On May 27, 2020 the queer community lost the fabulous Larry Kramer. During his life, Kramer cultivated the persona of a relentlessly confrontational activist who was unafraid to make what Civil Rights leader John Lewis called “good and necessary trouble.”
By training, professional historians resist all things fabulous. We seek fact rather than fable to make arguments by telling stories accountable to evidence. Derived from the Latin fabulosus, the English word “fabulous” connotes all things legendarily larger than life. Fabulous holds many subtle identities within its lexical umbra, colloquially deployed to describe the truly exquisite as well as the exceptional. Queer history is replete with the fabulous—magnificent dramatis personae who at times assumed legendary identities to tangibly change the world for the better.
On May 27, 2020 the queer community lost the fabulous Larry Kramer. His New York Times obituary recounts the achievements of a human who dared to live by the radical dictum that “queer lives matter.” During his life, Kramer cultivated the persona of a relentlessly confrontational activist who was unafraid to make what Civil Rights leader John Lewis called “good and necessary trouble.” His passing was met with a public outpouring of tales of an activist who could shame government officials into action with an abrasive word, yet develop warm working relationships with former adversaries shaped the legend of Larry Kramer.
As a writer, Kramer’s works show how he employed literary fabulousness to at once make sense of and in turn shape the epoch-making AIDS epidemic in LGBT+ history. Kramer frequently wrote himself into the role of his literary and theatrical protagonist, most notably the role of Ned Weeks in “The Normal Heart.” His works celebrated New York’s queer community while also making scathing critiques about the sexual hedonism of the late 1970s and early failures to take AIDS seriously. In a 2019 interview, Kramer quipped “ I love being gay, and I love gay people. I think we’re better in positive ways. I think we’re more talented as a population.” His art aimed to spur the community he loved into action. Through his art and activism, Kramer rose to challenges of his own historical moment through a baptism by fabulousness.
What exactly do we mean by a “baptism by fabulousness” beyond an orotund turn of phrase? Larry Kramer’s death coincides with a period when many LGBT+ Catholics will begin taking initiation sacraments delayed by epoch-defining pandemic. This year, fulfilling the promise of the sacraments requires improvisation and adapting the old script to the nuances of this moment in history. For this newest cohort of queer Catholics, taking initiatory sacraments represents a bold act of optimism and faith—and in some cases—while making “good trouble” to dismantle ecclesiastical homophobia.
The world witnessed Larry Kramer’s baptism by fabulousness through his larger-than-life response to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. He shouted truth to power through his provocative fiction, while also recognizing that he alone could not change the world through the force of his extraordinary personality. He marshalled a queer community in crisis to found ACT UP, and shocked the consciousness of an ambivalent United States into fighting AIDS at home and around the world.