Larry Kramer Chicken

Tonight we feature some boneless, skinless chicken thighs. With a nod to our Bastille Chicken, this was conjured up to honor LGBT hero Larry Kramer. Read about this giant in a short article after the recipe.

Chicken, the taste of french onion soup and a touch of wine, just the evening meal for the “stay at home or else” crowd we find ourselves in today. Remember we are doing this out of love and to protect our most vulnerable. Every Thursday night at 8PM, all the citizens of the UK go to their doors and windows and applauds the medical workers.

Ingredients:

3 Tbs. oil, divided

2 large onions, sliced into half moons

2 tsp. thyme

salt + pepper

2 cloves garlic, minced

4 boneless, skinless chicken thighs

1 tsp smoky paprika

1 cup white wine. Used Pinot Grigio

4 Tbs. all-purpose flour

1½ c. low sodium beef broth

1 c. shredded Gruyère

Chopped parsley, for garnish (optional)

Directions:

Do your cutting: Chop the garlic and set aside. Slice the onions into half moons.

In a large skillet over medium heat, heat 2 tbsp olive oil. Add onions and season with salt, pepper, and thyme. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook, stirring occasionally until onions are caramelized and jammy, about 25 minutes. Stir in garlic and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Turn off heat and remove onion mixture. Wipe skillet clean.

In a bowl, mix flour, paprika, salt & pepper and season the chicken. Heat remaining oil in the same skillet over medium high heat. Add chicken and cook until golden on both sides for a total of about 8 minutes.

Add beef broth and return the cooked onions to skillet. Bring mixture to a boil, then then reduce heat. Add the wine and let simmer until chicken is cooked through and beef broth reduces slightly, about 10 more minutes. 

While that cooks, grate the cheese.

Any time you grate cheese, spray the grater first!

Set aside the cheese to add as a topping when the dish is cooked. Serve warm over pasta with a side of green vegetables.

What an interesting dish named after a very interesting LGBT Hero!

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To satisfy and restore.

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…..I cook!

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Larry Kramer 

Larry Kramer (born in 1935) is an American playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures. He moved to London where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for the film Women in Love (1969) and earned an Academy Award nomination for his work.

Kramer watched the spread of AIDS among his friends in 1980. He co-founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), which has become the world's largest private organization assisting people living with AIDS.

His political activism continued with the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987. ACT UP has been credited with changing public health policy and the image of people living with AIDS, as well as raising awareness of HIV and AIDS-related diseases.

The younger of two children, Kramer was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and considered an "unwanted child" by his Jewish parents.

Kramer first became sexually involved with a male friend in junior high school. His father wanted him to marry a woman with money and thus pressed him to become a member of Pi Tau Pi, a Jewish fraternity.

Kramer enrolled at Yale University in 1953, where he had difficulty adjusting. He attempted suicide because he felt like he was the "only gay student on campus". The experience left him determined to explore his sexuality and to fight "for gay people's worth".

The next semester, he had an affair with his German professor – his first romantic relationship with a man.

Yale had been a family tradition, he graduated in 1957 with a degree in English.

Kramer became known for controversy with his writing. In Faggots, (1978), Kramer wrote about the fast lifestyle of gay men of Fire Island and Manhattan. His primary character was modeled on himself, a man who is unable to find love while encountering the drugs and emotionless sex in the trendy bars and discos. He stated his inspiration for the novel: "I wanted to be in love. Almost everybody I knew felt the same way. I think most people, at some level, wanted what I was looking for." “I began to think, 'My God, people must really be conflicted about the lives they're leading.' And that was true. I think people were guilty about all the promiscuity and all the partying."

The novel caused an uproar in the gay community; it was taken off the shelves of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore — New York's only gay bookstore — and Kramer was banned from the grocery store near his home on Fire Island. Kramer says, "The straight world thought I was repulsive, and the gay world treated me like a traitor. Faggots, however, became one of the best-selling gay novels of all time.

Although Kramer was rejected, the book has never been out of publication and is often taught in gay studies classes. 

Gay Men's Health Crisis

When friends he knew began getting sick in 1980, Kramer took up gay activism. In 1981, although he had not been very political, Kramer invited a group of gay men from the New York City area to his apartment to listen to a doctor say their friends' illnesses were related, and research needed to be done. The next year, they named themselves the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) and became the primary organization to raise funds for and provide services to people stricken with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in the New York area. 

When doctors suggested men stop having sex, Kramer strongly encouraged GMHC to spread this message to as many gay men as possible.

