Culture > Reviews

The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me
a Lavender Salon Review
by John Olski
posted 11/04/03

Writer/actor David Drake developed The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me as an off-Broadway performance piece in the early 1990's.  Set in post-Stonewall America, the one-man show explores numerous facets of gay community and the ways in which individuals -- including leaders like Larry Kramer -- have impact on their fellows and on the gay civil rights movement in general.

Drake's screen performance of The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me was released on video in 2000 and on DVD in 2003.  Directed by Tim Kirkman, the screen version mixes theater footage (including audience laughter) with more cinematic sections that allow a camera to fully circle the stage.  Film has the advantage of dramatically framing David Drake as his characterizations demand.  It also creates an effect or two not available to theater audiences: one Lavender Salon member noted that candle flames in a vigil scene appeared as little crosses on film.

David Drake's monologue often rises to a level of riff that rivals Alan Ginsberg's Beat poetry.  If the actor's voice is just a little more palatable than that of Richard Simmons, it's in part the result of filming someone who is projecting to a live audience.  The actor does have vocal range (as does Mr. Simmons), a fact guaranteed to provoke startled amusement during a straight-acting gym workout.

Scenes from gay life include a gender-atypical childhood monologue; a frenetic dance club stream-of-consciousness, structured by the language of personal ads; some hyper-masculine posturing at the gym; and an optimistic, domestic gay future, set sometime after a Hillary Clinton presidency.

In characterizing a population, Drake walks the tightrope between stereotyping all gay behavior and giving inordinate prominence to a few behaviors.  The dance riff, for example, touches on many kinds of men likely to be found in a club, from S&M practitioners to those seeking "straight-looking, straight-acting" partners.  Yet the climax of the scene finds Drake tracing the contours of his bare torso with the back of a knife, a violent image that one Lavender Salon member found uncomfortable and unrepresentative of most club-goers.  Drake's gym riff also ended with the idea that gay men work out to protect themselves from violent, anti-gay heterosexuals.  A couple of Lavender Salon members felt that gym culture is more about gay men protecting themselves from irrelevancy in the eyes of other gay men.

The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me didn't generate immediate feedback from members of the Lavender Salon, as did the movie Urbania, but the performance was well received and led to discussion of Larry Kramer and the emergence of AIDS in the 1980's.  Drake's vision of a domestic gay future also inspired talk about attitude changes in the gay civil rights movement.  The 2003 DVD of The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me offers two earlier versions of the show's ending, providing a glimpse at how much social and political ground GLBT people have gained in the U.S. since the early 1990's.

David Drake's performance in The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me is captivating and, at points, even mesmerizing.  The show itself is a good vehicle for reflection, offering a gay man's take on who gay people are and where gay people are going.