Quotes by Larry Kramer

About Larry Kramer:

Larry Kramer is an American playwright, author, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for the 1969 film Women in Love, and earned an Academy Award nomination for his work. Kramer introduced a controversial and confrontational style in his 1978 novel Faggots. The book earned mixed reviews but emphatic denunciations from elements within the gay community for his one-sided portrayal of shallow, promiscuous gay relationships in the 1970s.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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

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

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

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...

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

Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.

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 wou...

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

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 pre...

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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 aliv...

Larry Kramer

Author Bio

  • NameLarry Kramer
  • DescriptionScreenwriter, novelist, essayist, playwright, activist
  • BornJune 25, 1935
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionScreenwriter; Playwright; Author; Novelist
  • AwardsLambda Literary Award