The American People Volume 1 - Search For My Heart

"Kramer vs. Kramer" is a favorite headline to describe Larry Kramer, the outspoken activist, and for good reason. There's Kramer the writer who shot to fame for his screenplay of 'Women in Love' and 'The Normal Heart,' still the best drama about the early years of the AIDS crisis. But then there's the author of 'Faggots,' an antic fictional screed against the rampant hedonism of New York gay life in the late '70s.

There's a third Kramer, one whose jeremiads early in the epidemic sounded a warning too few heeded, and whose speech castigating gay men for not taking to the streets was the impetus for ACT-UP. Like the biblical Jeremiah, this Kramer is full of righteousness, but also more than a little self-righteous.

So far, the few advance reviews for "The American People Volume 1 - Search For My Heart" have had me wondering if I am too clueless and a literary clod -- or whether this might be a case of the boy who said what everyone knew but didn't want to say out loud: That the emperor has no clothes.

At 800 pages, and encompassing not only U.S. history up to the '50s but the ontology of primates, this book certainly qualifies as a magum opus. Fiction allows Kramer to paint on a massive canvas with the broadest strokes possible, and, at the same time, settle old scores with long-time Kramer b�te noirs like Gina Kolata, the New York Times reporter who covered the early years of the AIDS crisis; Robert Gallo, director of the National Institutes of Health; the entire medical establishment, medical historians and everyone else with the title "Dr." before their names; American Jewry; and, of course, Ronald Reagan.

There are others -- dozens in fact -- all seen through Kramer's alter ego, Fred Lemish, a holdover from 'Faggots.' In fact, this is in every sense a sequel to 'Faggots' -- doubly unfortunate, not only because it was his worst-written work, but because it has the same nasty tone.

Every few pages, he cites a scholarly authority (like the French deconstructionists, citing academics in a work whose whole person is to undermine the cred of academics doesn't bother him) to let the reader know that he has done his homework. In Kramer's version, the entire history of America, from Jamestown on, has been one long progression of gay men (very few lesbians, it seems), from George Washington to Mark Twain, and a catalog of mendacity, hypocrisy, greed and bad manners.

The problem is that Kramer can't hide behind his fictional alias if he wants us to wade through 800 pages of this stuff. And, however extensive his research, it's almost all speculation. This isn't history so much as gossip.

Far more problematic, however, is Kramer's worldview about homosexuality itself. Slogging through this miasma of names, places, dates and deeds, I kept thinking back on what Judy Belushi said of Bob Woodward's biography of her husband, John: "But he never talks about how much fun the drugs were."

For Kramer, Walt Whitman's stoic manly man-love and Abe Lincoln's bed-sharing on the Illinois prairie are exemplars of gay manhood, which only exists when it is striving against the dark forces that constitute the entire rest of the world.

When Andrew Holleran tried to get Kramer to admit that things have improved at least a teensy-weensy bit for us over the years, he mentioned bars, which Kramer seemed to consider as time wasters when the real work needs to be done.

"The American People" is full of homosexuals, but no one is, in the literal sense, very gay. That said, I know that there are many who agree with him about dressing in leather and dancing and attending black-tie fund-raisers and being nice to people, even though they don't agree with you about everything.

Kramer's historical revisionism is a bleak landscape of a Calvinist world where lovemaking is reduced to rutting, love is a Platonically elevated friendship, and a mysterious disease defines all of existence. Even if half of what Kramer writes is accurate, it's not a world I want to live in.