[In this review of The Destiny of Me, Klinghoffer states that "as an artist, Kramer can be crude, " but adds: "The power of his conviction, though, makes up for [his] lack of artfulness. "]

With their calls for ever more public money and their equally insistent denials that any disease matters as much as their own, AIDS activists have done their best to deter sympathy. So much so that to find one of them worthy of affection and admiration comes as a shock.

Larry Kramer helped found the quasi-terrorist ACT-UP—which makes sense, terrorism being an appropriate response to "genocide," which is what he says the (pre-Clinton) Federal Government has waged against homosexuals. He is also a playwright, novelist, and screenwriter who, for all his experience creating dramas, has refused to admit there is such a thing in human life as tragedy. AIDS is no tragedy, according to Kramer. It is, instead, an entirely preventable phenomenon, the outcome of bureaucratic ineptitude and hostility on the part of heterosexual health officials—"genocide." Says Ned Weeks, the obnoxious autobiographical hero of Kramer's two AIDS plays: "What do you do when you're dying from a disease you need not be dying from?"

And yet it's hard to watch Kramer's newest AIDS play, The Destiny of Me, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on (where else?) Christopher Street, and come away without warm feelings for the guy. A writer for the Village Voice recently visited Kramer at his apartment in Greenwich Village and pronounced him "adorable," in a fuzzy beard and oversized sweater. I wouldn't go that far.

Both The Destiny of Me and The Normal Heart, his previous AIDS play, along with Faggots, his novel, take Kramer's own life as their primary text. In Heart (1985), Ned Weeks is a writer who, confronted with the early blossoming of AIDS among several friends and lovers, turns activist and inaugurates an unnamed AIDS-fighting group. By the time of Destiny, Ned has himself become a host to the HIV virus—as, in real life, has Kramer. The play opens to find Ned unpacking his bags for a stay at the National Institutes of Health, where he greets the chief doctor with the demand, "How long can you keep me alive?" In three acts, scenes from Ned's childhood and youth are played out, items of furniture from his old bedroom, family room, and college dorm sliding elegantly out through openings in the white-tiled hospital walls.

The seeds of family drama have been lifted from Faggots (1978). There as here, the mother of the Larry Kramer stand-in character is an overbearing woman, physically large and emotionally smothering; the father, an embittered man who feels his Yale education entitled him to a better life than the one, as a minor government functionary, he actually leads. In Destiny the couple are acted, by Piper Laurie and David Spielberg, convincingly enough to make you cringe.

As a younger Ned, John Cameron Mitchell looks a little like Juliette Lewis (Woody Allen's love interest in Husbands and Wives). Though Mitchell is effective as a foil to Ned's parents—cowering in the presence of Ned's dad, looking rightfully disturbed as he complains to his mom about the way her nightgown exposes too much of her bosom—it's Jonathan Hadary, as the adult and hospitalized Ned, who really represents Larry Kramer and captures all his charms.

Ned, like Kramer, is a ranter. But he differs from the usual run of ranting AIDS activists in the focused and entirely straightforward quality of his anger. When ACTUP (from which Kramer has since dissociated himself) acts up, part of the aim is to secure money and attention. Another part is to secure society-wide approval of the gay lifestyle and all it entails. That's why the Catholic Church, with no hand at all in medical research, has inspired such fury. Among AIDS activists, perhaps more urgently desired than a cure for AIDS is a cure for their own guilt.

The anger of Larry Kramer, on the other hand, is no masquerade. Ned rails at his doctor, Tony Della Vida (Bruce McCarty); calls the National Institutes of Health the "National Institute of Quacks"; and has nothing but contempt for the hundreds of researchers currently attempting to figure out what makes AIDS tick. There is something, not adorable, but lovable in this. His is the lovability of a champion crank: single-minded, irrational, 100 per cent sincere. Even as Dr. Della Vida works tirelessly to protect Ned's health, Ned posts a sign on his wall: "Tony, You Are Murdering Us." Jonathan Hadary plays the role with a combination of cheerfulness and disgust in his voice that makes you feel as if you've spent an evening with Larry Kramer himself.

As Kramer has made clear in his previous work, he has no great interest in forcing the nation to endorse the habits of homosexuals. Faggots satirized the world of bathhouses and Fire Island beach cottages, a world where grown-up males go by irritating diminutives such as Derry, Dinky, and Mikie. Kramer found the scene at once hilarious and contemptible. He also found it deeply depressing that, as Ned Weeks puts it in The Normal Heart, "All we've created is generations of guys who can't deal with each other as anything but erections." Or, as Ned asks in The Destiny of Me, "Doesn't having so much sex make love impossible?"

For years Kramer has been asking whether gay men should be having sex with each other at all. That they should not is the inevitable message of both The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me, making Kramer an object of ambivalence among gays. At a tenth-anniversary smash for Gay Men's Health Crisis (another Kramer creation) at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, he got up to speak and ended up denouncing practically everyone present. And yet he has failed so far to win the attention he deserves from his (unlikely, and to him probably distasteful) allies on the Right. Here is an open homosexual and enemy of euphemisms who prefers the term "faggot" to "gay" be-cause of its "punch, bite, a no-nonsense, chin-out assertiveness." A man of genuine seriousness, he wants to know (in Heart), when it comes to fighting any threat to human life, whether there aren't "moral obligations, moral commandments to try everything possible." The other day we received here at NR a copy of the new, updated edition of The Joy of Gay Sex (HarperCollins). The volume includes sections on sado-masochism, sex with animals, and sex with children. Against such a moral landscape Larry Kramer absolutely towers.

There is no denying that, as an artist, Kramer can be crude. His characters tend to launch into paragraphs of prose better suited to the letters section of the New York Times. The power of his conviction, though, makes up for this lack of artfulness. The Destiny of Me is propaganda, but propaganda of a type that leaves you feeling as if you've been "punched in the gut. You don't have to believe what Larry Kramer says about the National Institutes of Health. He deserves our respect, though, and certainly our prayers.