Really, Nancy Brophy? Really?

In Oregon, 71-year-old self-published romance novelist Nancy Crampton Brophy was found guilty of the June 2018 fatal shooting of her husband, chef, and culinary instructor Dan Brophy. She was sentenced to life in prison last month.

The couple had financial issues, and Nancy wanted to pay off all their marital debts and travel the world, but Dan didn’t like that idea. And that’s when it hit Nancy that Dan had a $1.5 million life insurance policy, as well as several other assets that would all be hers if he were … out of the way.

But police investigators became suspicious when they noticed that, while the Brophy’s were falling behind on paying their mortgage, Nancy made sure Dan’s insurance policy was paid right on time each and every month. Oh, and it didn’t help that her computer history showed that she went online and bought a ghost gun kit online—she claimed it was for “novel research”—and then also purchased a Glock 17 handgun—which turned out to be the murder weapon—at a gun show.

Then, on the day of the slaying, Nancy Brophy’s van was caught on traffic cameras near the scene at the time of Dan’s murder, and then while in jail awaiting trial Nancy ALLEGEDLY told a cellmate that she shot Dan in the heart twice, and then used her arms to demonstrate how far away from him she was when she fired.

But the most telling evidence in the case against Nancy Brophy? She wrote and published an essay in 2011 giving tips on the best way to kill your husband. Nancy now says the essay, How to Murder Your Husband, was just “jokes’ and here are some of the funnier lines:

“Divorce is expensive, and do you really want to split your possessions?”

“Or if you married for money, aren’t you entitled to all of it? The drawback is the police aren’t stupid. They are looking at you first. So you have to be organized, ruthless and very clever.”

Sadly, it seems that Nancy Brophy wasn’t as good at murdering her husband as she was about writing about murdering her husband. Perhaps Nancy should write another book on How To Better Kill Your Husband and Not Leave Behind Any Clues.

She has Life to do that.

RIP Patricia Nell Warren ... And Thank You

Around the same time I learned about Harvey Milk, I learned about Patricia Nell Warren, and about myself.

Warren’s 1974 novel, The Front Runner, made me think about myself, about who I was, what I was, how I might be. It was the story of an out gay track-and-field athlete, Billy Sive, who fell in love with his closeted, older coach, Harlan Brown. It was about love, and hate, and shame, and finding your way out of the closet, no matter who you were, or how old.

It was about me, but, you know, without the athleticism, cuz that ain’t my thing.

I found the book after asking my sister if she had something I could read and she told me to check her room. And I found The Front Runner, and the cover naturally caught my eye, so I took it. I didn’t know if it was about a gay athlete and his coach at the time, it was just the homoeroticism of that image.

But I read it, and parts made me ache, and made me smile, made me blush, and made my cry. I had never read such a book that talked mostly about the way two men could fall in love, and how they might choose to live after that.

Years later, I told my sister about the book—I kept it for years, never giving it back to her—and she didn’t know anything about it or where she’d gotten it; she said she never read it but she was glad I had.

I say all this because this week Patricia Nell Warren has died at age 82. And I wanted to thank her for her words and for all they meant to a young gay boy struggling to understand what that might possibly mean.

RIP. Thank you so much for helping me understand myself, a boy you never even knew.

"The Art of the Deal" Author Speaks Out On Donald [t]Rump

Back when Donald [t]Rump announced his candidacy for the presidency, he touted his book, “the Art of the Deal,” as one of the major reasons he could, and should , be President. 

Sadly, the man who actually wrote the book — [t]Rump]s ghostwriter Tony Schwartz — begs to differ. Schwartz, who earned a joint byline and half the 1987 memoir’s advance and royalties, spent 18 months with [t]Rump and got to know the man, the myth, the ego, quite well. But, um, yeah, to paraphrase Christina Crawford, speaking to her mother Joan, right before that epic slap in Mommie Dearest, he is not one of [t]Rump’s fans:

“I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

“One of the most deep and basic needs he has is to prove that ‘I’m richer than you.'”

“He’s a living black hole.”

Schwartz says that if he had written the book today it would be called “The Sociopath”:

“Trump didn’t fit any model of human being I’d ever met. He was obsessed with publicity, and he didn’t care what you wrote.”

“It’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes.”

“If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time.”

“Donald pisses ice water. He’d like people when they were helpful, and turn on them when they weren’t. It wasn’t personal. He’s a transactional man—it was all about what you could do for him.”

