Larry Kramer

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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.

ImageMr. Kramer at his apartment in Manhattan in 1987.Credit...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.

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.”

ImageDemonstrators 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.Credit...Tim Clary/Associated PressAdvertisement

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,” 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.”

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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 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, ‘Hunker 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, , 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.”

ImageMr. 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. Credit...MGMMr. 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.

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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.

ImageMr. Kramer at home in 1989, a year after he learned he was H.I.V. positive.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Advertisement

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.

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YesAfter 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 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.

‘The Normal Heart’ 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,” , “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.

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Less successful was Mr. Kramer’s “Just Say No,” a sendup of official morality aimed at familiar targets, including Ronald and Nancy Reagan. 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.”

ImageMr. 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.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesHe 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 ‘family’-slash-‘memory’ 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. , for example, called it “a frantic novel that builds up little to no narrative momentum.”

ImageMr. 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.”Credit...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, 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.

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Site Index Larry Kramer Dead: Playwright and AIDS Activist Dies at 84 – Variety

Larry Kramer Dead: Playwright and AIDS Activist Dies at 84 – Variety

ShowMoreShow MoreMoreAmerican playwright, author and Aids activist best known for The Normal Heart

In a 2009 interview Larry Kramer professed not to understand why ‘every gay person doesn’t agree with everything I say’. Photograph: Times Newspapers/Rex/ShutterstockIn a 2009 interview Larry Kramer professed not to understand why ‘every gay person doesn’t agree with everything I say’. Photograph: Times Newspapers/Rex/ShutterstockPublished on Thu 28 May 2020 14.54 BST4444Larry Kramer, who has died aged 84 of pneumonia, enraged many gay readers with his lurid 1978 novel Faggots, a cautionary bestseller warning against the perils of promiscuity, before addressing the Aids crisis in his 1985 play The Normal Heart, in which an activist-writer warns against the perils of promiscuity. Publishers Weekly said he “made red-faced fist-pumping into his art”.

He also put his mouth where his money was. As co-founder of two Aids advocacy groups, Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power), he improved the lives of people suffering from HIV and Aids, and pilloried mercilessly and tirelessly those politicians and medical professionals who refused to take the epidemic seriously. Each of these figures he excoriated in lengthy screeds, or on the streets in a voice described by the LA Times as a “nasal bullhorn”.

His attacks could be parochial (he threw a drink over the closeted Republican politician at a Washington fundraiser) or expansive: he was one of those credited with the idea of encasing the home of the Republican senator in an enormous yellow condom. He led protests that succeeded in disrupting, among other things, the New York Stock Exchange and St Patrick’s Cathedral during Mass; many of these resulted in his arrest.

Also in his crosshairs was Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, who was leading the US government’s ineffectual response to Aids. In 1988, the San Francisco Examiner published an open letter by Kramer in which he wrote: “Anthony Fauci, you are a murderer. Your refusal to hear the screams of Aids activists early in the crisis resulted in the deaths of thousands of Queers.” Fauci acknowledged that Kramer forced him to reassess his entire approach to the disease.

The Normal Heart, with Martin Sheen and Paul Jesson, at the Royal Court theatre, London, in 1986. Photograph: Alastair Muir/RexThe pair grew to be friends, with Fauci inspiring a character in Kramer’s 1992 play The Destiny of Me and even becoming his doctor when the writer’s health – he had been diagnosed with HIV once tests became available in 1985 – was at a particularly perilous stage. “There is no question in my mind that Larry helped change medicine in this country,” Fauci told the New Yorker in 2002.

Larry was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to George Kramer, whose job as a government attorney necessitated the family’s move to the Washington area when Larry was six, and Rea (nee Wishengrad), a social worker for the Red Cross. He was educated at Woodrow Wilson high school in Washington and studied English at Yale University. He tried to take his own life during his first year there. Following his recovery, he came out as gay to his brother, who sent him to a psychiatrist.

After graduation and military service, Kramer worked for the William Morris agency and then at Columbia Pictures, where he began as a production assistant before working his way up to be an executive on films including Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dr Strangelove (1964). He also persuaded the studio to acquire and release Darling (1965), starring Julie Christie; its director, , was briefly a partner of his.

Kramer produced ’s (1969), having rewritten the adaptation of DH Lawrence’s novel when the one he had commissioned from the playwright David Mercer proved unusable. He was Oscar-nominated for that but savaged for his next film, the maligned musical Lost Horizon (1973), which he called “the one thing I have done in my life that I truly regret”.

He first sounded the alarm about Aids in the pages of a gay periodical, the New York Native, in 1981, though it was a piece two years later in the same newspaper that provided the angriest clarion call. The 5,000-word feature, , began: “If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble.” It catalogued methodically the failings of institutions including the and the , while upbraiding the “useless” gay press and complacency in the community at large. “Unless we fight for our lives, we shall die,” he wrote.

