The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart: A Novel Hardcover – April 7, 2015

Larry Kramer produced and wrote the screenplay for the movie of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. Seeing it, alone, in a theater in 1969, startled me into recognizing and respecting the homosexual feelings I had been trying so hard to extinguish since puberty. Eventually, in 1973, I found the courage to act on them. By 1978, I was living in New York, in the gay carnival Kramer described in Faggots. His novel, which was castigated by virtually every gay person I knew, was a jeremiad in a Swiftian satire, lamenting that gay people were wasting our new freedom, erroneously thinking that by devoting our lives to sport sex, drugs and disco, we were building our utopia. Faggots warned that we were becoming the repellent gay couple in Gornergrat that Lawrence invidiously compares to the sensual soulmate relationship that Rupert yearns to have with Gerald. I remember admiring Kramer for his insight and idealism while feeling his portrayal of my world was unfairly harsh. But it was just two years before the lives we were living began to kill us, bringing home the message of the W.H. Auden poem Kramer used for the title of another book, We Must Love One Another or Die. How many lives would have been saved if we had taken the message of Faggots to heart?

Having validated many of the stereotypes that straight society had always had of us: frivolous, sex-crazed, irresponsible; many of them viewed gay people as dispensable if not deserving of the suffering that AIDS brought us. Larry leapt to the barricades and sounded the alarm, again despised by many gay people as a “sex negative” scold. Undeterred, he founded The Gay Men’s Health Crisis to ease the suffering of the dying and demand that the government mount an appropriate response to end it. He crafted his anger and frustration into The Normal Heart, which many theater critics decried as merely agitprop when it first opened in 1985. Once again, Larry’s anger – at the power structure for ignoring us and at gay people for not fighting for our lives – was met with opprobrium and he was fired by GMHC. Unstoppable, he formed ACT UP to nurture social activism in the gay community and to find innovative and effective ways to demand more be done to stop our plague. He nurtured the best and the brightest in ACT UP, who eventually formed TAG, whose courage and scholarship forced the Public Health Service to respect our voices and incorporate them into AIDS policy decisions. I can’t think of anyone who has done more to open the hearts and minds of America to gay people than Kramer. He deserves better praise than I am able to articulate. He is a living national treasure worthy of a place in the pantheon of human rights leaders of all time. In so many ways, particularly as a long-term survivor of HIV, I owe him my life.

With The American People, Kramer has turned his Swiftian satirical vision on the canon of American history. In The American People the satire ignites in the quiet, unsentimental fury at America for trying to erase the history of men loving men. This history: books, letters and art dealing with men loving men, has been burned, suppressed and ignored throughout our history. Kramer uses what scant historical evidence we do have to flesh out a fully imagined narrative of gay American history. The American People is an indictment of mainstream historians, whose imagining of the sexual lives, events and conversations among the heroes of American history has ignored and dismissed suggestions of homosexuality. Let others disprove his allegations about how the first American colonists – all men – survived without women for years; about Washington, Lafayette and Hamilton; about Lincoln and Josiah Speed; about what happened to gay people captured by the Nazis. Volume I ends with the McCarthy Hearings. Kramer brings gay American history out of the closet shouting stories that have never been told. There are no footnotes for all the historical references because no documentation exists for many of the details Kramer relates. There is a surreal aspect alongside the humor that is reminiscent of Vonnegut and Pynchon. For instance, Kramer anthropomorphizes the AIDS virus as a Satanic observer, who, no doubt, will figure larger in the sequel. Volume I ends in the McCarthy era. The full scope and structure of the work will only be evident when Volume II appears. I can hardly wait. At 81, this is another of what I hope is many more capstones to his magnificent life.

Sigh .... So yeah, I admire Larry Kramer's passion just like everyone else does. But there's a huge elephant in the room: He's not a good writer. And this is not a novel. The only reason this book was published--and reviewed tolerably in major publications like NYT--is because of WHO Larry Kramer is, not because of the quality of his writing. Who Larry Kramer is and what he's done during his life are not good enough reasons to waste $20 and LOTS of time trying to make sense of this mess. What's so frustrating to me is that Kramer seems to have a specific theory as to the origin of AIDS and how/why the major outbreak occurred circa 1980. That's what I wanted to find out. His hints are intriguing. That's all that's intriguing about this book. I expect he'll answer the question in Volume II but we'll have to slog through another 800 pages to try to get it. (I certainly can't think of another book whose reviewers use the word "slog" so universally.) The most frustrating aspect for me was that it reads like a roman a clef without a clef. Some of the characters are real. Some are based on real characters but changed. Some have fake names, others real, etc. Why? Kramer seems to want to "tell on" certain real-life individuals: so-and-so was closeted; so-and-so was a homophobe, etc. So why use a pseudonym for the Ronald Reagan character? We all know who it is. Does giving him a silly name add value somehow? Unfortunately it took me more than a week to get through this crap, so it's too late for me to ask for a refund of my e-book. Wish I could give it away and get the week and $20 back!

I have loved Kramer’s work in the past, especially Normal Heart - one of the most moving experiences I have ever had in the theater - and the screenplay for Women in Love. But this novel, almost 800 pages in length, is just painful to endure. It’s never clear what is history and what is fantasy. Characters come and go while making no lasting impression. I wish Larry Kramer a long life, but hope he’s not devoting it to Volume 2.

I have to agree with other reviewers of both sides - in part it was a long "sloggish" read and I didn't understand the point of some narratives, but in other parts it was shocking and riveting and I couldn't put it down. I'm not familiar with Larry Kramer's writing style - I know all about him but have never read his books. This was definitely worth my time and I very much look forward to a Volume 2. It's clear he has put so much thought, imagination, and emotion into this tome.

Dry as a bone.Attacked it several times.Looking for someone to give the book to.

Brilliant, thoughtful, provocative and just the shot in the ass needed for complacent novel readers with no imagination who want easy digestible tapas with whiny fiction that is turned out like sausages and goes down smoothly with a glass if thin whiite wine.
I'm weary of reviewers who can't tolerate fiction more challenging than To Kill a Mockingbird.

Read this

Beautifully structured and very well written. A bit heavy at parts, and I had to push myself forward, but so rewarding in the end. It is so refreshing to have a compiled history of LGBT peoples (at least the first part) when so many great strides have been made.

I just finished "The American People" and although it was not an easy read, it certainly was worth it. I have always had so much respect for Larry Kramer, and this book was certainly worth my time and concentration. Thank you Larry.