexual revolution?

[A] Kramer: Positive social things?

[Q] Playboy: For example, without those changes, wouldn't the gay community be back where it was in the Fifties--alone and isolated? Didn't the sexual revolution allow gays to come out?

[A] Kramer: I'm hard-pressed to make that leap. Who's to know what would have happened if we had been gently allowed our rights, allowed to marry? Gay men had nothing to call our own but our penises, and we tried to make a virtue of that. I find this hard to calibrate because of the enormous price that's been paid. If there had been a way of achieving the same results at a lesser cost, could we have learned about intimacy and freedom and physical pleasure without so much death? I don't have an answer.

[Q] Playboy: You're speaking as though you feel AIDS signals the end of sex.

[A] Kramer: I don't know. People are saying things like, "We have to go back to teaching abstinence." All of these concepts were anathema to us--and to me--a few years ago. Now they're hard to dispute.

[Q] Playboy: Actually, they're not. There's absolutely no data to suggest that teaching abstinence works. We can teach it all we want, and people will still have sex and will still die of AIDS.

[A] Kramer: All I'm saying is that the argument doesn't seem as much of an anathema as before. Look, I know how prudish I sound in all of this. At one time I was just as sexual as the next guy and enjoyed it just as much. But I also know how demeaning so much of it was. I know how emotionally unsatisfied I felt when I came back from the baths, which so many people have enshrined as heaven on earth. Yes, sometimes it was a heaven, but many times it wasn't. These are difficult issues to grapple with. The body should be able to do what it wants to do and enjoy what it wants to enjoy. But it would appear that mother nature doesn't allow that.

[Q] Playboy: Now you're sounding like Pat Robertson.

[A] Kramer: Am I? I hope not. [Laughs] All I'm saying is, don't go to bed with a person just to go to bed. Go to bed with someone only if you sort of like the person. So is that Pat Robertson?

[Q] Playboy: The point is, you're attaching a moral judgment to sex.

[A] Kramer: It's not moral, it's pragmatic. That's the difference.

[Q] Playboy: But aren't safer sex and AIDS education pragmatic solutions? And consider the alternative. There's been a lot of talk about people being scared celibate. Don't you see any cost attached to the loss of sexual expression and the intimacy that goes with it?

[A] Kramer: Indeed I do--I'm a good example of that. I've had a great hunger for intimacy over the past five years that I've been reluctant to assuage. But I'm beginning to see that the answer is in finding ways to cope with this plague that are not so draconian. Amazingly, the gay community is starting to do that. Sex is returning on a broader scale, and fairly safely, in ways that would have been unthinkable two years ago.

[Q] Playboy: Explain that.

[A] Kramer: You can't expect 12.5 million gay men--12.5 million of any kind of people--simply to stop having sex. It's too basic a human need. If it's dangerous, you'll find ways to cope with that danger. Initially, we couldn't. Now we're learning how. People are having new kinds of relationships, finding ways to be affectionate within prescribed limits. I guess intimacy is going to change. It's quite touching and remarkable to me how many HIV-negative--positive relationships there are. A few years ago, anyone who was HIV-positive was simply a leper. It's a testament to the adaptability of the human mind, I guess.

[Q] Playboy: So what's your one-sentence take on the future of sex?

[A] Kramer: That's the trouble with this whole sound-bite world.

[Q] Playboy: OK, do it in three sentences.

[A] Kramer: No. Can you imagine asking Sophocles or Plato: "If you had only one sentence to tell your students, what would you say?"

[Q] Playboy: They actually had some of those sentences--that's why they were Sophocles and Plato. So what's your message of enlightenment to heterosexual America?

[A] Kramer: Keep it in your pants, boys.

[Q] Playboy: That's it? But you just admitted that nobody can really be expected to exist without sex.

[A] Kramer: By keeping it in one's pants, I don't mean be celibate. I mean be careful. Be cautious. Be concerned. Be considerate. Use a condom. Don't fuck just for the sake of fucking. Fuck because you love the person or want to get to know the person. I don't know what other advice to give in the face of a plague where death is spread through sex.

[Q] Playboy: We still detect an undertone of morality.

[A] Kramer: I accept that, but I stand by my words. This isn't the first time I've been criticized for being a moralist. But I think of how often in the gay and the straight worlds that sex is used as a weapon of release, of revenge, of hunger. It is important to return affection to sex, and maybe that will help us to get through this period in history.

[Q] Playboy: What do you see as the root of America's skittishness about sex?

[A] Kramer: Skittishness is too weak a word.

[Q] Playboy: How about terror?

[A] Kramer: America is essentially a puritanical country. This is an issue we continue to ignore at our peril. It goes all the way back to the founding of the country. If you want to read scary stuff, read what preachers were preaching in Massachusetts Colony in the 17th century. All the great preachers sounded just like Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying Pat Robertson and his ilk are great preachers?

[A] Kramer: I won't in any way ever say anything nice about Pat Robertson or that other horse's ass, Buchanan. I'm certainly not going to equate the grammatical folderol of Robertson with the impassioned language of Cotton Mather. But it's from the same strain--the strain that parades hate in the costume of devotion to God. Their determination is that they are the chosen ones and everyone else is an other. There is an enormous amount of hate out there, and it's just barely contained. The Reagan--Bush years allowed it to get out of the box. It's been very scary.

[Q] Playboy: Many of those are the same religious voices who call AIDS God's punishment.

[A] Kramer: I rest my case.

[Q] Playboy: Since you brought up the Reagan years: Your play Just Say No is a savage satire of the sexual mores of the former first family. What made you decide to portray the Reagan White House as such an oversexed place?