“The notion that he’s a self-made man is a joke. But I guess they couldn’t call the book ‘The Art of My Father’s Deals.'”

“Lying is second nature to him. More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”

Schwartz now says he deeply regrets his role in helping [t]Rump promote himself and, just when I was about to wonder if he’d give back the money he made from the book, announced that he will be donating all  of this year’s royalties from the book to the National Immigration Law Center, Human Rights Watch, the Center for the Victims of Torture, the National Immigration Forum and the Tahirih Justice Center.

“I’ll carry this until the end of my life. There’s no righting it. But I like the idea that, the more copies that ‘The Art of the Deal’ sells, the more money I can donate to the people whose rights Trump seeks to abridge.”

And snap.

Raw Story

Repost: LGBT History Month: Randy Shilts*

* originally posted October 20, 2009

Randy Shilts spent his life writing about us and for us, and to us. He chronicled who we were and how we came to be, where we come from and where we headed. He lived as openly as nearly anyone on the planet, creating a model many might follow.

It seemed as though he always wanted to write, that he always had something to say. He was the managing editor of the Oregon Daily Emerald, the student newspaper, at the University of Oregon. It was there, at the age of twenty, that Randy Shilts came out as a gay man, even running for student office under the slogan Come Out For Shilts.

And though he graduated near the top of his class, finding work as an openly gay man in 1975 was near impossible, especially in what he soon learned was the homophobic environment of newspapers and television stations. He began to work as a freelance journalist, and because of his talent, he was offered the position of national correspondent by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1981. This made Randy Shilts the "first openly gay reporter with a gay 'beat' in the American mainstream press." Ironically enough, just as he was getting started in his new post, came news of the Gay Plague; AIDS, which would later take his life, was becoming a national news story.

But it wasn't the only story. Living and working in San Francisco he was fascinated by the life of openly gay politician Harvey Milk, and wrote his first best seller, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. This was yet another first for Randy Shilts; his book became one of the first gay political biographies, an entirely new genre.

His writing style was admired for its powerful narrative drive, interweaving personal stories with political and social reporting, and Shilts described himself best by saying he was a literary journalist in the style of Capote and Mailer.

His second book, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic was published in 1985, and also won the Stonewall Book Award, while also bringing him national literary exposure. Randy's sense of storytelling, along with his journalistic need for extensive research, made everything he wrote both enjoyable and valuable as a teaching lesson. And the Band Played On was translated into seven languages, and in 1993 was made into an HBO film.

Randy Shilts final book, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military: Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, shined a light on the discrimination faced on a daily basis by LGBT members of the American military. He and his assistants interviewed over a thousand people for the book, and Randy Shilts dictated the last chapter from a hospital bed.

Still, it wasn't all glory for Randy Shilts. While many, gay and straight, praised his work, he was also criticized--to the point of being spat on on Castro Street--for calling for the closure of gay bathhouses in San Francisco to slow the spread of AIDS. And the gay community also berated Shilts for his opposition to the controversial practice of outing prominent but closeted lesbians and gay men. still, he maintained his integrity in spite of being called "a traitor to his own kind" by another Bay Area journalist. In a note included in The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, he told of what he saw as his duty to rise above the criticism:

I can only answer that I tried to tell the truth and, if not be objective, at least be fair; history is not served when reporters prize trepidation and propriety over the robust journalistic duty to tell the whole story.

Randy Shilts had been tested for HIV, but declined to hear the results until he finished writing And the Band Played On. He felt that the knowledge of his condition, be it positive or negative, might have an effect on the book, and for Randy Shilts, the book, the characters, their stories, and the cause, came first. It was in March of 1987 that Shilts learned he was HIV+, and though he began taking AZT, and continued on that regimen for many years, he did not disclose his status until shortly before he died.

In 1992, Shilts came down with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and suffered a collapsed lung; the following year, it was Kaposi's sarcoma. In a New York Times interview in 1993, Randy Shilts said:

HIV is certainly character-building. It's made me see all of the shallow things we cling to, like ego and vanity. Of course, I'd rather have a few more T-cells and a little less character.

Despite his condition--he was essentially homebound and on oxygen--Randy Shilts went to Los Angeles in the late summer of 1993 for the premier of HBO's And The Band Played On.
Randy Shilts died in February of 1994, at his ranch in Guerneville, California. He was survived by his partner, Barry Barbieri, his mother, and his brothers, one of whom had conducted a commitment ceremony for Randy and Barry the year prior.

