They’re showing that

horrible documentary about Larry Kramer on HBO. I abhorred the man. He was always going on and on about how he didn’t have a lover. The reason was simple, he was an odious angry person who hated himself and everybody else. Who would want to partner with that? If you don’t know who Larry Kramer is — well he gets kudos for practically single-handedly awakening the gay community in New York City to the reality of a deadly disease called AIDS, and for hectoring the Reagan administration to do something about it. He was tireless and indefatigable in this, but that doesn’t make him a good playwright or a nice man. He wrote the horrifying play The Normal Heart; basically an ode to himself and his own heroism. He also wrote the screenplay for the musical Lost Horizon (some aesthetic crimes are simply unforgivable). But the real problem with Larry Kramer is that he hated sex. One cannot forget his novel Faggots, an excoriating critique of the 'gay lifestyle;' apparently we’re all too promiscuous and don’t know how to love. (Who knew?) Well everybody who was homophobic knew that, and Larry just managed to confirm all the myths (that we are hornier than straight men, and less loving) and wrap them up with neat bow that said ‘if a gay man knows how horrible gay men are, then how horrible might they be?’ But understanding Larry Kramer may help us to understand ourselves, especially during COVID-19. Diseases are metaphors, because they — like any good televisions show — are all about life, and death and suffering, and such things can’t help but trigger our fantasies. Larry Kramer’s relationship to AIDS was personal, and by that I don’t mean that many of his friends died (though they did) what I mean is that his political activism was deeply related to personal hurt. No one ever loved Larry enough (he was the dreaded second brother, and his older brother Arthur got all the love) and he had been rejected by a beautiful boy just before he wrote Faggots — which is what drove him to write about how horrible gay men are. (No Larry, not all gay men are horrible, just the man who rejected you, okay?) When AIDS came along, Larry was able to transfer this dream/nightmare onto the illness. It was not about microbes and germs, just about gay men and their prodigious tendency to want to suck on you-know-what. If we would only stop wanting and needing to do that!After all, is sex really that important? Something we would give up our lives for? Well for many gay men it was, and they are the real heroes of the AIDS Holocaust, not Larry Kramer, who played his own self-righteousness like a violin, to exalt himself over all the nasty gay men (like me) who resisted AIDS orthodoxy. In the house I lived in in 1986 (it was a gay house on Homewood, kinda famous, we kinda had a lot of parties, a lot of somewhat influential queer people hung out there…just to give you a hint) a decree was issued at the advent of AIDs — there would be no condoms allowed. Condoms were a homophobic plot. This was partially true; AIDS IS ‘homophobic’ — we can’t talk about it without thinking about how much we generally hate gay men and their prodigiously overstocked libidos. Eventually Homewood came 'round: condoms were allowed, but we never stopped reminding ourselves how AIDS was not only a disease but a way of thinking. The same can be said of COVID-19. There are certain facts about this illness, and if I told you the facts (which admittedly are hard to discern amidst the uproar) it would bore you to death. But what really interests us about COVID-19 are the metaphors  — the disease for most of us has little to do with germ warfare and very much to do with how much we care about our fellow man. That is the primary metaphor attached to this disease — your reaction to COVID-19 proves how you human you are, or God forbid, are not. When a metaphor has attached itself to an illness there is nothing that can be done about it, science or no science, that’s what it will mean forever. But that doesn’t mean that COVID-19 doesn’t have other ancillary messages. One of them is agoraphobia/obsessive compulsive disorder. For some it is not all bout altruism at all -- but fear -- and a certain kind of selfishness — will I get it? Is it time to disinfect the mail? What about doorknobs? Can my dog catch it? Someone coughed next to me the other day, will I die? These become all consuming questions, and there is an all-pervasive fear of leaving the house. The third metaphor attached to this disease is the one — I must admit — I am susceptible to: control. For some of us, from the very beginning we smelled it — this illness was all about control, from the very moment it was announced we were essentially locked up in our homes. This triggered our righteous concern  about civil liberties. We don’t like to be told what to do -- some of us --and for us, that’s all COVID-19 means, a nightmare which we can never claw our way out of, in which we — once free agents who controlled our own destiny, can no longer do so. My point here is this: deal with Covid-19 in any way you wish, there are many conflicting facts. All you can do, as with any illness, is try and protect yourself and others as best you can, and respect others’ decisions as well as your own. But what you also can do is try and figure out which particular metaphor applies to you. How do you relate to COVID-19? If you understand this it might help you deal more kindly with others. The fact that I know that ‘control’ is my metaphor of choice means that I must learn to be kinder to the ‘controlled’ automatons who I see as gleefully sacrificing their lives and freedoms to an oppressive orthodoxy. Similarly, those of you who are primed to shoot me on the street because I don’t believe in disinfecting doorknobs or taking care of my fellow man -- put away your 'guns.' That too, is a metaphor, I hope. But everything is, and the sooner we come to terms with that, the sooner we will learn how to be kind again.