[A] Kramer: Truth, honesty and historical accuracy.

[Q] Playboy: What are you saying?

[A] Kramer: Nancy Reagan used to have trysts.

[Q] Playboy: Trysts?

[A] Kramer: This is not original to me. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been in books. The more I researched the Reagans, the more I realized Nancy apparently had the sluttiest sex life, equal to those of ancient Rome. They say that Nancy Reagan gave blow jobs all over Hollywood. She used to service Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. It was no secret that she was such an active young starlet. Indeed, as a rising young beefcake star, Ronnie knew what he was getting when he married her. That these two people should have wound up the president and first lady of this country is one of the great farces in history.

[Q] Playboy: These charges are pretty explosive. You said they've been written about in books. Which ones?

[A] Kramer: Peter Lawford's wife's book, The Peter Lawford Story [by Patricia Seaton Lawford]. And Kitty Kelley's book on Nancy Reagan. The Gable and Tracy stuff was given to me by a well-respected writer who wrote a book on Reagan but didn't use it--a woman of such caliber that her word should be good enough for you.

[Q] Playboy: But----

[A] Kramer: Look, darling, what the fuck do you want? It's been in print and nobody challenged it the first time around.

[Q] Playboy: But how is any of this relevant to AIDS?

[A] Kramer: Because by the time the Reagans got to the White House, with all of their pomposity, they were going to deny this and make sure that anything even remotely sexual--like AIDS--was not going to be attended to. Throughout all of these years, one thing I've learned has been how sexual lies have allowed a small epidemic to become an uncontrollable plague. If [former New York mayor] Ed Koch hadn't been so terrified of being suspected to be gay--if the Reagans hadn't been so terrified that their son was going to be identified as gay--we wouldn't have AIDS today.

[Q] Playboy: That seems----

[A] Kramer: That may be a generalization, but I think an awful lot of history is based on sex. Most history books are only partial stories of history and, therefore, blatant lies. That's why I portrayed the White House as an oversexed place. I hope Playboy will print all of this.

[Q] Playboy: We have been known to write about sex in our pages.

[A] Kramer: Good.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk now about another famous Washington name. What do you make of the allegations that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was----

[A] Kramer: Queer? We always knew, but nobody believed us. That sort of thing drives me nuts. For example, we know Walt Whitman was gay. There's tons of evidence to support that. Yet you can't get the heterosexual hegemony to honor gay heroes. I mean, to this day The New York Times Book Review still publishes essays by academic assholes who say Whitman was heterosexual.

[Q] Playboy: In Hoover's case, it is now said that he refrained from prosecuting the Mafia for 20 years because it threatened to out him with photos of him and his male lover. Would you have outed him?

[A] Kramer: I grew up in Washington, D.C. Starting in about eighth grade, I used to hang out with one of my best friends, who lived directly across the street from J. Edgar Hoover. At 14 years of age I would see Hoover and Clyde Tolson leave the house in the morning and come home together in the evening.

[Q] Playboy: So J. Edgar Hoover was a gay role model for Larry Kramer?

[A] Kramer: [Laughs] At 14 I didn't even know what gay was. But I did know that those two men, walking into a house where every single window was curtained and light never entered, well, we knew they were doing something different in there. [Laughs]

[A] The point is, it wasn't his tragedy. It was our tragedy--this country's tragedy. If there ever was a case for the need for honesty in recognizing homosexuality, this is it. For decades Hoover went easy on the Mafia, and organized crime was allowed to get out of hand simply because he was in the closet.

[Q] Playboy: So the rise of the Mafia can be blamed on the closet?

[A] Kramer: The closet can be blamed on the morality of this country, and it's hurting this country as much as it's hurting gays.

[Q] Playboy: While we're on the subject, what do you think of outing?

[A] Kramer: The more we pressure people to come out, the more comfortable these people will be with being out. As much as they resent being forced out, the better the world will be for knowing it. I think of someone like David Geffen, who was really pummeled out of the closet by constant pressure, and is now turning out to be quite a miraculous gay man. I'm talking specifically about his financing--with his billion dollars--all of those things he should be financing as a responsible citizen. I don't think that would have happened if we hadn't yanked him out by the short hairs.

[Q] Playboy: This is the same David Geffen about whom you once said, "I don't understand how he holds his head up"?

[A] Kramer: Well, God knows, I've gone after him tremendously. Listen, I'm worse at that than anybody. I go after everyone tooth and nail when they're disappointing. But Geffen's consciousness has certainly been raised about a thousandfold since we criticized him so sharply. We need all powerful gay people--the Geffens and Barry Dillers and everybody who has $8 billion--to get together and really do something. Maybe Barry Diller can put the gay community together like he and others put together the Democratic Party.

[Q] Playboy: Some of the people you often say are gay haven't themselves come out, yet you seem quite comfortable identifying them as gay. How do you know?

[A] Kramer: A large and growing number of us are getting fucking sick of this question. You don't ask Jewish people how they know others are Jewish. We know who we are. We socialize and interact in other ways. Figure it out for yourself.

[Q] Playboy: At one point you worked hard to out Ed Koch.

[A] Kramer: I think every gay man who believed that Ed Koch was gay and hated him for being in the closet loved my saying out loud what they were too afraid to say. But plenty of people hated me for saying it, too.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Kramer: Because they were protecting Koch's closetedness, or they didn't think he was gay, or they didn't think it should have been played out so publicly.

[Q] Playboy: Many people, including gay leaders, call outing coercive and destructive--the fascist front of sexual politics.

