Top 41 Quotes & Sayings by Larry Kramer

The most important fact is that gays have been here since day one. To say otherwise is a gross denial and stupidity. We played an enormous part in the history of America.

I was at Yale from 1953 to 1957, and I tried to commit suicide in my freshman year because I was gay, and I thought I was the only person in the school who was. I was just totally and utterly miserable.

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were gay, just for starters. They didn't have a name for it, but their primary affections and intellectual attractions were all for other men.

I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don't like that feeling.

AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.

We didn't exist. Ronald Reagan didn't say the word 'AIDS' until 1987. I've tried desperately to get a meeting in the White House; Gay Men's Health Crisis is already an established organization. I have a certain presence.

The media in America is not covering American AIDS very much. They're covering African AIDS as if somehow miraculously it's all stopped here. Well, it hasn't, and the one thing they're not saying about Africa is that all those people are going to die; there's no way these people can be saved - none.

Living with AIDS is like always having the sword of Damocles over your head. The disease is scarier than death itself. The disease is so messy, so devastating, so pervasive. It robs you of everything you hold dear.

I now realize that I am a gay man before anything else. Other gays may think they're a Jew first, or black, or a banker, but I'm gay.

I think being gay and gay people are the most wonderful things in the world. I wish all of us could have the power and pride to benefit from what is rightfully ours. Why isn't there an enormous building in Washington called the 'National Association of Lesbian and Gay Concerns' to lobby for us?

Some reporter called me 'the angriest gay man in the world' or some such. Well, it stuck, but I realized it was very useful.

Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn't take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn't exist. I don't even think the word 'gay' was in existence.

There's no question that the gay movement would not be as far along as it is without AIDS. But how can there be any other issue in the face of death, possible extinction?

By nature, I'm an optimistic person. No one believes it, but I am.

Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.

Mr. Do-Nothing Obama will say today, 'Lets think of all the poor dead people' - or 'let's honor all the dead' instead of fighting for the living. He has been really useless in terms of both HIV and gay issues. He is simply not a leader. He may be president, but he is not a leader.

We're still leaderless. We still don't have strong organizations that are fighting for us; there isn't a national AIDS organization out there worth squat in my opinion.

I do not think the gay population has been all that rabid for gay marriage. Note that I do not use the words 'gay community.' Expunge that expression from your vocabulary. We are not a community.

I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people would have gotten sick.

AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.

Activism is very seductive, and writing is painful and hard. It's very scary to have a death threat living over your head. Activism is very sustaining. But I don't view myself as a political person. I'm just someone who desperately wants to stay alive.

Most of the Michelle Bachmanns and Mitt Romneys who say such terrible things about us actually is a positive force, because it allows sensible people to realize how stupid and vile their beliefs are.

Too many people hate the people that AIDS most affects: gay people and people of color. I do not mean dislike, or feel uncomfortable with. I mean hate. Downright hate. Down and dirty hate.

I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a very opinionated man who uses words as fighting tools.

I forgot that San Francisco is not an angry city like New York. Gays have gotten what they wanted there over the years, unlike New York, where we had to fight for everything.

I don't mind about the dead ones. They're dead. The worst of it is, they cling to the living and won't let go.

The guys in New York don’t know the new media. San Francisco takes more risks as a culture.

Saying someone is gay who is gay no longer constitutes defamation or slander or libel. You cannot defame someone by telling the truth.

You do not get more with honey than with vinegar!

You'd think one day we'd learn. You don't get anything unless you fight for it, united and with visible numbers. If ACT UP taught us anything, it taught us that.

By nature, Im an optimistic person. No one believes it, but I am.

Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I’m telling my story as a political document.

I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do. I think we're smarter and more talented and more aware. I do, I totally do. I really do think all of these things. And I try very hard to remember all this.

We're all going to go crazy, living this epidemic [AIDS] every minute, while the rest of the world goes on out there, all around us, as if nothing is happening, going on with their own lives and not knowing what it's like, what we're going through. We're living through war, but where they're living it's peacetime, and we're all in the same country.

Being gay is a natural normal beautiful variation on being human. Period. End of subject. Therefore, any argument which says differently is an immoral supremacist one. Call it out as such. ... Be outraged, offended, angry and intolerant of any discussion or any one who describes you as unequal, undeserving or unnatural for being just as you are.

We have to think bigger as writers. We have to try and change the world.

The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there--all throughhistory we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organise ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed.

I've spent fifteen years of my life fighting for our right to be free and make love whenever, wherever... And you're telling me that all those years of what being gay stood for is wrong... and I'm a murderer. We have been so oppressed! Don't you remember how it was? Can't you see how important it is for us to love openly, without hiding and without guilt?

This is always history's greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.

It’s so wonderful being a gay person. I said that before. I’m going to say it again. I love being gay. And I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. And I think we’re more tuned in to what’s happening, tuned into the moment, tuned into our emotions, and other people’s emotions, and we’re better friends. I really do think all of these things. And I try not to forget them.

The point about L-O-V-E is that we hate the word. Because we vulgarize it. It should be taboo, forbidden from utterance for many years, till we've found a new and a better idea.