He bequeathed 170 cartons of papers, notes, and research files to the local history section of the San Francisco Public Library, including research for what would have been his fourth book, an examination of homosexuality in the Roman Catholic Church.

A longtime friend said of Randy Shilts:

He chose to write about gay issues for the mainstream precisely because he wanted other people to know what it was like to be gay. If they didn't know, how were things going to change?

For Randy Shilts, the band plays on.

On This Day In LGBT History

October 20, 1969 – The National Institutes of Mental Health released a report based on a study led by psychologist Dr. Evelyn Hooker. The report urged states to repeal sodomy laws.

October 20, 1987 – Over fifty ACT-UP members were arrested during an act of civil disobedience protesting President Reagan’s lack of action in the AIDS epidemic. Another demonstration of about 150 people was held across the street from the United Nations building during the UN General Assembly’s first debate on AIDS.

October 20, 1987 – The US House of Representatives voted 368-47 to approve an amendment to withhold federal funding from any AIDS education organization which encourages homosexual activity. The senate approved a similar amendment the previous week by a vote of 94-2. It was introduced by Sen. Jesse Helms.

October 20, 1987 – The US House Judiciary Committee voted 21-13 to approve a bill requiring the justice department to collect statistics on hate crimes, including anti-gay violence.

October 20, 1992 – The San Diego Police Department announced that it was severing its ties with the Boy Scouts of America due to a local chapter’s dismissal of a gay police officer who was involved with the Explorer program.

October 20, 1993 – Roman Catholic priest Rev Andre Guindon died of a heart attack at age 60. In his book “The Sexual Creators” he wrote that heterosexuals should look to same-sex couples to learn about tenderness and sharing.

October 20, 1997 – Portugal’s first Gay and Lesbian Community Centre opened in Lisbon.

Jessica Verday: Gay Is SO Okay

Jessica Verday is an author; she has written three books, part of The Hollow Trilogy: The Hollow; The Haunted, Book 2 of The Hollow Trilogy; and The Hidden, Book 3 of The Hollow Trilogy.

As a lot of authors do, Jessica Verday submits stories to publishers of anthologies, one of those being the Wicked Pretty Things anthology. Unfortunately, at first for Jessica Verday, and subsequently for the publishers of the Wicked Pretty Things anthology, she ultimately pulled her submission from the book because she was told that she story she wrote....well, let's have Jessica Verday tell you in her own words.

Jessica Verday:

"I've received a lot of questions and comments about why I'm no longer a part of the Wicked Pretty Things anthology...and I've debated the best way to explain why I pulled out of this anthology. The simple reason?  I was told that the story I'd wrote, which features Wesley (a boy) and Cameron (a boy), who were both in love with each other, would have to be published as a male/female story because a male/male story would not be acceptable to the publishers. 

I'll try to keep the "not-so-simple" reason from becoming a rant and just sum it up by saying that that was SO Not Okay with me. I immediately withdrew my story and my support for the anthology.

There's a lot of misinformation and half-truths in the publishing world (like the fact that everyone thinks when you publish a book you're automatically BFF's with J.K. Rowling and you get to use her estate on the weekends because, hey, you're totally rich now, right?) and there's a lot that's outside of my control (like my cover design, the flap copy that goes on the book to describe it, how the book is advertised, and where it gets promoted in bookstores), but there's one thing that I can and always will be able to control, and that's the message I send to my fans by the stories I write.

And the message I want to send is this: You don't choose who you fall in love with and you don't choose to be gay.

We're constantly bombarded with messages from sick people who try to tell us that it's a choice or a lifestyle or an agenda. But Wesley and Cameron's story isn't an agenda or an issue. It isn't an "I have to prove something to the world" story. Wesley and Cameron's story is a love story. About one boy who loves another boy so much that when something bad happens to him, he'll do whatever it takes to get him the help he needs.

Just bittersweet, hopeful, first love. And I think the world needs more of that.

While I may not have intentionally written an "issues" story, in the real world this issue is very personal to me. I have gay friends, fans, and family and by allowing my story to be changed in that way I would be contributing to a great disservice to them, the entire LGBT community, and to readers in general. You are not wrong or a dirty little secret for being who you are. Love is beautiful and rare. When you find it, you should hold onto it and not let go. You should not be made to feel inferior.

