Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken AIDS Activist, Dies at 84 - The New York Times

28/05/2020 Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken AIDS Activist, Dies at 84 - The New York Times
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Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken

AIDS Activist, Dies at 84
He sought to shock the country into dealing with AIDS as a
public-health emergency and foresaw that it could kill millions
regardless of sexual orientation.
The author and activist Larry Kramer at an AIDS conference in New York in 1987. In the early 1980s, Mr.
Kramer was among the first people to foresee that what had at first caused alarm as a rare form of cancer
among gay men would spread worldwide and kill millions of people. Catherine McGann/Getty Images
By Daniel Lewis
https://archive.fo/vhogn 1/14
May 27, 2020 289
Larry Kramer, the noted writer whose raucous, antagonistic

campaign for an all-out response to the AIDS crisis helped shift
national health policy in the 1980s and ’90s, died on Wednesday
morning in Manhattan. He was 84.
His husband, David Webster, said the cause was pneumonia. Mr.
Kramer had weathered illness for much of his adult life. Among
other things he had been infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes
AIDS, contracted liver disease and underwent a successful liver
transplant.
An author, essayist and playwright — notably hailed for his

autobiographical 1985 play, “The Normal Heart” — Mr. Kramer had
feet in both the world of letters and the public sphere. In 1981 he
was a founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first service
organization for H.I.V.-positive people, though his fellow directors
effectively kicked him out a year later for his aggressive approach.
(He returned the compliment by calling them “a sad organization
of sissies.”)
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He was then a founder of a more militant group, Act Up (AIDS

Coalition to Unleash Power), whose street actions demanding a
speedup in AIDS drugs research and an end to discrimination
against gay men and lesbians severely disrupted the operations of
government offices, Wall Street and the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
Mr. Kramer at his apartment in Manhattan in 1987. Ángel Franco/The New York Times
“One of America’s most valuable troublemakers,” Susan Sontag

called him.
Even some of the officials Mr. Kramer accused of “murder” and

“genocide” recognized that his outbursts were part of a strategy to
shock the country into dealing with AIDS as a public-health
emergency.
Remembering Larry Kramer
Larry Kramer, Prophet and Pussycat May 27, 2020
Activists and Celebrities Honor Larry Kramerʼs Brash

Advocacy May 27, 2020
In the early 1980s, he was among the first activists to foresee that
what had at first caused alarm as a rare form of cancer among gay
men would spread worldwide, like any other sexually transmitted
disease, and kill millions of people without regard to sexual
orientation. Under the circumstances, he said, “If you write a calm
letter and fax it to nobody, it sinks like a brick in the Hudson.”
Demonstrators in front of the New York Stock Exchange in

1989 protesting the high cost of the AIDS drug AZT. The
protest was organized by the militant group Act Up, of
which Mr. Kramer was a founder. Tim Clary/Associated Press
ADVERTISEMENT
The infectious-disease expert Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, longtime

director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, was one who got the message — after Mr. Kramer wrote
an open letter published in The San Francisco Examiner in 1988
calling him a killer and “an incompetent idiot.”
“Once you got past the rhetoric,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview for
this obituary, “you found that Larry Kramer made a lot of sense,
and that he had a heart of gold.”
[Read about Dr. Fauci’s relationship with Larry Kramer.]
Mr. Kramer, he said, had helped him to see how the federal
bureaucracy was indeed slowing the search for effective
treatments. He credited Mr. Kramer with playing an “essential”
role in the development of elaborate drug regimens that could
prolong the lives of those infected with H.I.V., and in prompting the
Food and Drug Administration to streamline its assessment and
approval of certain new drugs.
In recent years Mr. Kramer developed a grudging friendship with

Dr. Fauci, particularly after Mr. Kramer developed liver disease
and underwent the transplant in 2001; Dr. Fauci helped get him
into a lifesaving experimental drug trial afterward.
Their bond grew stronger this year, when Dr. Fauci became the
public face of the White House task force on the coronavirus
epidemic, opening him to criticism in some quarters.
“We are friends again,” Mr. Kramer said in an email to the reporter
John Leland of The New York Times for an article published at the
end of March. “I’m feeling sorry for how he’s being treated. I
emailed him this, but his one line answer was, ʻHunker down.’”
At his death Mr. Kramer was at work on a play centered on the

epidemic. “It’s about gay people having to live through three
plagues,” he told Mr. Leland — H.I.V./AIDS, Covid-19 and the
decline of the human body, an inevitability brought home to him
last year when he fell and broke a leg in his apartment, then lay on
the floor for hours waiting for a home attendant to arrive.
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Master of Provocation
Mr. Kramer enjoyed provocation for its own sake — he once
introduced Mayor Edward I. Koch of New York to his pet wheaten
terrier as the man who was “killing Daddy’s friends” — and this
could sometimes overshadow his achievements as an author and
social activist.
His breakthrough as a writer came with a screen adaptation of

