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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

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Larry Kramer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1935
Born: June 25
Died: 2020
Died: May 27
Hiv Activist
Lgbtiq+ Rights Activist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Laurence David Kramer
May
Bankers
Firsts
Jew
First
Gay
Men
Realize
Think
Realizing
Thinking
Black
Else
Banker
Anything
Gays

More quotes by Larry Kramer

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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
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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
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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
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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
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By nature, Im an optimistic person. No one believes it, but I am.
Larry Kramer
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Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I’m telling my story as a political document.
Larry Kramer
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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
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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
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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
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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
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You do not get more with honey than with vinegar!
Larry Kramer
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Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.
Larry Kramer
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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
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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
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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
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This is always history's greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.
Larry Kramer
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We have to think bigger as writers. We have to try and change the world.
Larry Kramer
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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
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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
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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