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“It is New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1999. The century is ending, but the millennium has arrived. That is, the homosexual millennium has arrived. Oh, there were dark and bloody times. The Queer Wars racked the country, American cities were soaked in blood, Pat Buchanan was assassinated. But thanks to Act-Up, Queer Nation, the Lesbian Avengers, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, the Sexual Minority Youth Guidance Center, NOW, the ACLU, the NAACP, CORE, the AFL-CIO, the Urban League, the Supreme Court, Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, and the series of Marches on Washington, an idyllic peace now reigns in the land, with homosexuals sitting at the right hand of whomever one is supposed to sit at the right hand of. The cure for AIDS was found long ago but kept hidden by Phyllis Schlafly, Bill Dannemeyer, and Louis Sullivan. But most of those people are in prison now, and in any event the great pestilence is over. Siskel and Ebert are out of the closet. Amy Carter is living in lesbian bliss with Cher’s daughter Chastity. Hollywood is remaking the Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford The Way We Were with Barbra’s son Jason in love with Tom Cruise. Homosexuals can marry now and have fashionable wedding ceremonies in which friends and family unite joyfully. Able to live in happy domestic relationships with the full respect of the community, they seem to have given up their compulsive sexual promiscuity and settled down as ordinary couples just like anybody else. Everything is open to them. They love each other and everybody else. Happy twenty-first century!”

THIS, AT LEAST, is the slightly fanciful dream of the future—partly quoted, partly paraphrased— from The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, an entertaining monologue written by David Drake and wittily performed by Erick Paeper to packed houses in Greenwich Village. Earlier passages of the monologue are realistically descriptive of the homosexual life, some passages rather somber. But as it happens there is substantial reason for satisfaction in the homosexual world these days. Another Gay and Lesbian March on Washington has been held. President Clinton has received a delegation of gay and lesbian activists at the White House—a first. The Hawaiian State Supreme Court has legitimized gay marriage. Despite opposition, Mr. Clinton has reaffirmed his intention to lift the ban on gays in the military. And the AIDS epidemic receives voluminous, daily attention in all branches of the media and almost obsessive attention from Hollywood stars at award ceremonies.

RG

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Richard Grenier

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“It is New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1999. The century is ending, but the millennium has arrived. That is, the homosexual millennium has arrived. Oh, there were dark and bloody times. The Queer Wars racked the country, American cities were soaked in blood, Pat Buchanan was assassinated. But thanks to Act-Up, Queer Nation, the Lesbian Avengers, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, the Sexual Minority Youth Guidance Center, NOW, the ACLU, the NAACP, CORE, the AFL-CIO, the Urban League, the Supreme Court, Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, and the series of Marches on Washington, an idyllic peace now reigns in the land, with homosexuals sitting at the right hand of whomever one is supposed to sit at the right hand of. The cure for AIDS was found long ago but kept hidden by Phyllis Schlafly, Bill Dannemeyer, and Louis Sullivan. But most of those people are in prison now, and in any event the great pestilence is over. Siskel and Ebert are out of the closet. Amy Carter is living in lesbian bliss with Cher’s daughter Chastity. Hollywood is remaking the Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford The Way We Were with Barbra’s son Jason in love with Tom Cruise. Homosexuals can marry now and have fashionable wedding ceremonies in which friends and family unite joyfully. Able to live in happy domestic relationships with the full respect of the community, they seem to have given up their compulsive sexual promiscuity and settled down as ordinary couples just like anybody else. Everything is open to them. They love each other and everybody else. Happy twenty-first century!”

THIS, AT LEAST, is the slightly fanciful dream of the future—partly quoted, partly paraphrased— from The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, an entertaining monologue written by David Drake and wittily performed by Erick Paeper to packed houses in Greenwich Village. Earlier passages of the monologue are realistically descriptive of the homosexual life, some passages rather somber. But as it happens there is substantial reason for satisfaction in the homosexual world these days. Another Gay and Lesbian March on Washington has been held. President Clinton has received a delegation of gay and lesbian activists at the White House—a first. The Hawaiian State Supreme Court has legitimized gay marriage. Despite opposition, Mr. Clinton has reaffirmed his intention to lift the ban on gays in the military. And the AIDS epidemic receives voluminous, daily attention in all branches of the media and almost obsessive attention from Hollywood stars at award ceremonies.