Quotes from 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

Indeed, to be fucked pleasurably is a gift.

Straights don't compare themselves to us!

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

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

When in doubt, eat donuts.

Humiliation is so essential to Catholics. And to faggots!

Progress is unimaginably difficult, dangerous, always at risk, always made by people with only partial vision.

How needy man is.

The only safe place left is the dark.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.