Books, Arts & Manners: Crank It Up

WITH THEIR calls for ever more public money and their equally insistent denials that any disease matters as much as their own, AIDS activists have done their best to deter sympathy. So much so that to find one of them worthy of affection and admiration comes as a shock.

Larry Kramer helped found the quasi-terrorist ACT-UP—which makes sense, terrorism being an appropriate response to “genocide,” which is what he says the (pre-Clinton) Federal Government has waged against homosexuals. He is also a playwright, novelist, and screenwriter who, for all his experience creating dramas, has refused to admit there is such a thing in human life as tragedy. AIDS is no tragedy, according to Kramer. It is, instead, an entirely preventable phenomenon, the outcome of bureaucratic ineptitude and hostility on the part of heterosexual health officials—“genocide.” Says Ned Weeks, the obnoxious autobiographical hero of Kramer’s two AIDS plays: “What do you do when you’re dying from a disease you need not be dying from?”

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.

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WITH THEIR calls for ever more public money and their equally insistent denials that any disease matters as much as their own, AIDS activists have done their best to deter sympathy. So much so that to find one of them worthy of affection and admiration comes as a shock.

Larry Kramer helped found the quasi-terrorist ACT-UP—which makes sense, terrorism being an appropriate response to “genocide,” which is what he says the (pre-Clinton) Federal Government has waged against homosexuals. He is also a playwright, novelist, and screenwriter who, for all his experience creating dramas, has refused to admit there is such a thing in human life as tragedy. AIDS is no tragedy, according to Kramer. It is, instead, an entirely preventable phenomenon, the outcome of bureaucratic ineptitude and hostility on the part of heterosexual health officials—“genocide.” Says Ned Weeks, the obnoxious autobiographical hero of Kramer’s two AIDS plays: “What do you do when you’re dying from a disease you need not be dying from?”

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.