[A] Kramer: That all sounds very Forties and retrograde. We are in a different time and place now--a time of plague--and we can't wait. In many instances I don't give a shit. I mean, I'm not going to yank schoolteachers out of the closet, or two-bit actors who don't make any difference. But particularly now, when we are on the brink of perhaps our greatest time in history, the truly gay Nineties, we need every role model, every bit of support we can get.

[Q] Playboy: You've said, "AIDS is here because the straight world would not grant equal rights to gay people. If we had been allowed to get married--to have legal rights--there would be no AIDS cannonballing through America." What did you mean?

[A] Kramer: What don't you understand? I think gay people were forced to make a virtue out of the only thing we had: our sexuality. Our dicks. Our interactions with one another were on that base level. If we had been allowed to get married, there wouldn't have been such need for the promiscuity. That's basically what bathhouses and bars were all about. We had no other place where we could be ourselves. We couldn't meet in churches, no one would rent us spaces for clubs. If we had legal rights--to get married and adopt children, to be like everybody else--then we wouldn't have had to sneak around in bathhouses and bars to meet one another. I think a very good case could be made that because of this, the straight world caused AIDS.

[Q] Playboy: That seems a little rhetorical.

[A] Kramer: Seriously. I ask every straight man to think about it--every horny man: If he were not allowed to marry and it was considered despicable to fuck a woman or be seen with a woman in public, but he was desperate to have a woman, to stick his dick into her, wouldn't he find a way of doing it? In a bathhouse or a whorehouse or a backroom bar? I guess it's hard for people to make that switch, but I ask them to try.

[Q] Playboy: What is the one thing you would say to straight men that they still don't understand about gay men?

[A] Kramer: That we're just like them--and to stop being so pompous because they're in the driver's seat and we're not. I want the same rights as straight people. That amounts to equality. Why does that terrify everybody?

[Q] Playboy: The loudest call for equality lately has concerned gays in the military. What's your take on that?

[A] Kramer: I'm perplexed that has become number one on the agenda of things for us to deal with when AIDS is so much more important. I think they must have rocks in their heads to want to be in the military, but I will fight for them.

[Q] Playboy: Is the debate really about gays and straights showering together?

[A] Kramer: Of course not. Many countries have gays in the military and everything works fine. Canada, Italy, France, New Zealand, Australia, even Israel. All of them have integrated armies. And I still can't help but be amused by the fact that the greatest general of all time, Alexander the Great, traveled his entire battle swath of half the known world with one male lover or another in his camp, in his bed, by his side in battle--and everybody knew it. Yet that is never taught. The notion about not following someone who is gay in the course of battle is a specious fear. A leader is a leader is a leader.

[Q] Playboy: By the time this interview is published, the issue of gays in the military will have been decided. Any prediction about what will happen when it comes up for resolution in July?

[A] Kramer: You're pinning me down for answers to an issue I don't particularly care much about. That makes it more difficult for me to make predictions. I understand strategically why we have to fight for this issue, but I find it hard to do so emotionally. Again, why anybody gay or straight would want to serve in the Armed Forces is beyond me.

[Q] Playboy: So no prediction?

[A] Kramer: If it went to a vote now, we'd lose. I don't know how President Clinton will have more public support by July. It wouldn't surprise me if we lost the military thing completely.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any message for General Colin Powell and the rest of the Pentagon's top brass?

[A] Kramer: I feel strongly that people who scream loudly against gays are in some way uncomfortable with their own heterosexuality. It's sad that they take out on us what they're having difficulty dealing with in themselves. I'm not saying that they're gay, but the issue has obviously touched a nerve, making them afraid they might have those feelings inside.

[A] Gays are the last minority that it is legally possible to dump on. There's no one left. You can't legally discriminate against blacks or Jews or women. That leaves gay men and lesbians. I think we are now the repository of this country's hate. In a funny sort of way it doesn't have anything to do with us. We are just the other. And not a very good other at that.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] Kramer: I mean I love being gay and I can't imagine being anything else. And this is probably a politically incorrect thing to say, but I think that gay people are better than other people. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Kramer: Because I'm one of them. [Laughs] We have this miraculous combination: We are products of enormous pain that enables us to get in touch with parts of ourselves that other people, perhaps, don't have to face the same way. Yet that is combined in many of us with an education and sensibility that is remarkably in tune to the lovelier things in life. And by the way, when the honest history is written someday, we will discover that presidents were actually gay. And Supreme Court justices. And scientists. And whole rafts of people we do not even know about yet because of the nature of closetedness. Meanwhile, though, the church and the right wing are constantly throwing issues at us like red herrings--issues about education and condoms and discrimination--to keep us from concentrating on the big picture.

[Q] Playboy: And what is the big picture?

[A] Kramer: The big picture is research and a cure. It is appalling, it is appalling--it is appalling, appalling, appalling, appalling--how little has been done to research this disease.

[Q] Playboy: Yet we now know more about HIV than we have ever----

[A] Kramer: Bullshit! I'm so sick of hearing that. If we knew so much we'd have a cure by now. We're still uncertain how the damn thing creates disease. The unanswered questions have been there since the virus was discovered, and they're unanswered simply because the bureaucracy has refused to address them. What is clear is that this is a curable thing. No question. None.

[Q] Playboy: You sound a lot surer than many of the scientists.

