The Church in Sag Harbor presents a conversation with author and current artist-in-residence Bill Goldstein on Friday, April 22, at 6 PM.
Goldstein will speak on his current work, a biography about Larry Kramer, the playwright, novelist, activist and one of the founders of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the world’s first HIV/AIDS service organization. Its first meeting was held in Kramer’s apartment in 1982, before the disease even had a name. Larry Kramer recently died in 2020 at the age of 84.
Before his death, Goldstein spent hundreds of hours interviewing Kramer and has worked with Kramer’s personal papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale, as well as in the records of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and at ACT UP, the other organization Kramer played a vital role in founding. He has also studied the personal archives of many of Kramer’s closest friends and opponents.
In his talk Goldstein will concentrate on Kramer’s initial calls to community activism in 1981 and 1982, as the scope of the epidemic became clearer, and on Kramer’s time living and writing (and acting up) in Sag Harbor and East Hampton in the 1980s and 1990s.
Goldstein reviews books and interviews authors for NBC’s “Weekend Today in New York,” and was the founding editor of The New York Times books website.
The cost to attend is $15.