Well said, Ms. Verday. Well said.
And here's hoping Wesley and Cameron's story finds it's way onto bookshelves, and those Kindle things. These are stories that a lot of us might like to read.
 
Jessica's Blog

Welcome......

.........to Taylor Siluwé, author of Dancing With The Devil, a collection of short stories that "deal with those sometimes sexy, sometimes darkly disturbing moments when our inner devils come out and dance."

Check it out HERE

LGBT History Month: Paul Monette

Anyone who writes, anything from notes to journals to blogs to books, understands that the best writing of all comes when the writer writes what they know. There is nothing that connects people more than shared experiences, shared emotions, shared lives.

Paul Monette knew this, and opened up every aspect of his life to tell stories, all of our stories. He was there to tell us how he struggled with being gay, how he found his identity, how he coped with a society that often views us as 'less than','how to deal with finding love, and losing love to AIDS.

Paul Monette was always out, it seems. As a young man in his twenties he met Roger Horowitz, with who he would live, and love, for the next twenty years. He'd begun teaching poetry, but soon became disillusioned with that art form, and with Horowitz' encouragement, the couple moved to Los Angeles so Monette could pursue a career as a screenwriter.

He wrote many screenplays, none of which were ever produced, but just the act of writing them, convinced Monette that he should write novels, that he should tell his story and the stories of others.

Monette published four novels between 1978 and 1982, and all were enormously successful, establishing him as a writer of popular fiction. But his life began to change, and his work would change just as dramatically. In his fiction, Monette unabashedly depicts gay men who strive to fashion their own identities that lead them to love, friendship, and self-fulfillment. His early novels often begin where most coming-out novels end; his characters have already come to terms with their homosexuality and they battle family relations, societal expectations, and personal desires in a desire to live their lives as openly gay men.

In the earl 80s Roger Horowitz was diagnosed with AIDS, and he died in 1986. Monette began to write himself out of his pain, by telling of their battle with AIDS in Borrowed Time. Then he shared more of his pain, and his life, when he wrote Love Alone: 18 Elegies For Rog, a collection of poems about losing his lover to AIDS. These two books are oftentimes quoted as being the two most powerful works of fiction about living with,m and dying from, AIDS.

With the publication of these two works, Paul Monette found himself as somewhat of a national spokesman for AIDS. Along with Larry Kramer, he became one of the most familiar and outspoken activists of our time. With very few out gay men in the national spotlight, especially in the early years of the epidemic, Monette's openness and honesty, and simple visibility as a gay man, helped many through their own times of crises.

His own memoirs, Becoming A Man: Half A Life Story, was less the story of people with AIDS, but rather the story of Monette's own struggles with growing up gay. It's the story of a life in the closet and the struggles we all face knowing when to come out. Becoming a Man won the 1992 National Book Award for nonfiction, and Paul Monette went on to write two more novels about AIDS: Afterlife in 1990, and HalfwayHome in 1995.

Paul Monette, himself, died from complications of AIDS in 1995.

His is a story, in life and words, fiction and fact, of our struggles, with being gay, with finding acceptance not only from others but from ourselves, on recognizing that while we are different, we are all, straight and gay, black, white, male, female, all very much alike.

As I said, everyone who writes anything knows the best writing is what you know, and Paul Monette showed us that we can write what we know, live what we know, be what we know.

The march goes on.

On This Day In LGBT History

October 23, 1766 – Christoffel Bosch van Leeuwarden, a seventy year old porter in the Netherlands, was convicted of seduction to sodomy and sentenced to three years of prison labour.
October 23, 1907 – The Molte v. Harden trial began in Germany. Journalist Maximillian Harden accused General Kuno Count von Moltke of being in a homosexual relationship. Moltke filed a civil suit, and though Harden was acquitted the verdict was later overturned and he was found guilty.
October 23, 1937 – Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay’s former lover Stanley Haggart wrote to him after marrying a woman in an attempt to change his sexuality, “To think it had to take a marriage with its wedding night experiences to show me where my real affinity lies. Every cell in me screamed out in protest at my desecration of my body. At that time I knew that I belonged to you and you to me.”
October 23, 1977 – Two thousand people demonstrate in downtown Montreal to protest October 22 bar raids. Police attack the demonstrators with motorcycles and billy-clubs and made further arrests.
October 23, 1979 – Former Winnipeg Free Press publisher Richard Malone pleads guilty to charges of buggery and obstructing justice. He is given a one-year sentence, following “juvenile sex ring” investigation in February 1979.
October 23, 1993 – In Helena Montana the state supreme court ruled that transvestitism is not a sufficient reason to deny a father joint custody of his 3-year old child.
October 23, 1998 – The Los Angeles City council condemned the “Making Sense of Homosexuality” conference, organized by the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, saying that claims of “curing” homosexuals create an atmosphere that can lead to anti-gay violence.
October 23, 1999 – Religious right leader Rev. Jerry Falwell and evangelical Christian supporters met with Rev. Mel White and gay Christians for an anti-violence forum.

