AIDS activist, state native Larry Kramer dies

BRIDGEPORT — When Jim Gricar moved to New York in 1989 “as a young activist in training,” he met a Bridgeport native named Larry Kramer at a meeting of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.

“Larry was irascible,” Gricar, now a Weston resident, said Wednesday, “but also irresistible.”

Kramer, an author, playwright and prominent activist in the fight against AIDS, died Wednesday at 84. Kramer’s husband, David Webster, told The New York Times that Kramer died of pneumonia.

“We have lost a giant of a man who stood up for gay rights like a warrior,” Elton John said on Instagram. “His anger was needed at a time when gay men’s deaths to AIDS were being ignored by the American government; a tragedy that made the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP movements so vital.”

Kramer was born in Bridgeport Hospital on June 25, 1935.

In a 1997 profile that appear in the Connecticut Post, Kramer recalled his childhood growing up in Bridgeport, talking about the “magical atmosphere” of Pleasure Beach; remembering his grandparents, Harry and Lena Wishengrad, who ran a grocery store on North Main Street.

He graduated in 1957 from Yale University in New Haven with an English degree before moving to New York City, although he would eventually resettle in his home state, buying a 10-room mansion on a hillside overlooking lush woodland in northwestern Connecticut

Kramer was already a wellknown writer by the early 1980s, when AIDS began decimating New York’s gay community.

Kramer and others began Gay Men’s Health Crisis to raise money and awareness. He soon left the organization, in conflict with other board members, and later helped found ACT UP, which used civil disobedience to try to persuade officials into action.

“That’s not fun. Screaming is not fun. Effigies are not fun,” Kramer told the Connecticut Post in 1997. “But we tried all the nice ways.”

ACT UP’s protests sped Food and Drug Administration approval of drugs to fight HIV/AIDS and led Burroughs-Wellcome to lower its price for AZT, one of those drugs.

One of his battles and later reconciliations was with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 and one of the public faces of the government’s fight against COVID-19.

It’s striking, Gricar said, that Kramer should die with another viral pandemic raging.

“It’s not like he had his flash in the pan with Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP,” Gricar said. “He stayed involved in health care as an advocate.”

Kramer