Author of The Normal Heart who fought tirelessly to bring Aids to attention of world
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MARK KENNEDY
ACT UP’S protests helped persuade the FDA to speed the approval of new drugs and Burroughs-wellcome to lower its price for AZT. He also battled –and later reconciled – with Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been leading the national response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“This is a very, very sad day. It’s the passing of a true icon,” Fauci said, adding that he was glad that he’d recently had a chance for a last phone call with Kramer. “I had a very long and complicated and ultimately wonderful relationship with him over more than three decades,” Fauci said. “We went from adversaries to acquaintances to friends to really, really dear friends.”
Kramer soon relinquished a leadership role in ACT UP, and as support for Aids research increased, he found common ground with health officials whom ACT UP had bitterly criticised. Kramer never softened the urgency of his demands. In 2011, he helped the American Foundation for Equal Rights mount their play 8 on Broadway about the legal battle over same-sex marriage in California. “The one nice thing that I seem to have acquired, accidentally, is this reputation of everyone afraid of my voice,” he said in 2015. “So I get heard, whether it changes anything or not.”
One of his last projects was the massive two-volume The American People, which chronicled the history of gay people in America and took decades to write. “I just think it’s so important that we know our history – the history of how badly we’re treated and how hard we have to fight to get what we deserve, which is equality,” he said.
At the time of his death, Kramer was working on a play called An Army of Lovers, which he was updating to include the pandemic.
At the 2013 Tonys, he was honoured with the Isabelle Stevenson Award, given to a member of the theatre community for philanthropic or civic efforts.
A few months later, Kramer married his longtime partner, architect David Webster, in the intensive care unit of NYU Langone Medical Centre, where Kramer was recovering from surgery for a bowel obstruction.