It took almost 30 years for Larry Kramer's acclaimed play The Normal Heart to be adapted into a movie—Ryan Murphy's take on Kramer's autobiographical account of the early days of AIDS will premiere Sunday on HBO. In a rare interview with the New York Times, the now frail former Gay Men's Health Crisis/ACT UP activist Kramer explained his version of why Barbra Streisand's adaptation never got off the ground: She didn't want to portray gay men fucking.

Streisand snapped up the rights to the 1985 play early on and had a draft of a screenplay in 1995. "The problems with her is that she didn't know what to do with it, and she also was really uncomfortable with the subject of gay sex," Kramer told the Times. He continued:

I really think it's important that after eons of watching men and women make love in the movies, it's time to see two men do so. I bought her a book of very beautiful art pictures of two men making love and she found it very distasteful. That was sort of a sign for me that we weren't made for each other.

Indeed. Streisand countered, though:

Larry was at the forefront of this battle and, God love him, he's still fighting. But there's no need to fight me by misrepresenting my feelings. As a filmmaker, I have always looked for new and exciting ways to do love scenes, whether they're about heterosexuals or homosexuals. It's a matter of taste, not gender.

It's probably for the best that the nice lady didn't end up making the gay sex all pretty.

Another point of interest in the Times story is that Kramer spoke out against Truvada, the controversial, C.D.C-endorsed antiretroviral drug that works as a pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV negative men. Says Kramer:

"Anybody who voluntarily takes an antiviral every day has got to have rocks in their heads," Mr. Kramer said, describing the side effects of drugs he has taken. "There's something to me cowardly about taking Truvada instead of using a condom. You're taking a drug that is poison to you, and it has lessened your energy to fight, to get involved, to do anything."

I don't entirely agree with Kramer here, but then, I often don't. That's never stopped me from appreciating his fighting spirit.