Larry Kramer Questions Gay Studies
Larry Kramer returned to Yale University -- the alma mater with which the gay activist and author has had a stormy relationship -- and offered a harsh critique of the university's commitment to gay studies and of the idea that the discipline should be linked to gender and sexuality studies. Because ties of the sort that exist at Yale between gay studies and gender studies are in fact common in academe, the speech -- posted online by The Daily Beast -- is attracting discussion.

"[T]he plague of AIDS was allowed to happen because much of the world hates us and most of the world knows nothing about us. ... I needed no queer theories, no gender studies, to figure all this out," Kramer said. "Why can’t we accept that homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history, whether it was called homosexuality, sodomy, buggery, hushmarkedry, or hundreds of other things, or had no name at all? What we do now they pretty much did then. Period. Men have always had cocks and men have pretty much always known what to do with them. It is just stupidity and elite presumption of the highest and most preposterous order to theorize, in these regards, that then was different from now."

He said that Yale was "afraid" to teach about all the people who are gay. And he asked "why is the history department allowing history to be hijacked by the queer theorists just as the English department allowed Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida to hijack literature for the deconstructionists? That travesty found safe haven here at Yale, too."- IHE | Read The Speech