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April, 2008:
GAY WRITER ACCUSES INTERNATIONAL WRITERS’ GROUP OF HOMOPHOBIA
Today, I received an e-mail from my friend Larry Kramer and I am reprinting this letter with his permission.
Mr. Michael Roberts
Executive Director
PEN American Center
533 Broadway, Suite 303
New York, NY 10012
Dear Michael:
I am in receipt of PEN’s program for your “PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature.” It is shockingly deficient and upsetting. It is particularly upsetting that you, a gay man, would sanction such an exclusionary undertaking. Have you no sense of responsibility to your people to equal the sense of responsibility you are obviously extending to others? It is equally sad for me to note that my friend and fellow gay activist, Michael Cunningham, is on your board. (Shame, Michael, shame.)
Of the 180, repeat 180, “World Voices Participants” I can recognize a scant few as gay or lesbian or transsexual, perhaps six or seven.
Of the 82, repeat 82, scheduled presentations (over 6, repeat 6 days and evenings from April 29-May 4) listed in your program, and devoted to every other conceivable concern, I can locate not one single one that is devoted to lesbian or gay or transgender issues, our art, our culture, our writers, our (precious few) triumphs and our horrendous tragedies. I can find no discussion of the worldwide plague/holocaust of HIV/AIDS. I can find no discussion of the never-ending powerlessness of the lesbian, gay, and transgender populations (writers most definitely included!) everywhere in the world. I see no discussion of the increasingly rampant and sanctioned hatred of gay people, particularly the murder of young gay men, in numerous countries, including (to name but a very few) Iran, Iraq (since the invasion), Russia, Poland, Latvia, Jamaica, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and America.
Indeed I can’t even locate the words “gay,” “lesbian,” or “transgender” in this entire 60, repeat 60, page program—not in any description of any of these 82, repeat 82 events, or, worse, in any biography of the 180, repeat 180, participants, a few of whom can surely be numbered as one of my people. It is almost as if this program and every single word of its prose have been put through a mangle to extract these dirty words lest they soil that laundry which you have selected to air. I have never seen anything quite like it from an organization that pretends to speak for us all.
This rampant homophobia goes back a long way in PEN’s history. When I returned to America in 1970 I joined PEN, happily and proudly. After several years I resigned in disgust because of its complete non-inclusion of anything that represented that which is most dear to me. Later, when we became friends, but to no avail, I discussed this with PEN’s great member, supporter, and president, Susan Sontag, whose own lesbianism, by her own adamant refusal to discuss it herself, has only been allowed to be discussed openly after her death. (Indeed I was, and quite rightly, criticized by fellow gay activists for my own refusal to confront this issue; because of my respect for her greatness in other areas, I did not pursue this with her.) The specter of her internalized homophobia obviously still lingers in your genetic history, where so many of the “great” writers that you constantly champion were her discoveries and friends.
In this day and age it is shocking, pathetic, and ineffably sad that this program that PEN is presenting as “international” is so shamefully exclusionary. It seems to me it is time for you and your membership to put PEN’s house in order, please.
Sincerely,
Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer (born June 25, 1935 in Bridgeport, Connecticut), is an American playwright, author, public health advocate and gay rights activist. He was nominated for an Academy Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was twice a recipient of an Obie Award. In response to the AIDS crisis he founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which became the largest organization of its kind in the world. He wrote The Normal Heart, the first serious artistic examination of the AIDS crisis. He later founded ACT UP, a protest organization widely credited with having changed public health policy and public awareness of HIV and AIDS. “There is no question in my mind that Larry helped change medicine in this country. And he helped change it for the better. In American medicine there are two eras. Before Larry and after Larry,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci. Kramer currently lives in New York City and Connecticut. – Wikipedia