LGBT History Month: Randy Shilts

Randy Shilts spent his life writing about us and for us, and to us. He chronicled who we were and how we came to be, where we come from and where we headed. He lived as openly as nearly anyone on the planet, creating a model many might follow.

It seemed as though he always wanted to write, that he always had something to say. He was the managing editor of the Oregon Daily Emerald, the student newspaper, at the University of Oregon. It was there, at the age of twenty, that Randy Shilts came out as a gay man, even running for student office under the slogan Come Out For Shilts.

And though he graduated near the top of his class, finding work as an openly gay man in 1975 was near impossible, especially in what he soon learned was the homophobic environment of newspapers and television stations. He began to work as a freelance journalist, and because of his talent, he was offered the position of national correspondent by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1981. This made Randy Shilts the "first openly gay reporter with a gay 'beat' in the American mainstream press." Ironically enough, just as he was getting started in his new post, came news of the Gay Plague; AIDS, which would later take his life, was becoming a national news story.

But it wasn't the only story. Living and working in San Francisco he was fascinated by the life of openly gay politician Harvey Milk, and wrote his first best seller, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. This was yet another first for Randy Shilts; his book became one of the first gay political biographies, an entirely new genre.

His writing style was admired for its powerful narrative drive, interweaving personal stories with political and social reporting, and Shilts described himself best by saying he was a literary journalist in the style of Capote and Mailer.

His second book, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic was published in 1985, and also won the Stonewall Book Award, while also bringing him national literary exposure. Randy's sense of storytelling, along with his journalistic need for extensive research, made everything he wrote both enjoyable and valuable as a teaching lesson. And the Band Played On was translated into seven languages, and in 1993 was made into an HBO film.

Randy Shilts final book, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military: Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, shined a light on the discrimination faced on a daily basis by LGBT members of the American military. He and his assistants interviewed over a thousand people for the book, and Randy Shilts dictated the last chapter from a hospital bed.

Still, it wasn't all glory for Randy Shilts. While many, gay and straight, praised his work, he was also criticized--to the point of being spat on on Castro Street--for calling for the closure of gay bathhouses in San Francisco to slow the spread of AIDS. And the gay community also berated Shilts for his opposition to the controversial practice of outing prominent but closeted lesbians and gay men. still, he maintained his integrity in spite of being called "a traitor to his own kind" by another Bay Area journalist. In a note included in The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, he told of what he saw as his duty to rise above the criticism:

I can only answer that I tried to tell the truth and, if not be objective, at least be fair; history is not served when reporters prize trepidation and propriety over the robust journalistic duty to tell the whole story.

Randy Shilts had been tested for HIV, but declined to hear the results until he finished writing And the Band Played On. He felt that the knowledge of his condition, be it positive or negative, might have an effect on the book, and for Randy Shilts, the book, the characters, their stories, and the cause, came first. It was in March of 1987 that Shilts learned he was HIV+, and though he began taking AZT, and continued on that regimen for many years, he did not disclose his status until shortly before he died.

In 1992, Shilts came down with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and suffered a collapsed lung; the following year, it was Kaposi's sarcoma. In a New York Times interview in 1993, Randy Shilts said:

HIV is certainly character-building. It's made me see all of the shallow things we cling to, like ego and vanity. Of course, I'd rather have a few more T-cells and a little less character.

Despite his condition--he was essentially homebound and on oxygen--Randy Shilts went to Los Angeles in the late summer of 1993 for the premier of HBO's And The Band Played On.
Randy Shilts died in February of 1994, at his ranch in Guerneville, California. He was survived by his partner, Barry Barbieri, his mother, and his brothers, one of whom had conducted a commitment ceremony for Randy and Barry the year prior.

