Cyril's Sandwich

Writers get the craziest dreams. I found my dreams “visited” by a person I had written about in passing a few days ago, Cyril Wilcox. A young Harvard student who committed suicide 100 years ago. He could not cope with the pressures of homophobia rampant at the time. His visit, he informed me, was to thank me for such a nice piece on my “writings”. And he said he wanted to tell me about a favorite sandwich that he and his friends enjoyed, back in the day. Well the next day when I tried to make the sandwich, I found it needed a modern translation. Bread today can not hold up like the bread back then. 

Cyril's sandwich is great for a brunch, and I urge you to try this egg, sausage and cheese delight. I assure you, you can trust a recipe from a ghost who had been departed since 1920!

Ingredients:

¼ cup loose cooked sausage

3 eggs

2 Tbs dry pancake mix

2 slices of a sturdy wheat bread

2 slices of American cheese

Directions: 

Cook up the sausage over medium heat, about 6 minutes should do it. Here I split open bratwurst for the sausage, and then used only about half of the meat. Turn the heat down a touch.

While you whip up the 3 eggs and fold in the 2 Tbs of dry pancake mix. This does not have to be blended well. You want lumps! Let this sit while the sausage cooks and skillet cools.

Then pour the egg mixture over the sausage and mix slightly.

Place two slices of bread on this, let it soak for only a tiny bit and flip the bread over. You want the bread to still have egg on it.

Let that cook until the egg sets. Turn each piece over and top with cheese. Cover skillet to melt and then place cheese sides together. 

Serve. (Cyril recommended lightly buttering the outsides, but it is hardly necessary)

What a wonderful way to re-imagine a grilled cheese sandwich!

For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOVb0OrmyL0

Looking forward to serving this for a Master's Brunch!

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTM via @amazon

Secret Court Roast Chicken

In these days of social distancing and enforced confinement the walls can start coming in on you. Shake things up with a production meal! We dedicate this recipe to the rather tragic figure of Cyril Wilcox, a young gay student at Harvard who's grief and suicide brought about a “Secret Court” to root out all the homosexual students one hundred years ago.

This full meal of roasted chicken thighs, broccoli, escalloped potatoes, and simple peach halves represents the kind of production you should do once in awhile to show love and appreciation. Mixing simple butter with olive oil and the addition of Gruyere cheese into the thighs elevate this into a gourmet delight.

Ingredients:

4 boneless, skinless chicken thighs

Smoked Gruyere cheese

½ cup olive oil

½ salted butter, melted

squirt of lemon juice

½ tsp garlic powder

1 lbs fresh broccoli

1 box pkg escalloped potatoes

grated cheese for a topping

1 can peach halves in juice

Directions:

Pre heat the oven to 425 degrees. Line a baking pan with foil and spray lightly.

Do your cutting, cut the broccoli into florets and slice the cheese into thin (less than a ¼ inch) slices. This cheese does not melt well.

Put the broccoli into a large bowl of water with ½ cup vinegar and let set for about 15 minutes. This will clean off any impurities from the garden.

Melt the butter into the olive oil. Add the garlic powder and blend well.

Rinse the broccoli and pour about half of this oil mixture over and stir until well coated.

Lay out some foil on the counter and open up the chicken thighs with their inside up. Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste. Lay a slice of cheese on each piece and fold them over to cover.

Place the chicken wraps down the center of the baking sheet and arraign the broccoli on either side. Coat the chicken well with the rest of the oil mixture.

Prepare the potatoes according to package directions and place everything in the preheated oven with potatoes on lower rack.

Let that roast for about 40 minutes. Check the chicken with a thermometer to read 155 degrees for doneness.

While that cooks prepare the “desert” of peach halves sprinkled with cinnamon. Chill in the refrigerator. 

When done, remove everything from oven and let sit for 10 minutes.

You an go ahead and use a slotted spoon to place the broccoli into a serving bowl. Put out the peaches. Pour drinks.

Use a spatula to place the chicken wraps onto a platter.

What a beautiful and comforting meal.

For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdaxqfV4SKQ

So deeply honored to serve my Master Indy.

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTMvia @amazon

=========================

The Harvard Secret Court

In 1920, Harvard University set up what they refereed to as The Secret Court. It was an ad hoc disciplinary tribunal of five administrators formed to investigate charges of homosexual activity among the student population.

During two weeks in May and June, "the Court", headed by the Acting Dean, conducted more than thirty interviews behind closed doors and took action against eight students, a recent graduate, and an assistant professor. They were expelled or had their association with the university severed. The proceedings were kept a dark secret until the whole affair was unearthed in 2002! But lives and families had long been ruined. The loss of careers and the suicides, were all a direct result of this homophobic endeavor. It is no wonder that the University kept this quiet for over 80 years.