D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” for which he had obtained the
film rights with $4,200 of his own money. He also produced the film,
which was a box-office hit when it was released in 1969 and a high
point of more than one career. The screenplay was nominated for
an Academy Award; Glenda Jackson won an Oscar as best actress
for her performance; and the director, Ken Russell, established
himself as an important filmmaker.
Four years later, Mr. Kramer wrote the screenplay for the ill-fated
musical remake of the classic 1937 film “Lost Horizon.”
Mr. Kramer’s breakthrough as a writer came with his screen adaptation of D.H.
Lawrence’s “Women in Love” (1969), directed by Ken Russell. The movie’s cast
included, from left, Eleanor Bron, Jennie Linden, Alan Bates, Oliver Reed and Glenda
Jackson. MGM
Mr. Kramer eventually turned to gay themes, and in his first novel,
“Faggots,” he did so with a vengeance. A scathing look at
promiscuous sex, drug use, predation and sadomasochism among
gay men, it was a lightning rod from the day of its publication in
1978.
Some reviewers simply found it beyond belief. (On the contrary,

Mr. Kramer responded, it was more a documentary than a work of
fiction.) Others complained that it libeled gay people generally, that
it lacked literary merit, and that the narrator’s epiphany — one
“must have the strength and courage to say no” — was not exactly
a stroke of genius.
“Faggots” drew a line between Mr. Kramer and a significant

number of gay men, who saw him as an old-fashioned moralist or
even a hysteric. In various forums well into the 1990s, he found
himself called on to defend his point of view, which was essentially
that gay men and lesbians had a diminished chance of living
fulfilling lives or producing great art so long as they defined
themselves primarily in terms of their sexual orientation.
ADVERTISEMENT
He preached not only protected sex but also the virtues of

affection, commitment and stability — arguments that anticipated
the values of the movement for same-sex marriage.
An Uneasy Childhood
Laurence David Kramer was born on June 25, 1935, in Bridgeport,
Conn., the second son of George and Rea (Wishengrad) Kramer.
George Kramer had earned undergraduate and law degrees from
Yale University but was unable to make a decent living during the
Depression. Rea Kramer supported the family by working in a shoe
store and teaching English to immigrants. In 1941, George got a
government job in Washington, and the family moved.
By his own account, Larry had a miserable childhood and hated his
father. His protective older brother, Arthur, was the scholar-athlete
of the family, on his way to becoming a prominent lawyer. Larry
read the Hollywood gossip columns.
“From the day Larry was born until the day my father died, they
were antagonists,” Arthur Kramer told Vanity Fair in 1992.
Nor were the two brothers always on the easiest terms. In “The
Normal Heart,” Arthur Kramer is represented by the character
Ben Weeks, a man with ambivalent feelings about his brother’s
homosexuality. But they shared an abiding affection until Arthur’s
death in 2008. Arthur gave $1 million to Yale in 2001 to establish the
Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and his law
firm became active in pro bono work for causes like same-sex
marriage.
Larry Kramer himself married his partner, Mr. Webster, in 2013, in

a ceremony in the intensive care unit of NYU Langone Medical
Center, where Mr. Kramer was recovering from surgery for a bowel
obstruction.
Mr. Kramer at home in 1989, a year after he learned he was