He bequeathed 170 cartons of papers, notes, and research files to the local history section of the San Francisco Public Library, including research for what would have been his fourth book, an examination of homosexuality in the Roman Catholic Church.

A longtime friend said of Randy Shilts:

He chose to write about gay issues for the mainstream precisely because he wanted other people to know what it was like to be gay. If they didn't know, how were things going to change?

For Randy Shilts, the band plays on.

On This Day In LGBT History

October 20, 1969 – The National Institutes of Mental Health released a report based on a study led by psychologist Dr. Evelyn Hooker. The report urged states to repeal sodomy laws.
October 20, 1987 – Over fifty ACT-UP members were arrested during an act of civil disobedience protesting President Reagan’s lack of action in the AIDS epidemic. Another demonstration of about 150 people was held across the street from the United Nations building during the UN General Assembly’s first debate on AIDS.
October 20, 1987 – The US House of Representatives voted 368-47 to approve an amendment to withhold federal funding from any AIDS education organization which encourages homosexual activity. The senate approved a similar amendment the previous week by a vote of 94-2. It was introduced by Sen. Jesse Helms.
October 20, 1987 – The US House Judiciary Committee voted 21-13 to approve a bill requiring the justice department to collect statistics on hate crimes, including anti-gay violence.
October 20, 1992 – The San Diego Police Department announced that it was severing its ties with the Boy Scouts of America due to a local chapter’s dismissal of a gay police officer who was involved with the Explorer program.
October 20, 1993 – Roman Catholic priest Rev Andre Guindon died of a heart attack at age 60. In his book “The Sexual Creators” he wrote that heterosexuals should look to same-sex couples to learn about tenderness and sharing.
October 20, 1997 – Portugal’s first Gay and Lesbian Community Centre opened in Lisbon.

LGBT History Month: Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer is an everyman....an everyGAYman. Playwright, author, public health advocate, fighter, speaker and activist....hero to the LGBT community, whether you like him or not.

In 1953, Larry enrolled at Yale University, but didn't do well in that environment. He truly believed he was the only gay man at the school and, at one point, tried to commit suicide with an overdose of aspirin. That experience, of wanting to end his life because he was homosexual, left him desperate to explore sexuality and fight for gay people in any way possible.

Soon, there was a brief affair with a German professor, who wanted Larry to return to Europe with him, but Larry refused. Yale was a family tradition--his father, older brother, Arthur, and two uncles were alumni--and he wanted to graduate also, which he did in 1957 with a degree in English. For Larry Kramer, every drama he would write has grown out of a desire to understand the nature of love and its obstacles.

After graduation, Larry worked as a teletype operator at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood. Eventually he moved to the story department to rework scripts; his first writing credit was for Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, a teen sex comedy. He followed that with an Oscar nomination for his screenplay of D.H.Lawrence's Women in Love in 1969. Then Larry erred, or he believes he erred. He wrote what he now calls "the only thing in my life I'm ashamed of;" the 1973 musical remake of Frank Capra's Lost Horizon.

Disappointed im himself, Larry left Hollywood for New York City to write for the stage. He began to integrate homosexual themes into his work, his first of which was Sissies' Scrapbook--later rewritten and retitled as Four Friends--a dramatic play about four dysfunctional friends, one of whom is gay. Calling it a play about "cowardice and the inability of some men to grow up," Larry loved the play, and loved it more when it was actually produced. However, mixed reviews and poor box office, closed the play quickly, and he vowed never to write for the stage again.

His first novel, Faggots, received all sorts of attention, though perhaps not the kind Larry Kramer craved. Faggots was about the fast lifestyle of gay men of Fire Island and Manhattan; it was the story a man who is unable to find love while encountering drugs and casual sex in bars and discos.

Faggots caused an uproar in the very community it portrayed; it was taken off the shelves of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore and Kramer was actually banned from the grocery store near his home. Both the gay and straight press panned the book and Larry remembers that time as one when the "straight world thought I was repulsive, and the gay world treated me like a traitor. People would literally turn their back when I walked by."

Still, Faggots is one of the best-selling gay novels of all time. The book has never been out of publication and is often taught in gay studies classes and Larry Kramer seemed on the cusp of becoming a successful, though controversial writer. He might have stayed there had it not been for that flu.

