Larry Kramer's Novel 'The American

Larry Kramer's Novel 'The American People' Adds a Gay Dimension to History By ALEXANDRA ALTER APRIL 7, 2015 Photo Larry Kramer, the author of a hefty new novel (or, as he would have it, history) of the United States. He is working on a second volume. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times Fourteen years ago, the playwright and activist Larry Kramer was preparing to die. His liver was failing, and the prognosis was grave. He summoned an old friend, Will Schwalbe, editor in chief of Hyperion Books, and made him the steward of his novel in progress, a rambling history of homosexuality and AIDS in the United States. He told Mr. Schwalbe to self-publish it if necessary, using money from Mr. Kramer's estate. It didn't come to that. Mr. Kramer survived a liver transplant and finished the book, a project he had begun more than 30 years ago. Now, at 79 and against all odds and expectations, he has lived to see it published. The first volume, "The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart," weighing in at 775 pages, comes out Tuesday from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mr. Kramer has already thrown himself into finishing the second volume, which is to come out in 2017. "Larry lives to write," said Mr. Schwalbe, who is now an executive vice president at Macmillan. "There's no doubt in my mind that Larry's writing is what keeps him alive." Photo Mr. Kramer, 79, defied the odds and lived to see the publication of "The American People." Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times "Magnum opus" doesn't seem like a robust enough phrase to describe the scope of "The American People," which stretches back to the prehistoric swamps of the Everglades and concludes, in the second volume, in contemporary New York City. When Farrar acquired the two volumes in 2010, the narrative had swelled to around 4,000 pages. Blending farce and tragedy, autobiography and fiction, it opens as Fred Lemish, a standin for Mr. Kramer, is struggling to finish writing a book titled "The American People," a far-reaching historical exposé that describes Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and other major historical figures as gay. "He's been struggling with this history for many years," Mr. Kramer writes of his fictional counterpart. Mr. Kramer said he was driven to write the book because he had long felt that gays had been excluded from history books, written out or ignored. "Most history is written by straight people, and they don't have gaydar," Mr. Kramer said during an interview at his apartment in Greenwich Village. "People say, 'Can you prove to me that George Washington was gay?' and I say, 'Can you prove to me that he wasn't?' " (As evidence, Mr. Kramer notes that Washington "was surrounded by men, and he designed all their uniforms himself.") In the novel, and in conversation, Mr. Kramer criticizes historians and scholars like Stacy Schiff, Ron Chernow and Doris Kearns Goodwin for glossing over homosexuality in American history. If he had had his way, he would simply have called the book a work of history rather than fiction, he said. "Farrar Straus said call it a novel, that way the lawyers will leave you alone," he said. "But I believe everything in the book is true. It may look like fiction, but to me, it's not." Mr. Chernow, the author of a well-regarded 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton, said he was surprised to be called out in Mr. Kramer's novel, particularly as he brings up in his book the possibility that Hamilton might have been bisexual. "I'm glad that Larry Kramer is raising the issue, I'm just mystified at why he's attacking me, when I thought he would have applauded the fact that I take this seriously," Mr. Chernow said. "It's a legitimate issue for historians or novelists, but we also have to be careful not to ransack history in service of a political agenda." As for Mr. Kramer's theory about Washington, Mr. Chernow countered that it was common in that era for generals to design soldiers' uniforms. If conflicting early reviews are any indication, "The American People" is likely to be as polarizing and controversial as Mr. Kramer's other works. While Kirkus Reviews praised the novel as "breathtakingly well-written," others have taken a dimmer view. "To call it a rough read at times would be an understatement," a reviewer wrote in Publishers Weekly. "It's like being hit by a truck, the book is so all over the place," the novelist Andrew Holleran, who has known Mr. Kramer since the 1970s, said of the book. "What I admired as a writer was the imaginative energy and the amount he takes on." Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, said the book struck him as ambitious and provocative, both as a work of literature and as an act of protest. "This book is, in a way, a culmination of all his artistic activity," he said. "Larry is a great polemicist and a fighter, and this book is part of his polemic about gay history and the roles of gays in our society. He's still fighting and he's using art to do it." Mr. Kramer never set out to be a political activist and said that in some ways he was illsuited to the role. "They say I'm obnoxiously noisy and angry, but I'm actually a bit of a shy person," he said. Early in his career, Mr. Kramer wanted to write comedy. After graduating from Yale, he worked in the film industry, and was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay adaptation of the D. H. Lawrence novel "Women in Love" (1969). In 1978 he published a controversial novel, "Faggots," a satire of rampant drug use and promiscuity among gays in New York. "It's meant to be a comic novel -- it made me laugh," he said. His mission changed in the early 1980s, when H.I.V. and AIDS began spreading rapidly among gays and claimed the lives of two friends. He was a founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, a nonprofit support organization for those affected by the disease, and later started Act Up, a protest group that brought attention to the AIDS crisis. His activism spilled into his writing, with plays like "The Normal Heart" and "The Destiny of Me," which center on gay characters confronting the AIDS epidemic and take aim at indifferent politicians and institutions. Mr. Kramer's activism was closely and messily intertwined with his personal life. In 1989, he learned he was H.I.V. positive and suffering from liver damage, the result of hepatitis B. He credits Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for being among a handful of doctors who saved him by giving him experimental drugs. Mr. Kramer once vilified Dr. Fauci in print, calling him "an incompetent idiot" and a murderer, for his early approach to fighting the spread of AIDS. "The man who I criticize for allowing the virus to spread is the man who saved my life," Mr. Kramer said. Mr. Kramer's acerbic and belligerent style has often alienated friends and supporters. He and the playwright Tony Kushner had a blowout over Mr. Kushner's screenplay for the Steven Spielberg movie "Lincoln" (2012), because Mr. Kramer felt that Mr. Kushner should have depicted Lincoln as a gay man. "He and I had a major falling out over this," Mr. Kramer said. "I so wanted him to put that in the movie." (In "The American People," Mr. Kramer strikes back with his own fictional Lincoln, who has a male lover and often lustily utters "mighty fine" after their encounters.) These days, Mr. Kramer seems much less bellicose, though no less passionate. He speaks in a tremulous near-whisper and relies on a hearing aid and a cane. He spent much of last year in hospitals being treated for abdominal infections and almost died twice, he said. He was bedridden in 2013 when he and his longtime partner, the architect David Webster, were finally married in the intensive care unit of NYU Langone Medical Center. Mr. Kramer's writing has taken on a greater urgency lately. He has been writing for five or six hours every day, seven days a week. His progress is visible in the towering stacks of manuscript pages that cover a large table in his living room, which doubles as a work space. He is also working on a screenplay for a sequel to "The Normal Heart" and is the subject of an HBO documentary, "Larry Kramer: In Love and Anger," which will be shown in June, just after his 80th birthday. As he works toward finishing what he views as the defining work of his career, Mr. Kramer said he hoped to be remembered for his art as much as his activism. "Tt goes against the grain in this country to do both, and that's why I'm not taken seriously," he said. "I want this book to be taken seriously as a work of art and a work of thought." A version of this article appears in print on April 8, 2015, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: The World According to Larry Kramer .