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Back
in the Fold
In 1997, Larry Kramer '57 loudly declared that his alma mater was
homophobic. Six years, one new liver, and a million dollars later,
Yale has a Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies,
and everyone is happy. For now.
April
2003
by Mark Alden Branch '86
Ask Larry
Kramer about Yale, and he is sure to tell you about two important
nights. The first
was one of his darkest: the night in October 1953 when, as a freshman
in Lawrance Hall, he tried to kill himself because he was so unhappy
about being gay.
The second was the
night of April 2, 2001, when he gathered with University officials
at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to celebrate the
donation of his papers to Yale and the creation
of a Larry
Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies. Fueled by a million-dollar
grant from Kramer's brother, Arthur Kramer '49, '53LLB, the Initiative
instantly made Yale's program one of the richest in the nascent
field.
Kramer remembers the
second night as the time that "Rick Levin made the speech that made
everybody cry." Levin declared that "lesbian and gay students are,
and must be made to feel themselves, a part of this institution,
a part of this community, a part of the Yale family." Some may have
taken such sentiments for granted, but for Kramer, it had been a
long time in coming. "It was everything I had ever wanted," he says.
The road from that first
night to the second has been a dramatic, controversial, and sometimes
harrowing one for Kramer, whose achievements as a writer have often
been overshadowed by his work as an AIDS activist. Best known in
the pre-AIDS days as a producer and screenwriter, he penned the
screenplays for Ken Russell's adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women
in Love (1969) and the 1973 remake of Lost
Horizon (which Kramer calls "the only thing in my life I'm
ashamed of").
In 1978, he stirred
up controversy with his novel Faggots, an indictment of a Fire Island gay lifestyle that equated promiscuity
with liberation. Then, in 1981, the novel's message became grimly
relevant when AIDS first began to be documented. Kramer responded
to the spread of the disease among gay men in New York by cofounding
Gay Men's Health Crisis.
Later, frustrated by what he saw as the medical community's inadequate
response to the epidemic, he founded ACT
UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an angrier organization
that used both guerrilla-style protests and extensive negotiations
to accelerate the development of treatments for the disease. Along
the way, he wrote The
Normal Heart, his now-classic play about AIDS, one of the
works that led the British newspaper The Guardian to refer
to him recently as "the Solzhenitsyn of AIDS."
And,
some time in the 1970s, he believes, he contracted HIV and
hepatitis-B. While the treatments he helped pressure the medical
community into developing have extended his life far beyond the
sad prognosis that faced early patients, he came close to dying
two years ago from advanced liver disease -- a frequent complication
of the two ailments. At the time, people with both diseases were
not eligible for liver transplants, and Kramer was told that he
had six months to live. At the last minute, a few transplant centers
changed their policy, and Kramer got a new liver in 2001. He has
now begun agitating
for changes in the organ-donor system that would make more organs
available.
With such a history,
one could guess that Kramer's giving money to Yale was bound to
be anything but uncomplicated. As Kramer tells it, he was first
approached by the University several years ago, when his success
in the movie business attracted the interest of the development
office. "I told the man that I would never consider giving money
to Yale unless it was for something gay," he recalls. "He wrote
me back and said 'fine, there would be no problem.'"
But nothing more came
of it until about six years ago, when Kramer, his health questionable
at best, decided he'd better make a will. His older brother Arthur
had invested his money for him (much of it, ironically, earned from Lost Horizon) and had done well. Kramer's will called for
his estate -- worth a few million dollars at that time -- to be
placed into a trust that would benefit his lover, David Webster,
during Webster's lifetime, then go to Yale. "Ideally, what I wanted
was a tenured chair in lesbian and gay studies, or a center for
gay students like the Slifka Center,"
explains Kramer. "I faxed Yale a copy of the will, and after a month,
I got a very businesslike and unequivocal 'no,'" from provost Alison
Richard.
Kramer insists that,
despite his history of in-your-face activism, he had not intended
to start a row with his alma mater. But writer Calvin Trillin, a
classmate and close friend of Kramer's (and a former Yale Corporation
member), is skeptical. He remembers when Kramer first told him of
his plan over lunch. "He said he wanted to leave his papers and
a bequest to Yale," says Trillin. "I said that's a nice thing to
do, but if you just want to make a tsimmes, I'm sure you can find something Yale won't do. Larry started negotiating
with Alison Richard, and eventually he found something Yale wouldn't
do."
Richard and Kramer
had a series of tense discussions in which she explained Yale's
reservations about his plans. Because lesbian and gay studies was
still a new discipline with an uncertain future, Yale did not want
to commit to something as permanent as an endowed chair. The University
wanted Kramer instead to consider a program of visiting professorships
like one that was already under way at Yale thanks to a bequest
from Stephen T. Baker '67. As for the student center, although there
are such centers for Jewish students and members of some racial
and ethnic groups, the University was leery about creating another
of the centers, which some view as leading to separatism.
To
Kramer, these sounded like excuses, and he was becoming discouraged
about the bequest -- and about giving his papers to Yale. "I didn't
want to give my papers to a place that was so cold to the idea of
gay and lesbian studies," he says.