His friends began getting sick, and then dying, and Larry wanted to know why. In 1981, he invited a select group of New York's gay community to his apartment to listen to a doctor say their friends' illnesses were related, and research was needed. The Gay Men's Health Crisis [GMHC] was formed that night, becoming the primary organization to raise funds for, and provide services to, people stricken with AIDS.

Although Larry Kramer served on its first board of directors, his view of how it should be run sharply conflicted with other members. While GMHC concentrated on social services for AIDS patients, Kramer wanted to fight for funding from New York City. Mayor Koch was a particular target, as was the behavior of gay men before we really understood how HIV was transmitted. When doctors suggested men stop having sex, Kramer strongly encouraged GMHC to deliver the message to as many gay men as possible but they refused.

Larry then did what he does best: write. His essay "1,112 and Counting" discussed the spread of HIV/AIDS, the lack of government response, and apathy of the gay community. It was meant to frighten gay men, and anger them to respond to government indifference. It attacked everyone from the Centers for Disease Control [CDC], the National Institutes of Health [NIH] and Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Larry raged at politicians for refusing to acknowledge the implications of an AIDS epidemic. While many were still talking about this flu, or this gay disease, Larry Kramer realized it was much, much more, and his harshest condemnation was directed at gay men who thought that if they ignored HIV/AIDS it would simply go away.

But many in the gay community, remembering Larry Kramer as the writer of that awful Faggots, saw him as the Gay Chicken Little, shrieking about a falling sky. Calling him too militant, the GMHC ousted Larry Kramer from the organization in 1983.

Saddened by his removal from the GMHC, Kramer left for Europe, and while visiting Dachau, he learned that the concentration camp had opened in 1933--long before the war--and that neither Germany, nor other nations, did anything to stop it. He saw a direct correlation between Dachau and the AIDS epidemic, and was inspired to chronicle the same reaction from the American government and the gay community to the AIDS crisis.

Despite his vow never to write for the theater again, The Normal Heart is a play set between 1981 and 1984. In it, a writer named Ned Weeks nurses his lover who is dying of an unnamed disease--one which has his doctors puzzled--and is frustrated at being unable to research it. Weeks is also a member of an unnamed organization of which he is eventually thrown out.

The play is considered a literary landmark. It contended with the AIDS crisis when few would speak of it, including gay men themselves; it remains the longest-running play ever staged at the Public Theater--running for a year starting in 1985--and has been produced over 600 times in the U.S., Europe, Israel, and South Africa.

Finally finding a place where his voice might be heard, Larry Kramer next wrote Just Say No, A Play About A Farce, highlighting the hypocrisy of the Reagan and Koch administrations that Larry believes allowed AIDS to become an epidemic. It is the story of a First Lady, her gay son, and the closeted gay mayor of America’s “largest northeastern city.”

I wonder who he meant?

It was not a successful endeavor, however. The New York Times hated it, and few came to see it, although one person, Susan Sontag, said that Larry Kramer "is one of America's most valuable troublemakers. I hope he never lowers his voice."

Published in 1989, Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist is a selection of Larry Kramer's nonfiction writings focusing on AIDS activism and LGBT civil rights. His message, the same as always, is that gay men must accept responsibility for their lives, and that those who are still living give back to their community by fighting for People With AIDS, and for civil rights for the LGBT community.

Larry Kramer:

"I must put back something into this world for my own life, which is worth a tremendous amount. By not putting back, you are saying that your lives are worth shit, and that we deserve to die, and that the deaths of all our friends and lovers have amounted to nothing. I can't believe that in your heart of hearts you feel this way. I can't believe you want to die. Do you?"

Larry Kramer effectively, directly, and deliberately defines AIDS as a Holocaust to which the United States failed to respond quickly. He believes this is due to the fact that AIDS initially infected gay men, and then predominantly poor and politically powerless minorities. It was the people who didn't really matter that got sick, he feels, and so now he personally advocates for a more significant response to AIDS. He implores the government to conduct research based on commonly accepted scientific standards and to allocate funds and personnel to AIDS research. Kramer ultimately feels that the response to AIDS in the U.S. be defined as a Holocaust because of the large number deaths that resulted from the negligence and apathy in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and early Clinton Presidencies

Tragedy was first a speech and a call to arms that Kramer delivered five days after the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush; he then turned it into a book. Larry Kramer found it inconceivable that Bush was reelected on the backs of gay people when there were so many more pressing issues. There was war, a failing economy, pollution, but Bush made the campaign about gay marriage. Larry Kramer feels we, as a community, were trampled on by George W. Bush in his quest for power.