[A] Kramer: I am not a scientist, but people I respect--like Dr. David Baltimore--have publicly or privately stated that this is a curable disease. So why isn't there a cure? Because the government hasn't done what it should to find out what's going on. The National Institutes of Health is probably the most incompetent, most useless place to seek a cure or pin our hopes. It gets $8 billion a year to look after our health, and yet it is doing a shitty, grotesque, appallingly bad job. No one's in charge. No one oversees it. Given the way Congress currently requires NIH to operate, there's no way that a cure for anything can ever come out of there. The NIH was not created to operate in any kind of an emergency situation. It's a slow, business-as-usual, methodical, second-rate institution. And it's becoming more second-rate every day. You have to see AIDS in perspective: This is no longer an illness like heart disease or cancer. It is like the bubonic plague, something of such astronomical proportions that it can no longer be dealt with in a bureaucratic framework.

[Q] Playboy: The entire National Institutes of Health is second-rate?

[A] Kramer: Why would anybody with a good degree want to work there? The pay is bad, you work under unbelievably stringent requirements. Every time you want to touch a person or put a needle in a person, do an experiment of any sort--every time you want to go to the toilet--ten committees have to approve. It's like asking writers to write without vowels. It's ludicrous. There are specific reasons why most of the world's leading scientists are not working on AIDS.

[Q] Playboy: List some of those reasons.

[A] Kramer: The disease is so political that it scares a lot of the best doctors away. Most labs where they work are not safe, so scientists feel this is a dangerous virus to work on--at least until the workplace is made safe. Government's specific rules in no way reward originality--in fact, they punish originality and reward compromise and the ordinary. It takes a year to get a grant, for God's sake--you have to have so many women and men and minorities and clergy that it's just ludicrous. In our determination to respect democracy in this country, the rules and regulations have come to prevail--and the virus marches on. Some 50,000 new people are being exposed to the virus--in this country alone--every single day. Nobody knows how many of those people will get infected.

[Q] Playboy: You say we don't have the finest minds working on AIDS, but don't you count Jonas Salk? Or Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute, who is credited with discovering the virus?

[A] Kramer: Luc Montagnier is no genius--certainly not a person of whom you'd say, "Wow, this is a man whom I really want to save my life!" And Jonas Salk has changed his mind a few times on what he thinks the problem is. I don't know where his level of expertise lies. But getting back to the point, I don't know why people don't look at the one indisputable fact: There has never been a cure for any major illness that has come out of the NIH.

[Q] Playboy: Not everybody would agree with that statement, nor does it square with the facts. What about childhood leukemia and hypertension? What about testicular cancer, where the survival rates have turned around dramatically? Don't they count?

[A] Kramer: No. Those are not cures, they are abatements. Control mechanisms. I don't consider childhood leukemia as being eradicated. It's been lessened. Same for testicular cancer. These are just bombardments by chemotherapy that manage in X percentage of cases only to keep the devil in check.

[Q] Playboy: Still, to the person who undergoes chemotherapy and ten years later remains free of cancer, that looks a lot like a cure.

[A] Kramer: I don't know why you are giving me such an argument about this. Of course I'm speaking in hyperbole, and, yes, there are people who have been helped by the NIH. But if you realize how old this institution is, how many things are being studied there, how many scientists are there, how much money is being poured into research--you'll see we are not getting good value for our money. Its AIDS research has been so wasteful, so asinine, so infantile, so disorganized, so duplicitous that you want to scream.

[Q] Playboy: Those are sweeping charges. Can you be specific?

[A] Kramer: You walk into the NIH and find out that there are 20 institutes doing exactly the same experiment. What kind of waste of money is that? Isn't anyone in charge down there? Who's running the show? That there are 20 institutes doing the same experiment is waste of an incomprehensible, tragic dimension. You want to scream: "Why am I the only person in the world who can see this?"

[Q] Playboy: So who would you put your money on to find a cure?

[A] Kramer: How can you ask me that after all I've just said? There's nobody I'd put my money on. Everything's being done in tiny bits and pieces. Uncoordinated. If the NIH is the second-rate cesspool that I fervently believe it is, we have to start over. The cure will probably come from a pharmaceutical company or some guy out in the Australian boondocks.

[Q] Playboy: You see no particular ray of hope? What about AZT?

[A] Kramer: AZT is a shitty drug and it's all they have now--for various reasons that have little to do with science. It was on the shelf for another disease and they had nothing else. Not one study proves the efficacy of AZT, and yet every doctor is prescribing it.

[Q] Playboy: We beg to differ. Many studies have shown that, while it may not increase survival time, it certainly has a positive effect.

[A] Kramer: And I beg to differ with you. For every study that claims an effect, another study contradicts that study. It's been an impossible drug to pin down. Yet for many years the NIH has stated unequivocally: Take AZT the minute you find you're HIV-positive because it's the best we have. But on a scale of one to a hundred, it's like a two. And it's only because [the pharmaceutical company] Burroughs-Wellcome is such an efficient and grotesquely ambitious company that AZT got out there first--and widely.

[Q] Playboy: Act Up picketed Burroughs-Wellcome, claiming that AZT was too expensive.

[A] Kramer: And we won two or three reductions in price. But at the same time it reduced AZT's price it raised the price of Acyclovir, which is taken far more widely than AZT. So in the end, Burroughs-Wellcome makes a lot more money--and we pay a lot more money. And it gets away with it. We may say, "That's awful," but it says: "Get real, buddy. This is dollars and cents."

[Q] Playboy: It's hardly a surprise that drug companies want to make money off their products.

[A] Kramer: Most drug companies don't see AIDS as a money-maker. Those who can afford the drugs are a tiny proportion of the people with AIDS--the ones with potent enough health insurance to cover the exorbitant costs. Most people with AIDS are poor and can't afford the drugs. And most of the cases are in Africa and Asia. You don't hear about shipping AZT to Africa, do you?