When they refused, Kramer wrote an essay entitled "1,112 and Counting", printed in 1983 in the New York Native, a gay newspaper. The essay discussed the disease, the lack of government response, and apathy of the gay community. Kramer intended to frighten gay men and anger them to the point where they would respond to government indifference. His harshest condemnation was directed at those gay men who seemed to think that if they ignored the new disease, it would simply go away.

Here, Kramer's confrontational style proved to be an advantage, as it earned the issue of AIDS in New York media attention that no other individual could get. However, Kramer's personal life was affected when he and his lover – also a board member on GMHC – split over Kramer's condemnations of the political apathy of GMHC.

The GMHC ousted Kramer from the organization in 1983. Kramer's preferred method of communication was deemed too militant for the group. 

The Normal Heart

Astonished and saddened about being forced out of GMHC, Kramer took an extended trip to Europe. While visiting Dachau concentration camp he learned that it when it opened in 1933 and neither Germans nor other nations did anything to stop it.

He became inspired to chronicle the same reaction from the American government and the gay community to the AIDS crisis by writing The Normal Heart, despite having promised never to write for the theater again.

The Normal Heart is a play set between 1981 and 1984. A writer named Ned Weeks nurses his lover, who is dying of an unnamed disease. Meanwhile, the unnamed organization Weeks is involved in is angered by the bad publicity Weeks' activism is generating, and eventually throws him out. The experience was overwhelmingly emotional for Kramer. The play is considered a literary landmark. It contended with the AIDS crisis when few would speak of the disease afflicting gay men; it remains the longest-running play ever staged at the Public Theater, running for a year starting in 1985.

In 2014, HBO produced a film version directed by Ryan Murphy with a screenplay by Kramer. 

In 1987, Kramer was the catalyst in the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a direct action protest organization that chose government agencies and corporations as targets to publicize lack of treatment and funding for people with AIDS. Their first target became the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which Kramer accused of neglecting badly needed medication for HIV-infected Americans.

Engaging in civil disobedience that would result in many people being arrested was a primary objective, as it would focus attention on the target. On March 24, 1987, 17 people were arrested for blocking rush-hour traffic in front of the FDA's Wall Street offices. Kramer was arrested dozens of times working with ACT UP, and the organization grew to hundreds of chapters in the US and Europe.

Dr. Anthony Fauci states "ACT UP put medical treatment in the hands of the patients. And that is the way it ought to be ... 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. 

Continuing to fight government indifference toward AIDS, Kramer wrote Just Say No, A Play about a Farce in 1988. Social critic and writer Susan Sontag wrote of the piece, "Larry Kramer is one of America's most valuable troublemakers. I hope he never lowers his voice."

The Destiny of Me

The Destiny of Me picks up where The Normal Heart left off. The play opened in October 1992 and ran for one year off Broadway. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was a double Obie Award winner and received the Lortel Award for Outstanding Play of the Year.

Kramer states, "I must put back something into this world for my own life, which is worth a tremendous amount. By not putting back, you are saying that your lives are worth shit, and that we deserve to die, and that the deaths of all our friends and lovers have amounted to nothing. I can't believe that in your heart of hearts you feel this way. I can't believe you want to die. Do you?"

Around 1981, Kramer started to research and write: The American People: A History, an ambitious historical work that covers the Stone Age and continues into the present.

Continuing to be controversal, there is information relating to Kramer's assertion that Abraham Lincoln was gay. In 2006, Kramer said of the work, "[It is] my own history of America and of the cause of HIV/AIDS ... Writing and researching this history has convinced me that the plague of HIV/AIDS has been intentionally allowed to happen."

The book was published as a novel in 2015. In the book, Kramer writes that in addition to Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Richard Nixon were gay.

In 1988, stress over the closing of his play Just Say No, only a few weeks after its opening, forced Kramer into the hospital after it aggravated a congenital hernia. While in surgery, doctors discovered liver damage due to Hepatitis B, prompting Kramer to learn that he was HIV positive. In 2001, at the age of 66, Kramer was in dire need of a liver transplant, but he was turned down by Mount Sinai Hospital's organ transplant list. The news prompted Newsweek to announce Kramer was dying in June 2001, and the Associated Press in December of the same year to claim Kramer had died.

"We shouldn't face a death sentence because of who we are or who we love", he said in an interview. In May 2001, the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute, accepted Kramer on its list. Kramer received a new liver on December 21, 2001.

Kramer and his partner, architectural designer David Webster, have been together since 1991. It was Webster's ending of his relationship with Kramer in the 1970s that inspired Kramer to write Faggots (1978). When asked about their reunion decades later, Webster replied, "He'd grown up, I'd grown up." On July 24, 2013 in New York City, Kramer and Webster married.