I think he had something there.

See, people don't seem to understand the one thing that Larry Kramer fully gets: you can be angry at those you love; you can even hate those you love. He loves the LGBT community, he simply wants us to get what we need for ourselves instead of waiting for someone, anyone, to give us our rights. They're our rights, we shouldn't be waiting for them to come to us, we should demand them.

Larry Kramer decided the time was ripe to act.

He confronted the director of an NIH agency about not devoting more time and effort toward researching AIDS because he was closeted; he threw a drink in Republican fundraiser Terry Dolan's face during a party and screamed at him for having affairs with men, then using homosexuality as a reason to raise money for conservative causes; he called Ed Koch and the media and government agencies in New York City "equal to murderers".

Larry would not be quiet.

In 1987, Larry Kramer founded AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power [ACT UP], a direct action protest organization targeting government agencies and corporations for their lack of treatment and funding for people with AIDS. Giving a speech at one of the first ACT UP gatherings, Kramer began by having two thirds of the room stand up, and told them they would be dead in five years: "If my speech tonight doesn't scare the shit out of you, we're in real trouble. If what you're hearing doesn't rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men will have no future here on earth. How long does it take before you get angry and fight back?"

How long indeed.

ACT UP's first target was the Food and Drug Administration [FDA], who Larry Kramer accused of neglecting badly needed medication for HIV+ Americans. For Larry Kramer, a man of words, now it was time for action; his primary objective was to get as many people as possible arrested to focus attention on their target. On March 24, 1987, 17 people out of 250 participating were arrested for blocking rush hour traffic in front of the FDA's Wall Street offices and Larry Kramer himself was arrested countless numbers of times while working with ACT UP. The group disrupted evening newscasts, corporate board meetings and even the New York Stock Exchange. Soon there were hundreds of chapters in the US and Europe.

Today, Larry Kramer continues to advocate for social and legal equity for homosexuals. "Our own country's democratic process declares us to be unequal, which means, in a democracy, that our enemy is you. You treat us like crumbs. You hate us. And sadly, we let you."

In 1988, as Just Say No was closing, Larry Kramer entered the hospital with an aggravated congenital hernia. While in surgery, doctors discovered liver damage due to Hepatitis B, and informed Larry that he was also HIV+. In 2001, at age 66, Kramer was in dire need of a liver transplant, but he was turned down by Mount Sinai Hospital's organ transplant list because HIV+ patients were routinely considered inappropriate candidates for organ transplants due to complications from HIV and perceived short lifespans. Out of the 4,954 liver transplants performed in the United States, only 11 were for HIV-positive people.

In June 2001, Newsweek announced that Larry Kramer was dying; in December 2001, the Associated Press claimed Kramer had died. Instead, very much alive, Larry Kramer was at the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute at the University of Pittsburgh--which had done more HIV transplants (9) than any other facility in the world.

He received the new liver on December 21, 2001.

Say what you will about Larry Kramer. He's brash. He's arrogant. He's rude. He's a troublemaker. But he marches out in front of all of us, even those who choose not to march. He stands up for us, and in our faces, at the same time. If there ever was a hero to the gay community and for the gay community, then it's a list that should include the name of Larry Kramer.

The march goes on.

On This Day In LGBT History

October 19, 1946 – Harris Glenn Milstead, better known to the world as Divine, is born in Baltimore. The queen of shock starred in Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and a raft of other films.
October 19, 1955 – Daughters of Bilitis, the first long-term American organization for lesbians, was founded in San Francisco by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.
October 19, 1981- Former Toronto mayor John Sewell wins junior aldermanic seat in Ward 6 byelection. It is the first time the gay issue has not played a role in an election in the mainly gay area.
October 19, 1993 – Massachusetts state education officials announced that they would use $450,000 in funds raised from a new state cigarette tax to fund programs to stop anti-gay harassment in public schools.
October 19, 1996 – Representatives of the American Psychiatric Association met with approximately fifty transgender activists who voiced their concerns about reforming the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder.
October 19, 1999 – A rape center in Vancouver organization was ordered to pay $2,030 in damages for banning a transgendered person from its drop-in center.