[Q] Playboy: So you're saying that on the government side there's nothing but ineptitude and incompetence----

[A] Kramer: Of the highest order.

[Q] Playboy: And that on the industry side there's a profit motive that excludes most research interest in AIDS. But what about drug companies such as Merck, which spends tens of millions of dollars on AIDS?

[A] Kramer: Merck is probably the best. It has spent more money researching AIDS than any other company. Yet even its president, Roy Vagelos, says privately that with the knowledge we currently have there will be no cure.

[Q] Playboy: So Merck is a good guy. Anyone else?

[A] Kramer: Bristol-Myers is a wonderful company. Our relationship with it has been the best the activist community has had with any drug company. And Squibb is good, too.

[Q] Playboy: And the bad guys?

[A] Kramer: The real sleazeballs are companies like Hoffman-LaRoche, which is controlled by the gnomes in Zurich and Basel. They couldn't care less about anything except the profit margin. They have several very promising drugs that they simply refuse to research.

[Q] Playboy: Like what? Be specific.

[A] Kramer: There's something called the Tat inhibitor, a whole new way of going after the virus that's enormously promising. It's been talked about for six years, but Hoffman-LaRoche has refused to make any meaningful investment of money in it. We don't really know why. It's now being used in a trial with six people at Johns Hopkins. I think Hoffman-LaRoche figures that if it stalls long enough--and the activists make enough noise--then the government will eventually pick up the tab. Frankly, I don't know why the government doesn't.

[Q] Playboy: Given your knowledge of what's out there, what anti-HIV drugs do you take?

[A] Kramer: Nothing.

[Q] Playboy: Nothing at all? Why not?

[A] Kramer: I have not seen any evidence, any information, any clinical study trial that has revealed enough information to persuade me to take the stuff. I know there are a lot of people who are much healthier than I am who have taken AZT for years. I just don't believe in it. You have to make your own decision.

[Q] Playboy: It's been five years since you found out you are HIV-positive, right?

[A] Kramer: I found out more than that I was positive. In 1988 I found out that I have liver disease from hepatitis B. They gave me two years to live. I learned this in the hospital, and it was very scary. For whatever reason, I am still here and I feel terrific. But it made me forcefully comprehend the fragility of life and the importance of making use of every remaining minute of it.

[Q] Playboy: By 1988 you had helped put most AIDS issues on the table. What was it like to hear the bad news yourself?

[A] Kramer: I remember standing on a street corner near the building where I was given the news and just being overwhelmed with a sort of awe that it finally had happened. It felt like an affirmation of something I knew was probably going to happen. So I accepted it, I think, with surprising ease. I was prepared for it. I didn't break down or go into depression. There was a moment of overwhelming readjustment. It forced upon me the necessity of making calculated, determined decisions. I had to assume I had only so many years and so much energy left, so what would I do with that?

[Q] Playboy: And what did you decide to do?

[A] Kramer: I became obsessed with my work. Nothing has made me so productive as learning I am HIV-positive. Since 1988, when I had my face right straight up to death, I've worked hard all the time. Time is precious to me. I don't waste time like I used to, letting days go by without working, finding excuses to do something else. I work every day, seven days a week.

[Q] Playboy: But you still don't describe yourself as a person with AIDS?

[A] Kramer: I don't have AIDS.

[Q] Playboy: Please help us understand the difference.

[A] Kramer: I have 450 T cells, and the definition of AIDS requires that you have something like 200. So right now I'm just HIV-positive. Basically, I still have a relatively healthy amount of T cells and I've never had an opportunistic infection. That's why I don't have AIDS.

[A] But it's such a stupid definition. I have a friend who has 750 T cells and AIDS lymphoma. By the official definition he doesn't have AIDS. It's ludicrous that the government has not been able to come up with a definition of this illness. Again, I come back to the CDC's being the single biggest bunch of idiots under one roof. In 12 years of a plague they still don't have a definition of the illness--and a lot of that has nothing to do with medicine.

[Q] Playboy: What are the other reasons?

[A] Kramer: Greed and pressure. The more people who have AIDS, the bigger a figure has to be put out--which means more money through Social Security and more worries from insurance companies. And none of this has anything to do with the poor blighter on the street who's suffering.

[Q] Playboy: So what do we need to do?

[A] Kramer: What we need is a Manhattan Project--like the group of people in the Forties that the government sent into the desert to build a fucking bomb. They were thought to be the best we had. "Here's the money to do it, here's the staff and don't come back until you do it." That is what we have to duplicate for AIDS. Give them emergency powers, the right to hire the people they want, the right to spend the money as they see fit anywhere in the world. And assign to them any government scientists or projects that they think are promising. Now, is that too complicated?

[Q] Playboy: The central authority you're describing sounds a lot like the AIDS czar Bill Clinton pledged to appoint.

[A] Kramer: No. It cannot be the AIDS czar. The person who is good at research is not the person who is good as the AIDS czar. An AIDS czar should coordinate the activities of the different agencies--a person with a whip, like Robert McNamara running the Defense Department or Lee Iacocca coming into Chrysler. I'm talking about a head of research who is good at supervising scientists and deciding what has to be done next.

[Q] Playboy: A medical Mussolini?

[A] Kramer: Absolutely. I do not believe that science can be legislated any more than art can be legislated--and science at the NIH is legislated. That's why we don't have a cure for anything. Somebody has to be put in charge, trusted, given emergency powers. I'm all for elitism.

