Never forget.

I don't want to write about the future. I want to write about the past.

We're forgetting now. Have you noticed? Time doesn't heal wounds so much as eradicate them. Time and history, like people, forget more than they remember. History, which should know better, forgets outrageously.

On a recent TV program, Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, interviewed Jesse Jackson. "We can't look back," Jackson said. "We have to look forward. We can't waste our energy and spend our lives looking back, filled with all the pain of the past."

Wiesel looked Jackson right in the eyes and smiled sadly and very wisely and, yes, proudly and said, "I belong to a people who will never forget."

Most gays I know (and most people in general) are more like Jackson and not enough like Wiesel. We forget so quickly how we've been written out of history, denied our rights on every front, and murdered. The best way to deny us rights, the best way to, eliminate us from history, certainly, is to murder us. It troubles me a lot that so many of us are forgetting so quickly the most recent murders in our history. I guess when awful things happen to us on such a regular basis, it's easier to pretend they don't.

We're very good at pretending. We pretend that people listen to us, that the genocide that is AIDS will go away, and that we have power.

As a kid, I danced around my bedroom, pretending I was... I'd rather, not tell you. (See how "history" can "forget" so conveniently?)

I don't pretend anymore. I want to wear my wounds with pride, like the finest jewelry from Cartier. Oops, there I go pretending again. See how easy it is to pretend? Dress up, put on your muscles and your makeup, and pretend.

Pretending is the same thing as forgetting.

Remembering's hard. Remembering's painful.

Well, nothing can be more important for our future than not forgetting our past. And all who lived it. And all who died so that we might still be here. Remembering the bad stuff is supposed to give us the energy to fight back and go on.

It does for me. Does it for you?

Our history must be taught in every school just like the history of everyone else is taught in every school. That way it's harder for everyone to pretend or to forget.

I want to belong to a people that never forgets.

Kramer is a playwright (The Normal Hearth), a screenwriter (Women in Love), and an author (Faggots Reports From the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist).