Larry Kramer was a failure

There’s a saying in business and political strategy: “Do you want to be right? Or do you want to win?”

He wanted to be right much more than he wanted to win. Fortunately, there were others who wanted to win working alongside him with HIV. Not so much in his creative career.

OP is a failure

Barbra wanted to suppress it (catch 'n kill?).

But karma won out: her son was outed as gay and HIV+

"squeaky wheel gets the AZT"

To encapsulate a career of advocacy and fighting for the health and rights of others based on a pissing match with Streisand is dumb. He was a pain in the ass, but you need those kinds of people to move others forward.

What a reckless thing to say,OP.

OP is just a fucking troll. Streisand sat on the project the same way she hemmed and hawed over doing GYPSY. That was entirely her; it wasn't about money.

FF Troll OP.

R3 is another idiot. No, that's NOT what Streisand did, Ronan.

All human beings are, in some way, failures, OP. Grow up--the man accomplished a lot. Had he never even written "The Normal Heart," he would still gave been a hero--and heroes have flaws.

And what have YOU accomplished in your life?

I eat shit.

You're a complete idiot OP if you believe they would have made A Normal Heart in 1986 period. HBO and Showtime weren't making that many originals then and PBS was being politicized as all hell. PBS received hell EIGHT years later with making Tales of the City.

There wasn't a mainstream AIDS film before Philadelphia, and that was 1994 - a looooong time after the crisis began. Even that film was controversial - I remember at the time. To do a mainstream film with GAY characters and AIDS? Huge risk.

Considering what was going on, there was really very little representation of the crisis in entertainment at the time. It was the 80s and people thought gay men were perverts and deserved it.

Bump

Streisand could have done a rendition of "People" at the end of the movie and it would have been a smash.

Larry Kramer's showbiz activities were a sideline on his existential balance sheet. He was a voice that would not let the indifferent larger culture stop up their ears. There were a lot of voices that changed the landscape for the course of that disease and the fate of its sufferers, but his was one of the loudest. That's called Success.

He seemed to have anger issues.

[quote] The lion's share of being an effective communicator is having an ability to read the room: To be able to disseminate your message so it's absorbed by as many people as possible.

A lot of gay people were angry and furious at the government's lack of response to the AIDS crisis. Kramer gave them a voice and got them to join rallies and protests.

r10 is right. No way in hell The Normal Heart would've been made in the 1980s, either as a feature film or a tv movie. Things just weren't there yet. Having anything "gay" in any way was extremely controversial, even some neutered eunuch gay character on a sitcom. It was such a different time.

Larry Kramer is a big reason why many men of my generation (Gen X) are alive today and never got HIV. He was loud and obnoxious and polarizing but that was exactly what was needed in those times. His activism saved a lot of lives.

No one with his own thread on DL is a failure.

R17 Tell that to Frankie Grande & all the Trumps.

He was no Marsha P. Johnson!

Whatever Larry Kramer’s flaws he got HIV grants their own NIH deadlines. No other disease, not even SARS-CoV-2 has that. It’s the shortest time from submission to funding for any standing deadline.

January 7th, May 7th, September 7th.

(Pre electronic submission January 1st (falls on next business day), May 1st, September 1st)

Do you feel you’ve accomplished more OP?

I wonder what he lived on all those years? A couple screenplays; a couple books; a couple plays...

New York is expensive.

Private fortune AKA family money, r21.

OP's successful accomplishments:

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