[A] [In late June, President Clinton appointed Washington State health official Kristine Gebbie to the post of national AIDS policy coordinator. "I have a few calls out to find out more about her," Kramer told Playboy, "but the reports out of Washington aren't good. I'm sure she's a very nice lady, but nice is the last thing this job needs. A Stormin' Norman is what we need, and that's not going to be her. It's like I told 'The Boston Globe': We needed 'Jurassic Park' and Clinton gave us 'Snow White.' "]

[Q] Playboy: But isn't corporate and government elitism exactly what Act Up and other AIDS activists have been fighting against for 12 years?

[A] Kramer: We went after only the people who weren't doing their work. The good ones don't need their feet held to the fire. We are the first people to respect brains and, quite frankly, the only people we've gone after have been the dumb ones in power. Or the inept ones. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Samuel Broder, Dr. Vincent DeVita, Dr. Louis Sullivan.

[Q] Playboy: You've just illustrated perhaps your most notorious activist tactic: naming names. Your list of criticisms about your colleagues has been virtually unending. Why?

[A] Kramer: Actually, I think people would like to be able to say the things I say. That's the wonderful thing about being a writer with a few bucks in the bank: You don't have to answer to anybody. It's like being a court jester. People either respond positively or say, "When will this fool shut up?"

[Q] Playboy: More than a few people have said that about you.

[A] Kramer: Well, I think if you look at the record you'll see that I've been right on 80 or 90 percent of the issues. I don't think I've ever really called anything grotesquely wrong. I may have made mistakes in emphasis or been a little too hyperbolic, but everybody I've called a schmuck has in one way or another turned out to be a schmuck. And I don't think I've ever maligned somebody who turned out to be a terrific leader.

[Q] Playboy: What's your take on Clinton?

[A] Kramer: I think Clinton goes from bad to worse. By the time your readers read this, we may be on our way to having one of the worst presidents who ever inhabited the White House. I don't see how he will extricate himself from the morass he's in. Everything will require such patching up. All the things he's tried to do have been so splintered that he'll spend most of his term doing damage control. I am completely and utterly without hope in terms of what he'll do for AIDS and for my people.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't he try to do the right thing with gays in the military?

[A] Kramer: I would have said that originally, but in retrospect it was just the first example of what a bumbler he is. I would give him credit if he had sense enough to know how to handle it politically, but I doubt we'll ever know why he did such a dumb thing as throwing that out as his first ball. It just seems unwise. Each day we discover more and more of what a bad bargain we got with this man.

[Q] Playboy: So you don't give Clinton any credit for trying to do the right thing?

[A] Kramer: If the man is incompetent, what do all the good intentions of the world amount to? Hmmm, good line.

[Q] Playboy: Are you satisfied with the president's selection of Donna Shalala as Health and Human Services secretary?

[A] Kramer: Donna Do-Nothing? My reading of Donna Shalala is that she would best have stayed in Wisconsin. She is shaping up to be an enormously ambitious, territorial person with personality traits bordering on those of a viper.

[Q] Playboy: If that's true, wouldn't some of those traits make her effective at running HHS?

[A] Kramer: As far as I can see, she alienates everybody. She has certainly alienated me. The problems affecting health are not confined just to HHS--which is a moronic system filled with tens of thousands of second-rate civil servants--but spread over many different agencies. If any programs are going to work, they need cooperation, not fighting over turf. She already has had so many turf wars, she reminds me of Richard II trying to kill off all his enemies.

[A] Also, I think it is not so wise to put someone in there who knows nothing about the issues surrounding health. There are specific problems in Health and Human Services. Shalala may be the most wonderful person in the world, but she knows dipshit about this disease. Yet there she was interviewing AIDS czars. That's why it's been so hard to find a person to supervise AIDS activities: Everybody who has been offered the job turned it down. Nobody of any stature wanted to work with her.

[Q] Playboy: Let's move on to some other AIDS leaders. Elizabeth Taylor?

[A] Kramer: She has contributed a great deal--and I guess I want more from her. That's my greed, because I know what she's capable of representing to the world. I find that she is sort of elusive, drifting in and out with her activism. The inconsistency becomes sort of like coitus interruptus. You're getting something so wonderful and then suddenly the erection's gone. In fact, until Elizabeth finally criticized President Bush at the 1992 Amsterdam AIDS Conference, I was entirely perplexed about why she refused to go after the political system. Elizabeth knows Ronald Reagan. It would have been useful if she had publicly pressured him. But she refused to do that--and Ronald Reagan got away with it for eight years. So I don't fault her, I fault her focus.

[Q] Playboy: C. Everett Koop?

[A] Kramer: Well, those were different days. He was a courageous man, very outspoken and useful. In this country, the surgeon general is a position of no power--a bully pulpit with one person, a secretary and maybe an assistant. He had no staff per se. So it was courageous to say all the things he said. Part of the tragedy was that nobody listened.

[Q] Playboy: Magic Johnson?

[A] Kramer: I know lots of people consider Magic Johnson and Arthur Ashe to be heroes in all this, but I don't. Ashe waited so long to announce that he had AIDS, when he probably could have been one of the best spokespersons. Celebrity demands that you be honest about everything; you can't pick and choose what you're going to reveal to the world. Your life is no longer your own. That's part of the Faustian bargain you make with celebrity. If you're willing to take the adulation on the tennis courts, you have to be willing to take the exposure of other parts of your life.

[Q] Playboy: What about Magic?

[A] Kramer: Magic could change the world. Magic could make AIDS so respectable and so important on the agenda that everything standing in our way would be brushed aside. Yet even when he criticized George Bush, it was very meek and behind-the-scenes. He knew nothing about the research that's been done, even though he was on the AIDS commission. Nothing. He hasn't educated himself sufficiently on what's wrong and what could be done if he opened his mouth. I'm sad that he doesn't even know he has this power, this charisma, this national love and goodwill that cling to him. I get sad when people don't use the gifts that are there to be used.

