Larry Kramer and David Sedaris are two of the most prominent gay voices in American culture today. And I'm tired of both of them.
Larry Kramer's been on my mind ever since I read this comment quoting Larry Kramer as saying:
I’m telling the gay world not to vote for any of these candidates now, right now, that are up for election, because they’re all against us.
It seems like classic purity troll stuff to me. Then I stumbled across this recent letter in The New York Review of Books responding to Russell Baker's review of several books on Ronald Reagan. The letter is short enough, but here's the gist of it:
Ronald Reagan may have done laudable things but he was also a monster and, in my estimation, responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler. [emphasis mine, DM] He is one of the persons most responsible for allowing the plague of AIDS to grow from 41 cases in 1981 to over 70 million today.
Talk about Godwin's Law! I think this is typical of Larry Kramer's rhetoric. Its excesses are not worth analyzing. What is noteworthy to me is not the content, but the fact that The New York Review of Books considers it worthy of publication.
Here at DailyKos (where the general ton is lower than at the NYROB) I would expect a comment like this to be immediately and strenuously challenged. The only reason I can imagine for them to publish this is because of Larry Kramer's perceived stature as a voice of Gay America.
Honestly, I think David Sedaris has earned his place more or less fairly. But, I find his writing cliche-ridden, stereotype-pandering and self-aggrandizing and I'm tired of seeing him so often in The New Yorker. Now, Jack Shafer over at Slate reports on the controversy over Sedaris' veracity. It doesn't seem to have fazed Sedaris much, but I can't resist indulging in a little Schadenfreude here.