MSNBC's Joy Reid set aside nearly six minutes of air time on Wednesday's The Reid Report to letting homosexual activists Larry Kramer and Dan Savage boast about their longtime involvement in the far-left LGBT movement. The segment was the latest in Reid's "Generation to Generation" series on her program, which, in her words, "brings together current leaders – and the people who influenced...them – for frank conversations about politics, policy, and the state of our culture."
The left-wing host gave Kramer a platform to wax ecstatic about his founding of the radical group ACT-UP (which notoriously desecrated St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City in 1989), as well as boost his play/movie The Normal Heart. Savage hyped his It Gets Better Project, and sang the praises of Kramer during the segment:
LARRY KRAMER: My name is Larry Kramer. I just turned 79 years old. I've been involved in various forms of AIDS activism since AIDS started in '81....I started an organization called ACT-UP – AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 1 (from file news footage): The members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power – or ACT-UP – are anything but silent. (clip of protesters chanting, "Let us choose!")
KRAMER: All those drugs are there because of ACT-UP.
DAN SAVAGE: My name is Dan Savage, and I'm a syndicated columnist and author. In 2010, my husband and I launched the It Get Better Project, which was just a video that we put out, speaking to LGBT youth about our lives as adult gay men. And I encouraged, in my column, other readers – who are LGBT – to do the same – to make videos to speak to LGBT youth, who might be bullied or victimized or feeling despair.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 2: I know things are tough right now, but you must never give up.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 3: There is help to be found.
HILLARY CLINTON: Your life is so important.
CHRIS COLFER: Know that you have friends.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And every day-
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 4: It gets better.
And what YouTube and Twitter and Facebook gave us – adult queer people out there in the world – was a way to bring the LGBT youth support group to queer kids, who live in parts of the country where there are no services for queer youth; or who are being raised in families where they would never allow their kids to attend a queer youth support group. That is really radical and really subversive and really new.
One of the problems with being gay is you don't learn your history, because it isn't taught, and you don't learn it from your family. You have to get out there and educate yourself. And that's why it's important that you have productions, like 'The Normal Heart' on Broadway, and the film on HBO....
KRAMER: Everything in 'The Normal Heart' happened. There was no fiction involved – none. Those were all people who – based on real people. The doctor that Julia Roberts played – in a wheelchair – was Doctor Linda Laubenstein, who had childhood polio....
JULIANA MARGULIES: And the Emmy goes to 'The Normal Heart.'
SAVAGE: It was really Larry [Kramer] that reached into all of our psyches and our hearts, and tore out that – those inhibitions and – and turned it around for us....
KRAMER: I don't think people realize how awful it is when everyone around you is dying....
SAVAGE: When you're young and gay, and you're hiding, what you don't want is to be seen. You don't want to be noticed. And, unfortunately, that emotional dynamic left us really handicapped when there was this health crisis, where we needed to be public and visible – and demanding and angry.
KRAMER: They weren't scared enough to fight, which is what I wanted them to do.
SAVAGE: Larry identified that – that core. Larry was that nuclear reactor.
KRAMER: I'm a firm believer in anger, and we were an angry lot.
SAVAGE: Basically, what ACT-UP – that brand of activism did, was it said, here's a doable thing. Show up at this time – show up to this place, and do this doable thing – and you will help make change.
KRAMER: It was amazing. We learned how to use the anger to go after our enemies.
SAVAGE: I feel like my activism in the column is very similar. You know, with the It Gets Better Project, Terry and I identified a doable thing: sit in front of your computer and talk for ten minutes, and upload that video to YouTube. It's a doable thing, and you have no excuse not to do it – and that was really the ACT-UP model, and that kind of activism is very empowering. ACT-UP was a response to a time and a place and a crisis, and ACT-UP changed the world.
The MRC's Brent Bozell and Tim Graham pointed out Kramer's Reagan derangement syndrome in a May 31, 2014 column. The activist's longstanding hatred of the Republican made its way into the movie version of The Normal Heart, which concluded with a caption bashing the former president (Bozell and Graham detailed how this note is misleading, to say the least):
President Ronald Reagan mentioned AIDS publicly for the first time Sept. 17, 1985, vowing in a news conference to make AIDS research a 'top priority.' Reagan's proposed budget for 1986 actually called for an 11 percent reduction in AIDS spending. By the end of 1986, there were 24,559 reported deaths.
Of course, Savage's vicious attacks on conservatives, Christians (especially the Catholic Church), and traditionalists of all stripes is well-documented. Earlier in 2014, the leftist columnist hoped Sarah Palin choked on her Christmas pastry. Just a few months earlier, he used a post on Twitter to wish cancer on the former Republican vice presidential candidate.
