TV REVIEW : Activist Animates AIDS Discussion

Thanks to Larry Kramer, the angry man of the gay and lesbian movement, “Out in America” (tonight on Channel 28, 10 p.m.) ends up being something more than just another well-intended panel discussion. And although this discussion would seem to be naturally contentious, centering as it does around the future direction of the country’s homosexual culture, it desperately needs Kramer’s needling, his deeply-felt corrosiveness.

When at one point during the round-table gabfest (hosted by Andrew Humm) Kramer remarks that the opening segment about parents of gays and lesbians was “saccharine,” he’s right. Though a clear attempt to appeal to a broad cross-section of Middle America, this filmed prelude of Jewish, black and Catholic families dealing in various ways with the children’s “coming out” is too soft and too sketchy to really matter. Not unlike the pallid remarks that begin the subsequent panel segment.

Just when you thought that television had sapped all the energy that emerged 22 years ago this week during New York’s seminal Stonewall rebellion (the Bastille for American gays and lesbians), in comes AIDS activist Kramer, railing at the “scandal” of failed AIDS research and the “impossibility” of forming coalitions between minority groups around common concerns. He is the gadfly that wakes up this sleepy panel.

Rep. Craig A. Washington (D-Tex.) reminds everyone that, as American history shows, there is no rest for those fighting for civil rights. Kevin Berrill, of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, counters Kramer’s bleak picture with such success stories as the new federal Hate Crimes law. Although recent trends in the gay and lesbian movement (mainstream gays versus activist Queer Nation, for instance) strangely never surface here, the panel itself reveals a movement at a painful crossroads where prejudice and progress dizzyingly coexist.