[Q] Playboy: The person most Americans associate with AIDS is Ryan White, the Indiana boy who died of AIDS in 1990. Where is he on your list?

[A] Kramer: I think little Ryan White probably did more to change the face of this illness and to move people than anyone. And he continues to be a presence through his mom, Jeanne White. She has an incredibly moving presence as she speaks around the world.

[A] People respond to courage. Ryan was courageous by confronting the issue and saying,. "In your face, here I am, and here AIDS is. I am the face of AIDS." I want Magic Johnson to be that kind of role model. Magic is not being courageous by dodging the issue. I want Jodie Foster to be that kind of role model.

[Q] Playboy: Why Jodie Foster?

[A] Kramer: Because I don't think Jodie Foster has any right to continually dodge the question of her sexuality. Martina Navratilova has been so honest about her lesbianism--she's become a beloved figure because of that. She'll go down in history as a far greater figure, in my mind, than Jodie Foster ever will--no matter how many Oscars Foster wins.

[Q] Playboy: As long as we're discussing the virtues of coming out, let's bring up another name: Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank.

[A] Kramer: Not in my interview you won't.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Kramer: Because I think Barney Frank is full of hot air. He came out so publicly and so courageously, yet it was like that was the only thing he was capable of doing--like it was his Academy Award performance and he was never going to be able to give another one. He has been so infinitely disappointing to many of us on gay issues, on AIDS issues. We waited so long for the Barney Franks and the [Massachusetts congressman] Gerry Studdses. Yet in terms of actually helping the gay and lesbian community, both of them are deficient; they've become more straight than gay. Particularly Gerry Studds. They seem as if they have to prove to their constituents that they're not being too nice to the gays.

[Q] Playboy: Do you at least agree with Frank's suggestion of a compromise on the gays in the military issue?

[A] Kramer: For the first time, I actually do agree with him. Not because of his compromise, which I don't agree with, but simply his reasoning: that we didn't fight hard enough to win. But the idea of the "don't ask, don't tell" compromise sucks. It has everything to do with appeasement and nothing to do with human rights or antidiscrimination.

[Q] Playboy: With all these villains, who are Larry Kramer's heroes?

[A] Kramer: There are precious few. They're mostly people who have surmounted physical handicaps, like Helen Keller. Thurgood Marshall was another hero. And I have a great deal of respect for the tactics and philosophy of Malcolm X, as complicated and contradictory as they were. Malcolm X was out there on the edge. Few people are willing to put themselves so on the line, I guess.

[Q] Playboy: Is that where you see yourself--on the edge?

[A] Kramer: I don't think I'm on the edge any more than I was last week or will be next week. To some ninny who's afraid to open his front door and go out and march in a protest, of course I'm on the edge. But I don't think I do anything special. I never look at it as courage. You make it all sound very grand. You know, so many people come up to me and say, "Thank you for what you're doing. You're really speaking for me." I know it's a compliment, but sometimes I really have to restrain myself, because what I want to say is: "Fuck you! Why aren't you doing it, too?"

[Q] Playboy: Which brings us to an important point: More than a few people have called you unpleasant, using such words as "shrill," "tiresome," "rotten" and "a bully." Care to take a whack at adjectives that describe the real Larry Kramer?

[A] Kramer: The real anybody is a complicated somebody. It's never as black and white as the media convey. I'm different people. I like to be by myself in solitude; I can go for days not seeing or speaking to anybody. I'm also sentimental and romantic. And I'm naive. I'm tough and I can get angry and I'm a pussycat. My close friends are always surprised when I'm portrayed as the angriest man in America. They don't see that anger. My anger is not a personal anger, it's--I don't know--it's a public anger, I guess.

[Q] Playboy: People don't only call you angry. Some say you're crazy.

[A] Kramer: As an artist I don't necessarily consider that an insult.

[Q] Playboy: Were you always outspoken?

[A] Kramer: I was independent. My father was very abusive to me, and somewhere I had the guts to stand up to him. I don't know why I didn't cave in, keep my mouth shut, let him slap me around. But I always gave just as good as I got. I'd scream back at him, which would make him hit me more. He'd say, "Gay people are sissies." Well, [laughs] I was no sissy.

[A] But both of my parents--strangely enough--were moral people, which was not as rare as it is now. They had good philosophies of life. There was a lot of discussion about what was happening in the world--McCarthyism, segregation. But what made me realize the hollowness of so much of what they said was their reaction when they found out I was gay. All their moral rules suddenly applied to everything except homosexuals.

[Q] Playboy: How and when did they learn that you were gay?

[A] Kramer: I told my mother when I was 18. My father basically never did know. But for all her talk that we had to love everybody, my mother had a hard time dealing with it. I confronted her. I said, "I'm sorry, that's not what you taught me. If you can't deal with it, I can't deal with you. Goodbye."

[Q] Playboy: What happened next?

[A] Kramer: She called me and said she knew if she wanted to see me, she would have to accept it. I get angry at people who are afraid to tell their parents about their homosexuality, because I think it's a sham. I don't have much sympathy for the line "It'll kill them." Tough shit. It's killing you by not telling them.

[Q] Playboy: In another time, we'd be interviewing you as a noted writer. Is that a separate career for you?