H.I.V. positive. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
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In 1953, Mr. Kramer, like his father and brother before him, enrolled
at Yale. He studied English literature, tried to kill himself once and
had a liberating affair with a male professor.
After graduating in 1957 and serving a tour in the Army, he worked

in New York, first for the William Morris Agency and then for
Columbia Pictures. In 1961, Columbia sent him to London, where he
worked as production executive on “Dr. Strangelove” and
“Lawrence of Arabia.” He returned to the United States in 1972.
He got into AIDS work in the summer of 1981 after reading an

article about deadly cases of a rare cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma,
among young gay men. It had previously been associated mostly
with older men. A meeting of about 80 people in his New York
apartment the next week led to the formation of the Gay Men’s
Health Crisis.
For the next several years, Mr. Kramer threw himself into fund-
raising, lobbying and confrontation, and also into his writing. His
landmark essay “1,112 and Counting,” which appeared in the March
14, 1983, issue of The New York Native, was one of many articles
taking gay men to task for apathy.
ʻThe Normal Heartʼ

The urgency of his life found its way into his plays. “The Normal
Heart,” which opened at the Public Theater in April 1985 and ran
for nine months, was a passionate account of the early years of
AIDS and his campaign to get somebody to do something about it.
“The Normal Heart” returned to the stage in 2011, to powerful

effect. “By the play’s end,” Ben Brantley of The New York Times
wrote in his review, “even people who think they have no patience
for polemical theater may find their resistance has melted into
tears. No, make that sobs.”
That production won the Tony Award for best revival of a play. An
HBO adaptation, written by Mr. Kramer, won the 2014 Emmy for
outstanding television movie.
ADVERTISEMENT
Less successful was Mr. Kramer’s “Just Say No,” a sendup of

official morality aimed at familiar targets, including Ronald and
Nancy Reagan. Widely criticized as crude and nasty, it opened Off
Broadway in October 1988 and closed a month later.
That same year, tests confirmed what Mr. Kramer had long
suspected: He was carrying the virus that causes AIDS.
“A new fear has now joined my daily repertoire of emotions, and

my nighttime ones, too,” he wrote in the afterword to a later edition
of his 1989 book, “Reports From the Holocaust: The Making of an
AIDS Activist.” “But life has also become exceptionally more
precious and, ironically, I am happier.”
Mr. Kramer in 2011 in front of the John Golden Theater in New York, where his 1985
play, “The Normal Heart,” returned to the stage to powerful effect. Hiroko Masuike/The
New York Times
He turned his attention to another autobiographical play,

ultimately titled “The Destiny of Me,” which opened in 1992.
Recalling the development of that work in an essay for The Times,
he called it “one of those ʻfamily’-slash-ʻmemory’ plays I suspect
most playwrights feel compelled to try their hand at in a feeble
attempt, before it’s too late, to find out what their lives have been
all about.”
As the play came to life during rehearsals at the Circle Repertory

Company, Mr. Kramer wrote, it was a revelation even to him: “The
father I’d hated became someone sad to me; and the mother I’d
adored became a little less adorable, and no less sad.”
He and Mr. Webster, an architect, began living together in 1994, and

Mr. Kramer was able to devote much of his time to writing, in spite
of being ill for many more years. Believing that he would die soon,
he began putting his literary affairs in order. In fact, The
Associated Press reported in 2001 that he had died.
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The real plot twist, though, was that the H.I.V. infection had not
progressed; he instead had terminal liver disease, traceable to a
hepatitis B infection decades earlier. He underwent the liver

transplant in Pittsburgh a few days before Christmas 2001.
At the same time, he had been working on a mammoth project, a

historical novel called “The American People,” by which he meant
the gay American people — a central tenet of which was that many
of the country’s historically important figures, including George
Washington and Abraham Lincoln, had had homosexual
relationships.
A first volume, almost 800 pages long, was published in 2015.

Volume 2, more than 80 pages longer, was published in 2020.
The reviews for “The American People, Volume 1: Search for My

Heart” were not kind. Dwight Garner of The Times, for example,
called it “a frantic novel that builds up little to no narrative
momentum.”
Mr. Kramer in 2017. “Once you got past the rhetoric,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, an
adversary who became a friend, “you found that Larry Kramer made a lot of sense,
and that he had a heart of gold.” Joshua Bright for The New York Times
“It wasn’t given much serious attention,” Mr. Kramer told The
Times in 2017. “Most people seemed to review me, not the book:
Loudmouth activist Larry Kramer has written a loudmouth book.”
“The American People, Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact,” whose

protagonist was based on Mr. Kramer, took its story almost to the
present and took scabrous aim at characters clearly based on
Ronald Reagan, Hugh Hefner and others. The reviews were not
much better.
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But while Mr. Garner for one found much to dislike, his Times
review was not unsympathetic.
“It’s a mess, a folly covered in mirrored tiles, but somehow it’s a

