Larry Kramer
Playwright
LARRY KRAMER, who has died at 84, was a playwright whose angry voice raised the consciousness of theatregoers to the Aids epidemic in the early 1980s and spurred thousands to militant protests.
He founded the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, lost his lover to acquired immune deficiency syndrome in 1984 and was himself infected with the virus. He also suffered from hepatitis B and underwent a liver transplant in 2001 because the virus had caused liver failure.
ACT UP became famous for staging civil disobedience rallies at the Food and Drug Administration, the New York Stock Exchange and the Burroughs-Wellcome corporation, maker of the antiAids drug, AZT. The protests helped persuade them to lower the price.
Kramer also battled, and later reconciled with, Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been leading the US response to the current Covid pandemic.
Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to a government lawyer and educated at Yale, Larry Kramer had long been a big noise in the theatre.
His screenplay for Women in Love, the 1969 adaptation of DH Lawrence’s novel, starring Glenda Jackson, won him an Academy Award nomination and Ms Jackson her first Oscar.
He also wrote the 1972 screenplay Lost Horizon and several plays, among them The Destiny of Me, which was Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1993.
But for many years he was best known for his public fight to secure medical treatment, acceptance and civil rights for people with Aids. He loudly told everyone that the gay community was grappling with a plague.
In 1981, when the virus had not yet acquired its name and only a few dozen people had been diagnosed with it, he and a group of his friends in New York founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis, one of the first groups to address the epidemic. It remains one of the largest Aids service groups in the US.
After parting ways with the organisation, he wrote The Normal Heart, in which a furious young writer not unlike himself battles politicians, society, the media and other gay leaders to bring attention to the crisis.
It premiered in April 1985 and a revival in 2011 was almost universally praised. It was then turned into a TV film for HBO starring Mark Ruffalo, Alfred Molina and Julia Roberts, and won an Emmy for best movie.
Kramer lived to see gay marriage become a reality, and married himself in 2013, but it was not enough, he said. “I’m married, but that’s only part of where we are,” was how he put it.
One of his last projects was the vast, two-volume The American People, which chronicled the history of homosexuality in the US and took him decades to write.
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.