It is June 1st. That may not mean anything to you other than “oh yeah… summer’s here.” But to 13.9 million (13,942,200) adults in the US (number reported by the UCLA School of Law – Williams Institute, December 2023) who identify as LGBTQ+ it marks the beginning of a very significant month: the month we commemorate the courageous patrons at the Stonewall Inn one June night in 1969 who stood up for themselves and resisted unprovoked police harassment and said ‘enough’ to homophobia.
This June and every June in the United States, we celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride Month in their honor.
As a native of Los Angeles, I attended my very first Pride Parade and Festival in West Hollywood shortly after I had turned 18 in 1984. We were a different community then. We knew very little about AIDS, and we certainly didn’t know how it would, in the years to come, decimate us. Some of the people I attended that 1984 festival with are not here today.
One man who had the vision to read the writing on the wall and sound the alarm (a year earlier) was novelist and playwright Larry Kramer. In March of 1983, he published a wake-up call in a controversial essay entitled “1,112 and Counting” in the New York Native, a daily newspaper for New York’s LGBTQ+ community.
Larry’s essay came out one month before my 17th birthday. Of course, in March 1983 I was completely unaware of it, being much more caught up that month in the release of Tears for Fears’ debut album, The Hurting. But as someone who has been HIV positive since 1997 and diagnosed with AIDS since 2007, I am well aware of the essay now. And know of the controversy it whipped up – not because of the stark and grim assessment he made of the nascent crisis, but (1) because many gay men felt he was blaming them for spreading the disease, and (2) they dismissed him as a bitter ‘self-hating gay man’ because of his novel Faggots which had condemned gay men for the widespread practice of casual and anonymous sex seen as part of ‘gay liberation’ that was prevalent in the 1970s. At the time of its publication, the essay was largely ignored. At great cost.
The essay begins:
…
I repeat: Our continued existence as gay men upon the face of this earth is at stake. Unless we fight for our lives, we shall die. In all the history of homosexuality we have never before been so close to death and extinction. Many of us are dying or already dead.Before I tell you what we must do, let me tell you what is happening to us.
There are now 1,112 cases of serious Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. When we first became worried, there were only 41. In only twenty-eight days, from January 13th to February 9th [1983], there were 164 new cases – and 73 more dead. The total death tally is now 418. Twenty percent of all cases were registered this January alone. There have been 195 dead in New York City from among 526 victims. Of all serious AIDS cases, 47.3 percent are in the New York metropolitan area.
Larry Kramer was the co-founder of the world’s first AIDS organization: Gay Men’s Health Crisis. He resigned from its Board in 1983 because of what he called its “political impotence,” though he had not resigned at the time the essay was published; still, perhaps previewing the rift to come, he made it very clear in “1,112 and Counting” that, “my views are not to be attributed to Gay Men’s Health Crisis.”
The essay was, I believe, the first angry voice raised about the intransigence and inaction surrounding the AIDS crisis of the Reagan administration, politicians in congress, and the media that characterized those early days. There was a sortof serene ignorance at work, one that likely led to many deaths and a pandemic. The ethos of the time with regard to AIDS was captured brilliantly in the title of Randy Shilts 1987 book about those days – And the Band Played On. Little had changed by the time queer rights and AIDS activist Vito Russo gave his “Why We Fight” speech a year later:
If I’m dying from anything, I’m dying from homophobia… I’m dying from the fact that not enough rich, white, heterosexual men have gotten AIDS for anybody to give a shit.
Russo died two years after he gave that speech. Shilts died seven years after his book about the thing that would kill him was published. A year before he died, Randy Shilts, today one of my personal heroes (I had no idea who he was at the time), told the New York Times in an interview, “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.”
This may seem an odd thing to focus on as Pride month begins, with its colorful rainbow flags and its raucous, joyful parades. But to have pride in who we are we must remember where we’ve been and what that was like. When Larry’s essay talks about the fact that AIDS at that time predominantly affected gay and bisexual men – “Of all serious AIDS cases, 72.4 percent are in gay and bisexual men” – he is not just rattling off statistics but drawing a direct correlation to how homophobia was really at the root of the disease’s spread and widespread indifference amongst the general population, because it meant that finding the cause, treatment, and a cure for a disease that predominantly affected a minority community (and a despised one at that) was a low priority (if one at all). AIDS therefore suffered from a lack of funding in those days which hampered necessary research that might have saved lives.
So yes, we have much to be proud of as we celebrate Pride month. Yeah! But nobody in their right mind would think we’ve done away with homophobia, and it was homophobia that led to a holocaust of gay men who are not with us here today…
but should be.
To read the complete essay, click here.