[A] Kramer: Everything feeds everything else; it's all part of the same thing. I want very much to be remembered as a writer first and an activist second--not the other way around. But I certainly use my activism as the subject matter of the plays. I don't think I could write about anything that was not connected with AIDS or being gay. I don't see how any gay writer today could. I get a lot of flak from other gay writers for saying that.

[Q] Playboy: Living at the intersection of the AIDS and art worlds, how do you see them affecting each other?

[A] Kramer: I resent questions like this. People always zero in on how AIDS has decimated the arts, as if it hasn't touched the legal profession or advertising or medicine. That tends to make people think that anyone getting AIDS is either an airy-fairy dancer or a hairdresser or a fashion designer. It reinforces stereotypes. Well, that's not the case. I don't think there's any world that hasn't been harshly punished by AIDS.

[Q] Playboy: What we mean is, a generation of artists has continued to work, even while carrying a fatal virus. How do you see that affecting the art itself?

[A] Kramer: Quite frankly, I wish it would do more. It gets my dander up that so many talented people in the gay community are not using it to create. Again, it's like Arthur Ashe not coming out and telling the world he had AIDS, or Nureyev dying of a "mysterious blood disease." I feel that these creative geniuses who our community harbors--owns, possesses--really owe it to themselves and to us to deal with this major subject of our time. That's what great art is all about. Look what Goya painted: He took the pain of his era and made great art out of it, and in so doing revealed to his people and to history what life was really like. We're denied something that could be their greatest creations.

[Q] Playboy: Your play The Normal Heart was among the first to bring AIDS to the public so dramatically. Yet Broadway's newest AIDS drama, Angels in America, is considered a landmark--it won a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Do you now feel overlooked?

[A] Kramer: Prizes don't mean much to me, whether I win them or not. If it makes you feel any better, I was the runner-up for the Pulitzer this year. But in my experience, whatever I do--my creative work, my predictions, my political hunches--always seems to come a little too early to be listened to or recognized. And by the time it is, someone else has come along to carry on the work in a more palatable fashion, and get recognized. But that's OK. You shouldn't do things with the hope of being thanked or recognized or given prizes.

[Q] Playboy: Barbra Streisand is directing the film adaptation of The Normal Heart. What will she bring to it?

[A] Kramer: I believe Barbra sees this as a story about people's right to love whomever they want to love. Barbra is passionate about the project.

[Q] Playboy: How does that feel after all these years?

[A] Kramer: I still get a tingle of excitement when the phone rings and it's Barbra. She calls me a lot. I suddenly realize that on the end of the line is this incredible star who's meant so much to my life, just in terms of my being a fan. I have all of her records and sing all of her songs and I can't go to a supermarket or a shopping mall or drive the car without one of her songs suddenly invading my consciousness. I stop and say, "Hey, that's Barbra Streisand. She's making a movie of my play." [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: Let's wrap up. You have met with some of the most powerful people in government and have been arrested...how many times?

[A] Kramer: Who can count?

[Q] Playboy: OK, countless times. In those years of trying to get America to deal with AIDS, what have you learned about how people can change this society?

[A] Kramer: Boy, what a question. I guess it's taught me that if I were ineffably sad and had another kind of personality, I probably would have blown my head off. It has taught me that humanity is not kind in a general sense. Of course, there are lovely people individually, but as an entity, humanity and the world are cruel. At my most despairing--or insightful--moments, I think that this country is no longer governable, that we are in fact moving into a period of decline from which we shall never arise.

[Q] Playboy: That's pretty grim. How do you figure?

[A] Kramer: I lived in England during the Sixties. It was a country that had seen better days--it was at the end of its empire. I sometimes get the same feelings now that I had then, that America's infrastructure is constipated and irreparable and that the bureaucracy is so entrenched and Byzantine as to make it impossible ever to untangle the red tape.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't Act Up untangle it?

[A] Kramer: It took us four years to figure out how the FDA's drug-approval process worked. Shit, if it took us that long and we were working on it every day--and we're smart--what does that say about the ability of Mr. Average Joe to figure out anything about the way this country works? So people stay home and keep their mouths shut. They can no longer figure it out. There is this feeling of powerlessness. I think we're on the slow road down--that nothing can change the bureaucracy of a government, short of a revolution. And I don't think a revolution is in the cards for this country, which is probably just as well.

[Q] Playboy: So it's curtains for America?

[A] Kramer: It may be possible to be a happier country when we're not so powerful. A declining America is not necessarily an unhappier one. Maybe we'll even be more relaxed when the constant pressure of living up to unnaturally high expectations is taken away. The Italians and British are probably happier than the Japanese and the Germans.

[Q] Playboy: One last thing----

[A] Kramer: No. No. No. It mustn't be the last thing!

[Q] Playboy: Any closing thoughts on what people can do about the epidemic?

[A] Kramer: Plague. Plague. I thought I had you broken in.

[Q] Playboy: What can we do about AIDS?

[A] Kramer: I wish I could say something enormously profound that could lead to a revolution of thought and deed. But unfortunately the realities of our democracy are not profound. People look at me as if I'm crazy when I say we all have power: Our power is our voice. Yet for whatever reason, most of us are unwilling to use it. We can do simple things, like writing letters to congresspeople and the president, writing to newspapers, organizing a group of people to sign a petition, starting grass-roots organizations to carry out our beliefs.

[A] Quite often, all it takes is saying, "Please, let's all do something about this. Know that I'm scared to death and I don't want my children to grow up in this world. Can't we do something? Can't you speak to somebody?" You know, word of mouth has an amazing ability to grow and pollinate action.

[A] It sounds corny, but that's how things get done.

"This is an epidemic that need not have happened. By benign neglect, 41 cases have become a billion."