beautiful and humane one,” he wrote. “I can’t say I liked it. Yet, on a
certain level, I loved it.”
Looking back in 2017 on his early days as an activist, Mr. Kramer,

frail but still impassioned, explained the thinking behind his
approach:
“I was trying to make people united and angry. I was known as the
angriest man in the world, mainly because I discovered that anger
got you further than being nice. And when we started to break
through in the media, I was better TV than someone who was nice.”
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
The Provocateur
More on Larry Kramer, the activist, writer and critic.
When Larry Kramer, AIDS Warrior, Took on Another

Plague March 28, 2020
Larry Kramer Leaves No Score Unsettled in an Epicʼs

Finale Jan. 6, 2020
Twilight of a Difficult Man: Larry Kramer and the

Birth of AIDS Activism May 19, 2017
How ACT UP Remade Political Organizing in

America April 13, 2020
12 People on Joining ACT UP: ʻI Went to That First

Meeting and Never Leftʼ April 13, 2020
My 10 Favorite Books: Larry Kramer March 4, 2016
Opinion | Frank Bruni

The Angel in Larry Kramer April 26, 2014
Correction: May 27, 2020

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the year Mr. Kramer
learned he was H.I.V. positive. It was 1988, not 1989. The error was
repeated in a picture caption.
A version of this article appears in print on May 28, 2020, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Larry Kramer, Who Gave People With AIDS a Loud Voice, Dies at 84. Order Reprints | Todayʼs Paper | Subscribe
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28/05/2020 Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken AIDS Activist, Dies at 84 - The New York Times

archive.today Salvo de https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/us/larry-kramer-dead.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn busca 28 May 2020 11:55:04 UTC

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Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken

May 27, 2020 289

Larry Kramer, the noted writer whose raucous, antagonistic

An author, essayist and playwright — notably hailed for his

He was then a founder of a more militant group, Act Up (AIDS

“One of America’s most valuable troublemakers,” Susan Sontag

Even some of the ofﬁcials Mr. Kramer accused of “murder” and

Remembering Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer, Prophet and Pussycat May 27, 2020

Activists and Celebrities Honor Larry Kramerʼs Brash

Demonstrators in front of the New York Stock Exchange in

The infectious-disease expert Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, longtime

[Read about Dr. Fauci’s relationship with Larry Kramer.]

In recent years Mr. Kramer developed a grudging friendship with

At his death Mr. Kramer was at work on a play centered on the

His breakthrough as a writer came with a screen adaptation of

Some reviewers simply found it beyond belief. (On the contrary,

“Faggots” drew a line between Mr. Kramer and a signiﬁcant

He preached not only protected sex but also the virtues of

Larry Kramer himself married his partner, Mr. Webster, in 2013, in

Mr. Kramer at home in 1989, a year after he learned he was

After graduating in 1957 and serving a tour in the Army, he worked

He got into AIDS work in the summer of 1981 after reading an

ʻThe Normal Heartʼ

“The Normal Heart” returned to the stage in 2011, to powerful

Less successful was Mr. Kramer’s “Just Say No,” a sendup of

“A new fear has now joined my daily repertoire of emotions, and

He turned his attention to another autobiographical play,

As the play came to life during rehearsals at the Circle Repertory

He and Mr. Webster, an architect, began living together in 1994, and

hepatitis B infection decades earlier. He underwent the liver

At the same time, he had been working on a mammoth project, a

A ﬁrst volume, almost 800 pages long, was published in 2015.

The reviews for “The American People, Volume 1: Search for My

“The American People, Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact,” whose

“It’s a mess, a folly covered in mirrored tiles, but somehow it’s a

Looking back in 2017 on his early days as an activist, Mr. Kramer,

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

When Larry Kramer, AIDS Warrior, Took on Another

Larry Kramer Leaves No Score Unsettled in an Epicʼs

Twilight of a Difﬁcult Man: Larry Kramer and the

How ACT UP Remade Political Organizing in

12 People on Joining ACT UP: ʻI Went to That First

My 10 Favorite Books: Larry Kramer March 4, 2016

Opinion | Frank Bruni

Correction: May 27, 2020

READ 289 COMMENTS

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UConn Student Wanted in 2

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