Larry Kramer’s first novel, Faggots, shocked a generation with its Swiftian indictment of ’70s clone sex culture on the West Side and Fire Island. His play The Normal Heart, a searing polemic against apathy and evil set during the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, has moved generations of audiences. For thirty years, he’s been at work on a multi-thousand-page epic attempting to situate queers at the center of American history. It takes us from Abraham Lincoln orgies to monkeys swapping AIDS before the dawn of human civilization, from a Jewish family outside Washington, DC to secret Nazi camps in North Dakota. Lawrence D. Mass, co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, says the book demands a reconsideration of “nothing less than the entirety of [American] history, calling it “Eloquent, powerful, epochal, defiant, relentlessly in your face and tough as shit on everyone and everything.” Volume 1 is ready. Are you?

The book was released April 5, and due to its length – 775 pages – we’re holding our discussion June 14. Buy it anytime at the Bureau. Don’t feel you need to have finished – or started – the book to join us. Stay tuned for news about possible special guests!

The discussion will be moderated by Ben Miller, a writer and researcher in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Learn more about him at benwritesthings.com, he tweets @benwritesthings
 
 

“He’s been struggling with this history for many years…How much did he find out? How much shame and horror at all that was and is being enacted and endured? Shame for whom?…He decides to finally belly up to this assignment on that day when he hears the President refer to ‘The American People’ and realizes that the president of the United States is not talking about him or his people, and that he, Fred Lemish, had best do something about it.” – the opening lines of The American People