Four days later, at least a thousand gay New Yorkers, mainly men, came to the Great Hall at Cooper Union to hear Larry Kramer, one of their evangelists, give his first speech in over a decade. The hall was full to standing, and thrummed with greetings, soft coats and hugs. More than a hundred people were turned away.

You never know what you’re going to get from Kramer, America’s most spectacular and angry Aids activist. He is a berater – of governments, newspapers, gay people – with genius. He’s also one of those people who requires a list: Pulitzer-nominated playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, bestselling novelist, founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and Act Up, credited with changing the process of approving drugs in the US and the man who picked up a megaphone to tell Ronald Reagan that his son was gay. ("I don't care what was true,” Kramer explained in a New Yorker profile in 2002. “We needed the attention. Ron Reagan's father was President for seven years before he said the word 'AIDS.'"

Kramer is 69 now, and he walks unevenly. For all the spleen – bodily terms come to mind in describing a man who has someone else’s liver and who has been HIV positive for nearly a quarter of a century – he is growing old. His voice, always sweet and strangely high coming from such a thunderous face, was patchy, and he stopped at intervals during his speech to drink what looked like iced tea.

But his message was undiminished: he spoke of tragedy. “More and more I am filled with dread. That is my truth that I bring to you today. Larry is scared.”

That rural Christian conservatives do not like or understand gay people was not his complaint – Kramer’s everlasting frustration is that the gay community cannot organise itself, cannot take itself seriously enough to fight back. And in that vein, he spoke at times for New York’s wider liberal community – a community that is bewildered and in pain these days: how could we lose?

“I have recently come to believe that gay men and women are tragic people,” said Kramer, in a typical passage. “We are so wonderful but we are also so fucked up. So blind. So ignorant in ways to look after ourselves. So uninterested in the outside world that is subsuming us when we thought we were making them pretty and giving them songs to sing. So without agendas to utilize our wonderfulness. We know who the enemy is and we just stand here letting them shoot us over and over again. WE STAND HERE AND LET THEM DO IT!”

Kramer is no stranger to hyperbole – those who defy him often end up somewhere in print as Nazis – but last Sunday there was substance to his sadness.

“The absoluteness of what has happened is terrifying. On the gay marriage initiatives alone: 2.6 million against us in Michigan. 3.2 million in Ohio. 1.1 million in Oklahoma, 2.2 million in Georgia. 1.2 million in Kentucky… Almost 60 million people whom we live and work with every day think we are immoral.”

The spine of Kramer’s argument was the contrast between America’s collapsing gay health groups and the splendid health of the Republican movement. For him, the roots of November 2 are to be found in the Powell Manifesto, written by Lewis Powell, an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, in 1971, which put forward a plan to save American capitalism. Powell demanded hard, unending work and Kramer pointed out that for many years the gay community has been up for everything but that.

It is vital for us to realize that this plan was written in 1971,” he said. “The people it was written for did not go off then to a disco, or to the Pines [a famous gay getaway on Long Island] or into therapy, or into drugs.”

At times Kramer drew laughter, but he didn’t seem to like that. The refrain he repeated three or four times – “I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do. I think we're smarter and more talented and more aware” – became more and more sombre.

And the most fragile, beautiful lines of the speech, whose form was such a contrast to the terse, repetitive sentences of the Administration it decried, were delivered to silence: “I do not see us, don't you see? They are killing us. They are eradicating us from this earth. Little by little by little we are disappearing. I do not see us and I am beginning to see us less and less.”

Here is the full text of Larry Kramer’s speech.

Slices of New York