Playwright became a leading but divisive figure in campaigns to tackle Aids crisis
Larry Kramer playwright b June 25, 1935 d May 27, 2020
Larry Kramer, who has died aged 84, was a writer and activist who used relentless, often antagonising tactics to goad public officials, scientists and fellow gay rights proponents to stanch the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, in the process becoming one of the most significant and divisive figures in the gay rights movement.
Kramer, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, was a firebrand and a versatile writer whose autobiographical plays The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me were among the first artistic productions to focus directly on the Aids crisis and put it in the public eye.
In 1982, when Aids was beginning to devastate gay communities from New York to San Francisco, Kramer founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first organisation to offer support and advocacy for Aids patients. From the beginning, his advocacy was neither muted nor polite. He was full of rage and wanted people to know it. ‘‘Sure, I have a temper, who doesn’t?’’ he told Newsday in 1992. ‘‘It happens when you’ve seen so many friends die.’’
In 1987, he helped launch ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power), which performed guerrilla acts of disruption against public officials, scientists and religious leaders. True to his calling as a playwright, his tactics were often theatrical. Demonstrators shut down the New York Stock Exchange, picketed the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration, surrounded St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and shouted down speakers at Aids conferences.
Kramer held particular scorn for closeted gay men who worked against gay interests. At a fundraiser in 1985, he reportedly tossed a glass of water in the face of Terry Dolan, a founder of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which opposed gay rights. Dolan died of Aids in 1986.
Kramer never lasted long in leadership roles with any of the groups he founded and, at one time or another, managed to alienate just about everyone, including many who had been his allies.
His autobiographical 1978 novel, Faggots,
cast an unsparing eye at contemporary gay life, and attracted harsh criticism. It became a bestseller, but led some to vilify Kramer for divulging unsavoury aspects of gay life and for criticising a newfound sense of sexual liberation.
His barbed language and prickly personality helped draw attention to what was called the ‘‘gay plague’’ before it became officially known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. With his accusatory 1983 essay, 1112 and Counting, Kramer railed against the apathy of gay men and society in general for not preventing the spread of HIV. ‘‘If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay men have no future on this earth,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Unless we fight for our lives we shall die.’’
In putting Aids on the national agenda, Kramer seemed to be out in front of everyone. His autobiographical drama The Normal Heart captured the human toll of the Aids struggle as early as 1985. The play won many awards and has been presented in hundreds of productions throughout the world. It was made into an HBO film in 2014, starring Julia Roberts, Mark Ruffalo and Jim Parsons.
In 1988, Kramer learned that he was HIV-positive, which added a personal urgency to his activism. On ABC’s Nightline in 1991, host Ted Koppel turned off Kramer’s microphone when he wouldn’t stop ranting against the Centers for Disease Control.
He was especially antagonistic towards Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Fauci coordinated research on HIV/Aids, but in Kramer’s view he wasn’t moving fast enough.
He taunted Fauci at every turn, calling him incompetent, a murderer and the public face of a callous federal government. Yet the two became friends and forged an unlikely social and medical alliance.
‘‘In American medicine, there are two eras. Before Larry and after Larry,’’ Fauci told the New Yorker in 2002. ‘‘There is no question in my mind that Larry helped change medicine in this country. And he helped change it for the better. When all the screaming and the histrionics are forgotten, that will remain.’’
Laurence David Kramer was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In later years, he said he knew he was gay by the time he was in junior high school. He was a good student and enjoyed the theatre, but he said his parents offered little emotional support. When he showed no interest in sports, he said his father called him a ‘‘sissy’’.
He worked for the William Morris talent agency in New York after graduating from Yale, then took a low-level job at Columbia Pictures and studied acting. In the early 1960s, he moved to London to do production work on such films as Dr Strangelove, Lawrence of Arabia and Georgy Girl.
He later bought the rights to D H Lawrence’s Women in Love with the idea of producing it as a film. When he didn’t like another writer’s screenplay, he wrote it himself, and hired Ken Russell as director.
The film, which featured a homoerotic nude wrestling scene between actors Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, was considered an artistic success when released in 1969.
Besides The Normal Heart, his other plays included Just Say No (1988), and The Destiny of Me (1992), a sequel to The Normal Heart.
In 2001, Kramer was near death from hepatitis B. Some news outlets erroneously reported that he had died before he received a lifesaving liver transplant. By the time he married his longtime partner, designer David Webster, in 2013, he had largely retreated from the world of activism.
Kramer published the first of two volumes of a novel called The American People.
Totalling 1600 pages, the books gave Kramer a chance to settle scores and to portray American history from a gay perspective. ‘‘This novel, like its predecessor, is overstuffed, packed with incident and narrators and digressions within digressions,’’ the New York Times wrote of the second volume. ‘‘It’s a mess, a folly covered in mirrored tiles, but somehow it’s a beautiful and humane one.’’
The longer Kramer lived, the more he was half-lionised and half-forgotten as the grand old man of gay rights and Aids awareness, a title he wasn’t sure he wanted. ‘‘I’ve gone from pariah to acceptance in the course of a decade,’’ he once said. ‘‘I don’t know which I like better.’’ – Washington Post
‘‘Sure, I have a temper, who doesn’t?’ It happens when you’ve seen so many friends die.’’
Larry Kramer in 1992