The Curse of the Prophet

In some versions of the Greek myth, Cassandra promises Apollo that she’ll sleep with him if he blesses her with the gift of foresight. When he does, she takes back her vow, allowing him only a kiss. So he spits into her mouth a curse: She’ll be doomed forever to see the future, but no one will listen to her prophecies. And as the world plunges into ruin around her, she’ll be powerless to prevent them from coming true.

If the writer and AIDS activist Larry Kramer, who died on May 27, is to live on in myth as a modern-day Cassandra, the record must be corrected. When the AIDS crisis began to devastate gay New York in the early ’80s, Kramer was still notorious among the Apollos of Fire Island for his profane, bitter riot of a novel Faggots, published in 1978. Kramer tended to write versions of himself into his work; his avatar in that book was the protagonist, Fred, who strives against the tide of sexual liberation for a committed relationship with a man named Dinky.

[Read: Larry Kramer knew that an honest debate was a rude one]

For many in the gay community, which was newly empowered after the Stonewall riots to develop its own models of what relationships could be, read as a self-hating screed. Then, as AIDS started to spread, Kramer’s insistence that bathhouses be closed and sexual intercourse be subject to precautions seemed