The “witch hunt” began as a result of Cyril Wilcox, a Harvard undergraduate, who committed suicide by inhaling gas in his parents' house in Fall River, Massachusetts. Unable to cope with the pressures of hatred and guilt over his sexuality. 

In 1920, the world of Cyril B. Wilcox was collapsing around him.

Away at a university, he had met, for the first time, other men who also liked men. This is a powerful, life changing event in a young gay man's life. He started to spend time socializing with these other outcasts. Dances, parties and other in-dorm “get together”s took place, often forsaking studies. His grades slipped. His family had no idea what was going on. Reading about it now we can guess the young man may have fallen in love with a man he was seeing. He had no one to talk to.

In May Cyril confided in his older brother George. We can only assume it did not go well. The next morning Mary Wilcox smelled gas from her son's room. When she opened the door. Cyril was dead.

The medical examiner wrote “most probably accidental, change of pressure in gas pipe extinguishing light, allowing raw gas to fill bed room”.

His family and friends, as well as Harvard administrators, knew that his death was self-inflicted.

His brother George, shortly after the death, intercepted two letters to Cyril, one from Ernest Roberts, another student, and one from Harold Saxton, a recent graduate. Their candid and detailed gossip convinced him that Harvard was harboring a network of homosexual students.

Filled with moral outrage, George Wilcox located Dreyfus, and beat out of him the names of three other men involved. Later that day, he met with Harvard's Acting Dean Greenough and shared what he knew: his brother's admission, the contents of the letters, and what Dreyfus had told him.

Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell immediately impaneled a group of four administrators and one professor, to address the situation.

For months, the Secret Court called both students and Boston residents to appear and interrogated them behind closed doors about alleged homosexual activity.

They would use a piece of information, whether from someone previously called, or from a Harvard hall proctor asked to log entries into a room suspected of harboring homosexual activity. This would pressure a witness into revealing his personal activities and identifying others engaged in these monstrous activities.

What happened derailed the lives of the young men caught up in the school’s disciplinary dragnet. Those convicted by the court were cast out of Harvard, out of Cambridge, and frequently out of academia entirely, because of the university’s determination to warn other schools to which the men applied.

The fallout of the investigation, included the headline-making death of a second student, Eugene Cummings, in June 1920. 

The Harvard administrators’ actions in 1920 were a part of the then widely held view that homosexuality was both immoral and an influence that could spread like a contagion.

If anybody wrote to ask about these men, they were told by Harvard that these men were not of good character, and that they were not to be trusted.

According to newly released documents the court received an unsigned letter from someone who identified himself only as a member of the Class of 1921. The anonymous student claimed to know all the details of Cyril Wilcox’s suicide and told of how Cyril first got involved with the underground gay group.

“While in his Freshman year he met in college some boys, mostly members of his own class, who committed upon him and induced him to commit on them ‘Unnatural Acts’ which habit so grew on him that realizing he did not have strength of character enough to brake away from it concluded suicide the only course open to him,” the anonymous letter read.

“the most disgusting and disgraceful and revolting acts of degeneracy and depravity took place openly in plain view of all present.”

Over the next two weeks, The Court handed down a verdict of “guilty” for a total of 14 men: seven college students, a Dental School student, an Assistant in Philosophy, an alumnus; and four men not even connected with Harvard.

In June of 1920, Eugene R. Cummings a 23-year-old dental-school student committed suicide at Harvard’s Stillman Infirmary. 

Then an article came out in the Boston American:
“According to friends of the two, Cummings, who was said to have been mentally unbalanced, told a story of an alleged inquisition which he claimed was held in the college office following Wilcox’ death,” read the article. “He said that he was taken into the office, which was shrouded in gloom, with but one light dimly burning, and there questioned exhaustively. This story, which was denied by the college authorities, was said to have sprung from his disordered mind.”

On Sept. 8, 1930, Keith Smerage became the third member of the circle to commit suicide. The New York Times reported that he was found dead of gas asphyxiation in an apartment he shared with Philip Towne, a government clerk. The police listed the case as a suicide.

By then all records and mention of the Harvard Secret Court were buried. In 2002, a researcher from Harvard’s daily newspaper, The Crimson, came across a box of files labeled “Secret Court” in the University’s archives. After pressure from newspaper staff, the University finally released five hundred documents related to the Court’s work.


The Harvard Secret Court was despicable yet hopefully today we can learn from the tragic life of that young university student Cyril B. Wilcox.

Maurice Brandied Roast

This slow cooker roast got its start as a variation of Beef Bourguignon. Here we use a nice brandy to slowly braise the chuck roast. Vegetables are cooked separately as a way of insuring better taste and doneness! It is named to honor LGBT hero E. M. Forster. Read about him for easy dinner conversation!

