Cleve Jones knew that the internet would revolutionize the way that the Equality March was organized, and he was right. It takes but moments to make hundreds of thousands of people aware of any event and then allows you to keep them actively updated and engaged with its progression. Social networks like Facebook are particularly useful for events such as this because they act as both informers and influencers. All month, and particularly all of last week I could see which of my friends were going to the march, how they were getting there, not to mention all the additional activities and parties they planned on attending while there. I couldn’t help but feel like maybe I was missing out.
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Best Frenemies: Yale University Provost Peter Salovey and Yale GALA Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient Larry Kramer ’57. Photo by Steven Mattson Hayhurst.
“I don’t think they’re going to like what I have to say,” Larry Kramer, Yale College class of 1957, whispered to me on our way to Yale’s University Commons Saturday evening. Kramer was anticipating the response to the speech he would deliver later that night when accepting the Yale GALA Lifetime Achievement Award during the University’s first LGBT alumni reunion held April 24-26.
After an introduction by Yale Provost Peter Salovey lauding Kramer for his contributions to LGBT activism and public healthy advocacy, for co-founding Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), and as an author and playwright, Kramer rose to the podium. With a portrait of George H.W. Bush hanging over the stage and more than 300 alumni and supporters in attendance, it was a dramatic backdrop for the night’s main event. Kramer took a few steps back from the podium, hung up his jacket, and rolled up his sleeves. The first blow was a quiet apology.
I have come here to apologize to you.
It took a long time for Yale to accept Kramer money. After a number of years of trying to get Yale to accept mine for gay professorships or to let me raise funds for a gay student center, (both offers declined), my extraordinary straight brother Arthur offered Yale $1 million to set up the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies and Yale accepted it. My good friend and a member of the Yale Corporation, Calvin Trillin, managed to convince President Levin that I was a pussycat. The year was 2001.
Five years later, in 2006, Yale closed down LKI, as it had come to be called. Yale removed its director, Jonathan David Katz. All references to LKI were expunged from Web sites and answering machines and directories and syllabuses. One day LKI was just no longer here.
When this happened I thought my heart would break.
From “Yale’s Conspiracy of Silence” on thedailybeast.com. Read the entire speech here.
At 17 I was intelligent enough to know that public nudity, and especially sex in public were illegal. But my horny teenager self allowed me to ignore those tidbits of information one summer afternoon. I was out on a date with a 19 year-old attending a local college, and after we had lunch he suggested we hang out in a nearby park. Like a scene from a gay Harlequin novel, a freak rainstorm forced us to scamper from the tree that shaded our make out session into a shelter with a handful of picnic tables. Perched on one of the tables, as the water rushed by below, we continued to kiss and grope each other until we eventually brought each other much needed manual relief.
In 2003 Lawrence vs. Texas overturned any remaining sodomy laws nationwide, guaranteeing that gays had the right to express their passion in private. This may have been significant to me at the time I was experiencing splendor in the grass that summer, and perhaps would have made me feel somewhat more confident about what we were doing, except Lawrence vs. Texas was decided a year later, and we obviously weren’t in private. I also happened to be a resident of South Carolina, a state that had yet to repeal its sodomy laws until Lawrence. So, my actions went beyond normal lines of teenage stupidity and hedonism, but also traversed legality a few times over. I was lucky that the rain, or just luck kept the authorities away that day; otherwise the story could have had a much different ending.
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