Then, in the midst
of what had been quiet negotiations, an item about the dispute appeared
in the newsletter of the Yale Gay and Lesbian Alumni (Yale GALA),
and a New York Times reporter called Kramer to ask him about
it. "So then it was, 'Okay, the media has called, and Larry doesn't
say no to the media,'" says Kramer. On July 9, 1997, a front-page
article in the Times bore the news that Kramer was trying
to give Yale $4 million for gay and lesbian studies, and that Yale
didn't want it. The media dustup went on for weeks, and Kramer was
outspoken in his attacks on Yale, calling the University homophobic,
President Levin "spineless," and Richard "that termagant woman."
Kramer says that as
a result of the media attention, "I had letters from more than 100
institutions of higher learning begging me to consider them," he
remembers. "USC sent me a set of blueprints for the building they
would put up."
But Kramer resisted
these offers, even as his communications with Yale stopped. And
there it stood until 2000, when Trillin, urged on by their classmate
Jim Banner, invited Arthur and Larry Kramer to lunch in hope of
breaking the impasse. It was there that Arthur Kramer -- whom Trillin
calls "the single best big brother in the world" -- made an offer
that astonished his brother. "He told me he'd give a million dollars
to Yale for anything I wanted," says Larry Kramer.
"I'm very proud of
my brother," says Arthur Kramer, "and I'm a committed Yale graduate,
as is he." The elder Kramer gave the money but has largely stayed
out of the discussions about how it is to be used. "I smile at the
meetings and encourage them, but mostly I stand aside and kvell, "
he says.
Arthur Kramer's generosity
-- and Trillin's words to Levin and Richard on Kramer's behalf --
opened the lines of communication again, and soon Kramer was invited
to New Haven to meet with Richard. This time, they found some common
ground, and in April 2001 they announced a plan for Arthur Kramer's
million dollars that was not so different from what the University
had first encouraged Kramer to consider: a five-year program to
bring in visiting faculty, host conferences and lectures, and coordinate
academic endeavors in lesbian and gay studies. At the same time,
Kramer agreed to donate his papers to the Beinecke Library, which
Trillin considers a coup for Yale.
"I think
the papers are extraordinarily valuable for scholarship," says Trillin. "You have someone
who was in at the very beginning of the AIDS crisis and who has
the added advantage of being a complete packrat. From the point
of view of history, sociology, and public health, the papers are
a real treasure trove."
What is perhaps most
surprising is the friendship that Richard and Kramer say has developed
between them. "It's true that Larry used to excoriate me in public
places," said Richard last winter before she left to become vice
chancellor of Cambridge University, "but I always had a high regard
and liking for Larry, and I'm now proud to call him a really good
friend."
Kramer agrees. "We've
become so close, it's painful to think of her leaving," he says.
Understanding the importance
of the Larry Kramer Initiative requires a quick history of lesbian
and gay studies. Inspired by women's studies, African American studies,
and other identity-based fields of academic inquiry, lesbian and
gay studies came into being in the 1970s, when a few seminal works
of gay history were published. While the early emphasis was on uncovering
the suppressed history of gay and lesbian life, the field found
its most hospitable home in English and literature departments,
where the emphasis was on literary theory. A set of ideas known
as "queer theory"
soon developed, using post-structuralist ideas about literature
and philosophy to raise questions about our "socially constructed"
categories of sexual identity. Rather than accept unquestioningly
the idea of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" identities, queer theory
seeks to demonstrate that much of what we think constitutes gender
and sexual identity is actually a kind of performance -- one's true
sexual identity is fluid and changes with circumstances.
But lesbian and gay
studies doesn't just encompass history and literary theory. Marianne
Lafrance, who has chaired the faculty committee that oversees
the Kramer Initiative, points to research in biology, sociology,
anthropology, and the history of science that considers issues related
to sexuality. A professor of psychology with a joint appointment
in women's and gender studies,
she says her field has moved on from a time when homosexuality was
considered a disorder to raise broader questions. "Now we're asking
not just 'What causes homosexuality?'" she says, but also 'What
causes heterosexuality?' and 'Why is sexuality so central in some
people's perspective?'"
In the
late 1980s and early 1990s, a locus for lesbian and gay studies
coalesced at Yale around historians John Boswell and Martin Duberman. Boswell led
three biennial conferences on the subject at Yale, and Duberman
began an effort to establish a center for lesbian and gay studies
at Yale in 1985. In 1991, though, Duberman left for the City University
of New York, where he founded its influential Center
for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and Boswell died in 1994.
But a couple of gifts
kept a small flame of lesbian and gay scholarship alive at Yale.
In 1993, an alumnus gave money to fund research projects in the
field, and the provost appointed a faculty committee to administer
what became known as the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies. That
committee developed the Pink
Book, a listing of courses relevant to lesbian and gay studies,
and established a small lending library named for Boswell. In 1994,
with Stephen Baker's bequest, the committee began to oversee a series
of one-year visiting professorships.