A nice chuck roast, slow cooked on a bed of chopped onion in a braising liquid of beef stock and brandy. A true comfort in these uncomfortable times.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons vegetable oil (or extra-virgin olive oil)

salt + pepper (to taste)

1 package brown gravy mix

2.5 lbs beef chuck roast

½ cup beef stock

1 large onion rough chopped

1 cup brandy

For the Optional Gravy

1½ tablespoons all-purpose flour

2 Tbs beef stock (cold)

Directions:

First wipe out and spray the slow cooker, set to low.

Heat 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil or olive oil in a large skillet over high heat.

Pat the pot roast with paper towels to dry; remove any excess visible fat.

Brown the pot roast on all sides in the hot oil, then remove to a plate.

While that browns, do a rough chop on the onion. You want big pieces. Scatter them in the cooker.

Place the browned roast on top of the onions. If the pot roast does not fit comfortably in the pot, cut it into two or three pieces.

Pour the dry gravy mix on top of the roast and smear around with your hand to make a coating.

Carefully pour the ½ cup of beef broth and full cup of brandy around the sides of the beef.

Cover the pot and cook on the LOW setting for 8 hours, or on the HIGH setting for about 4 hours. The roast is very tender.

Remove the roast to a serving platter and tent with foil; keep it warm until serving time.

During the last hour of cooking you will have plenty of time to crank up the oven to 400 degrees. Line a baking sheet with foil. Stir the broccoli with some olive oil and spread on the sheet. Let roast for 30 - 40 minutes.

The very tips and edges should have a touch of black. This is NOT burned, this is caramelazation that makes the green vegetable so delicious.

If you wish, this is also the time to boil potatoes and mash them.

Remember the meat should rest for at least 7 minutes! Do not forget this step. The resting time is great for making the gravy.

Skim off the fat or strain the liquids into a fat separator.

Pour the strained liquids into a saucepan. Bring the liquids to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to medium-low and continue cooking until reduced to about 1 to 1½ cups. Taste and adjust the seasonings.

Combine 1½ Tbs flour with 2 Tbs of beef stock; mix until smooth and well blended. Stir this into the reduced liquids and continue cooking until thickened.

For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G55yNWCnXTI

What a comforting meal for my Master to share.

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTMvia @amazon

============================

E M Forster

Edward Morgan Forster (1879 – 1970) was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. Many of his novels examine class difference and hypocrisy, including A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. The last brought him his greatest success. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 16 different years.

Forster, born in London, was the only child of "Lily" and Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster. He was registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but accidentally baptized Edward Morgan Forster. His father died of tuberculosis in 1880 before Morgan's second birthday. In 1883, he and his mother moved to Rooks Nest, Hertfordshire until 1893. This served as a model for Howards End in his novel of that name.

Forster inherited £8,000 in trust (the equivalent of about 1.25 million dollars today) from his great-aunt in 1887. The money was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer.

At King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles. They met in secret, and discussed their work on philosophical and moral questions. Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a member in the 1910s and 1920s.

Forster was gay. In 1906 he fell into his first and unrequited love with Syed Ross Masood, a 17-year-old future Oxford student he tutored in Latin.

After leaving the university, he travelled in continental Europe with his mother.

In 1914, he visited Egypt, Germany and India by which time he had written all but one of his novels. As a conscientious objector in the First World War, Forster served as a Chief Searcher (for missing servicemen) for the British Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt. Though conscious of his repressed desires, it was at this time, while stationed in Egypt, that he "lost his respectability" to a wounded soldier in 1917.

In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a notable broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the Union of Ethical Societies. In addition to his broadcasting, he advocated individual liberty and penal reform and opposed censorship by writing articles, sitting on committees and signing letters.

Forster was openly homosexual to his close friends, but not to the public, and a lifelong bachelor.

He developed a long-term relationship with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman. Forster died of a stroke in 1970 at the age of 91, at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry, Warwickshire. His ashes, mingled with those of Buckingham, were later scattered in the rose garden of Coventry's crematorium, near Warwick University.

Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice was published shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. He never finished a seventh novel, Arctic Summer.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread was published in 1905.

Next, Forster published The Longest Journey in 1907.

Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic.

Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes and the Basts, struggling lower-middle-class aspirants.

Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). A Passage to India was adapted as a play in 1960.

Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. It is a homosexual love story that also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire.

The novel was controversial, given that Forster's homosexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality and personal activities influenced his writing. Maurice was adapted as a film in 1987.

Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 until his death and a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association from 1963 until his death. His views as a humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society. When Forster's cousin, Philip Whichelo, donated a portrait of Forster to the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GLHA), Jim Herrick, the founder, quoted Forster's words: "The humanist has four leading characteristics – curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race."

Forster's two best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship.

Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works. Some critics have argued that a general shift from heterosexual to homosexual love can be observed through the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his homosexuality, while he explored similar issues in several volumes of short stories.

Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.

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!

For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA_kOJP94Hc

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTM via @amazon

============================

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.