Larry Kramer, writer who sounded alarm on AIDS, dies at 84
LARRY Kramer, a writer and activist who used relentless, often antagonizing 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, died May 27 at his home in New York City. He was 84.
The cause was pneumonia, said an official of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which Kramer founded.
Kramer, an Oscar nominated screen writer, 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 organization to offer support and advocacy for AIDS patients. The goal of his New York-based group was to raise public awareness of a medical scourge that, at the time, seemed to attack gay men in disproportionate numbers.
From the beginning, Kramer’s brand of 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 Kramer’s calling as a playwright, his tactics were often theatrical.
ACT UP 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.
In 1991, protesters charged into the studio of the “CBS Evening News,” interrupting a broadcast by anchor Dan Rather; they also interrupted a “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour” program. That same year, demonstrators covered the Arlington, Virginia, house of ultra conservative Senator Jesse Helms, R-NC, in a giant yellow condom. During a 1990 speech, protesters threw condoms at Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan, and they once attempted to pour the ashes of an AIDS victim on the White House lawn.
“We’re not here to make friends, we’re here to raise the issues,” Kramer told Time magazine in 1990.
“We are an activist organization, and activism is fuelled by anger, so people should not be surprised when that anger erupts in ways that not everyone approves of.”
He held particular scorn for closeted gay men who worked against gay interests. At a Washington 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 actively opposed gay rights. Dolan, who was known to frequent gay bars, 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 people who had been his allies. His autobiographical 1978 novel, “Faggots,” cast an unsparing eye at contemporary gay life.
Using graphic descriptions of sexual acts, he depicted a superficial subculture in which gay men were wasting their talents on promiscuity and drugs. Several years before the AIDS crisis unfolded, Kramer suggested that the uninhibited pursuit of sex and hedonism could lead to widespread illness and a culture of self-indulgence.
In spite of harsh criticism author Barbara Grizzuti Harrison called the novel “revolting” in her review for The Washington Post the novel became a bestseller and is still in print.
But it was divisive in the gay community and led some to vilify Kramer for divulging unsavoury aspects of gay life and for criticizing a newfound sense of sexual liberation.
“The straight world thought I was repulsive, and the gay world treated me like a traitor,” Kramer told the New Yorker magazine in 2002. “People would literally turn their back when I walked by. You know what my real crime was? I put the truth in writing.”
Kramer’s 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, or AIDS.
With his accusatory 1983 essay, “1,112 and Counting,” Kramer railed against the apathy of gay men and society in general for not preventing the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS.
“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.”
“With that one piece, Larry changed my world,” Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of the AIDS drama “Angels in America,” later told the New Yorker. “He changed the world for all of us.”
In putting AIDS on the national agenda, Kramer seemed to be out in front of everyone. Artistry and activism were one and the same. Eight years before Kushner’s “Angels in America” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, Kramer’s autobiographical AIDS drama, “The Normal Heart,” had been staged off-Broadway.
Without using the term “AIDS” - Kramer called the disease at the centre of his play the “plague” “The Normal Heart” captured the human toll of the AIDS struggle. The central character, Ned Weeks, was modelled after Kramer, complete with his tenacity, arrogance and temper.
He “starts off angry, soon gets furious and then skyrockets into sheer rage,” theatre critic Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times, praising the play’s “unflagging, at times even hysterical, sense of urgency.”
“The Normal Heart” won many awards and has been presented in hundreds of productions throughout the world, with New York revivals in 2004 and 2011. It was made into an HBO film in 2014, starring Julia Roberts, Mark Ruffalo and Jim Parsons.