The committee learned
from the Baker professorships that having visitors on campus for
only one year was frustrating for students, since the scholars weren't
around long enough to develop lasting academic relationships. As
a result, one of the Kramer Initiative's two visiting professorships
will be a two-year junior position -- still far short of the permanent
tenured positions Kramer had initially sought, but long enough for
a student to, for example, take a professor's course one year and
do a senior essay under the same professor the next.
The visiting professorship,
which actually resides in the women's and gender studies program,
is but one of the programs coordinated by the Kramer Initiative.
In just its first year, the Initiative has become a nexus for gay
and lesbian academic, social, and political activity, largely due
to the efforts of executive coordinator Jonathan D. Katz. An art
historian by training, Katz was the first faculty member in lesbian
and gay studies at City College of San Francisco, which has the
first (and only) free-standing
department in the field. He left a tenured position at SUNY-Stony
Brook to come to Yale, where he is classified not as ladder faculty
but staff. (He has an adjunct appointment as an associate professor
in the art history department.)
Katz
studies the influence of sexuality and sexual relationships among
gay mid-century artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper
Johns, and Cy Twombly. He is also a veteran political activist and
a founder of the 1990s gay activist group Queer Nation. Having watched
the Kramer controversy unfold from outside, Katz was unsure about
Yale's intentions at first. "I came in suspiciously," he says. "I
thought Yale was interested in a fig leaf to cover an embarrassment.
But the consistent message I'm getting is that Yale wants this to
happen. And it doesn't want it to happen weakly, but as the advent
of a leading program."
Katz hit the ground
running when he arrived last fall, launching a lecture series, planning
a conference with the American studies program, and creating a council
of student gay and lesbian organizations. "He's an incredible person,
and he is working harder than anyone I've ever seen," says student
leader Marissa Pareles '03 of Katz. "The initiative has provided
a tremendous boost to queer life on campus." The Kramer Initiative
also supports student and faculty research projects and will bring
in post-doctoral fellows in the coming years. (The fellowships will
be supported by a new fund -- kicked off by Kramer -- that honors
the late Out magazine founder Sarah
Pettit '88.)
Katz believes that a
successful program at Yale could help jump-start lesbian and gay
studies nationally. Unlike women's studies or African American studies,
which have found institutional homes in American universities relatively
quickly, lesbian and gay studies has languished. Scholars have published
important books in the field, but universities have been slow to
carve out faculty slots for those scholars. Katz believes that fear
of alienating alumni of private universities -- or legislators who
fund public ones -- is partly to blame. Besides City College of
San Francisco and the City University of New York, the most substantial
programs are at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and New York
University.
With Arthur Kramer's
money and five short years, Katz hopes he can establish a foothold
for the discipline that will someday lead to a freestanding academic
program with its own tenured faculty. "Yale won't become a major
player until it hires tenured faculty with a national profile,"
says George Chauncey '77, '89PhD, a historian who chairs the Lesbian
and Gay Studies Project at the University of Chicago.
But the visiting professors
are a start, and the first visitor is a pioneering scholar of gay
history who, coincidentally, is named Jonathan
Ned Katz. (The two Jonathan Katzes bear the campus confusion
with good humor.) Jonathan Ned Katz has mined legal documents, letters,
publications, and diaries for evidence of intimate same-sex relationships.
In his book Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality, he wrote about several such relationships, but the one that caught
the attention of the most people -- including Kramer -- was the
opening chapter about Abraham Lincoln and his friend Joshua Speed,
with whom he was known to share a bed. "The known material suggests
to me that there was an erotic current between these two men and
between Lincoln and other men," says the visiting Katz.
Kramer
has seized on such scholarship to declare that Lincoln was "unequivocally
gay," though he acknowledges that "I don't need as much proof
as William Bennett is going to need." Kramer wants the money that
was given in his name to be directed more toward historical research
than queer theory, a field he has trouble getting excited about.
"First of all, I hate the word 'queer' and I've begged them to try
to get it out of academic dialogue as soon as possible," says Kramer,
who is not swayed by the argument that the ironic appropriation
of what has traditionally been a slur against homosexuals is empowering.
Marianne Lafrance has
chided Kramer for being out of step and narrow in his interests.
"Larry has an unwavering focus on a particular kind of gay history,
basically outing famous homosexuals from the past. He tends to dismiss
other areas of inquiry that are as important and more intellectually
interesting."
But Kramer believes
that uncovering gay history will do more good in terms of increasing
public acceptance of homosexuality. "The more historical figures
we can legitimately 'out,' the more seriously we'll be taken," he
says. "That the greatest president our country has ever had was
gay has to do a lot of good for our cause -- more than any number
of courses in queer studies."
While program coordinator
Jonathan D. Katz says he hopes that the tendency to neglect gay
history will be rectified at Yale, he also says that queer theory
is an important part of the dialogue, including the introductory
class that he teaches.
Kramer is watching
the progress of his namesake initiative closely, and he says he
will leave his money to Yale to continue it if it meets with his
approval. But while the subject of his estate once seemed to be
of urgent importance, the realization of any bequest from Larry
Kramer now seems blessedly far in the future. "My transplant surgeon
told me in all seriousness that you are as old as your liver," says
Kramer, "and I have the liver of a 45-year-old man."  |
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