If Faggots had made him a pariah in some eyes – in the wake of the book’s publication, Kramer was banned from at least one store on Fire Island, New York, the popular gay haunt where he kept a holiday home – then The Normal Heart was received as an urgent response to a steeply escalating emergency.

The play took aim at an assortment of Kramer’s enemies including New York’s mayor Ed Koch, the New York Times (which he accused of suppressing early reports about Aids – a charge the paper rejected in print) and his former colleagues at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which he had left a year after its inception in a disagreement over confrontational tactics.

The New York Times critic Frank Rich complained of the play’s “pamphleteering” tone, but no one could say that Kramer didn’t take that to its logical conclusion: he could sometimes be found outside the theatre distributing literature to audience members, keen that their emotional responses to his work should be put to practical and political use rather than evaporating as soon as the tears on their cheeks had dried. In 2014, the play was adapted as a starring Mark Ruffalo and Julia Roberts.

As a writer, Kramer was vulnerable to hectoring and grandiosity, nowhere more so than in his mammoth 2015 novel , which filtered history through a radical queer perspective that reimagined Franklin, Lincoln and Reagan as gay. For all the advances Kramer made in public health and civil rights, it bothered him to see his artistic reputation eclipsed by his activism. “I like to think I work very hard on my writing,” he in 2015. “And unfortunately in this country you can’t be taken seriously as an artist if you’re also an activist.”

He lamented his “loudmouth” persona, though he had only himself to blame: in a he professed not to understand why “every gay person doesn’t agree with everything I say”. In 2002, he said: “I put the truth in writing. That’s what I do: I have told the fucking truth to everyone I have ever met.’’

He is survived by his husband, David Webster, whom he married in 2013.

• Laurence David Kramer, writer and activist, born 25 June 1935; died 27 May 2020

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Show Information that may be usedShow PurposesI'm OK with thatOptions Larry Kramer: Playwright and Aids activist dies at 84 - BBC News

Larry Kramer: Playwright and Aids activist dies at 84 - BBC News

For other people named Larry Kramer, see .

Larry KramerKramer in April 2010BornLaurence David Kramer June 25, 1935 , U.S.DiedMay 27, 2020 (aged 84) , U.S.OccupationNationalityAmericanPeriod1960s–2020SubjectSpouseDavid Webster (m.2013)Relatives (brother)Laurence David Kramer (June 25, 1935 – May 27, 2020) was an American playwright, author, , public health advocate, and activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for , which led him to London where he worked with . There he wrote the screenplay for the film (1969) and received an nomination for his work. Kramer introduced a controversial and confrontational style in his novel (1978), which earned mixed reviews and emphatic denunciations from elements within the gay community for Kramer's portrayal of what he characterized as shallow, promiscuous gay relationships in the 1970s.

Kramer witnessed the spread of the disease later known as (AIDS) among his friends in 1980. He co-founded the (GMHC), which has become the world's largest private organization assisting people living with AIDS. Kramer grew frustrated with bureaucratic paralysis and the apathy of gay men to the , and wished to engage in further action than the social services GMHC provided. He expressed his frustration by writing a play titled , produced at in New York City in 1985. His political activism continued with the founding of the (ACT UP) in 1987, an influential protest organization with the aim of gaining more public action to fight the AIDS crisis. ACT UP has been widely credited with changing public health policy and the perception of , and with raising awareness of HIV and AIDS-related diseases. Kramer was a finalist for the for his play (1992), and he was a two-time recipient of the .

Contents Early life[] Laurence David Kramer was born in , the younger of two children of Rea (Wishengrad), who worked at a shoe store and taught, and George Kramer, who had earned law degrees. His family was . He was considered an "unwanted child" by his parents, who struggled to find work during the American . When the family moved to they found themselves in a much lower socioeconomic bracket than that of Kramer's high school peers. Kramer had become sexually involved with a male friend in junior high school, but he dated girls in high school. His father wanted him to marry a woman with money and thus pressed him to become a member of , a Jewish fraternity.

Kramer enrolled at in 1953, where he had difficulty adjusting. He felt lonely, and earned lower grades than those to which he was accustomed. He attempted suicide by an of because he felt like he was the "only gay student on campus". The experience left him determined to explore his sexuality and set him on the path to fight "for gay people's worth". The next semester, he had an affair with his German professor – his first requited romantic relationship with a man. When the professor was scheduled to study in Europe, he invited Kramer to accompany him, but Kramer opted not to go.

Yale had been a family tradition: Kramer's father, older brother Arthur, and two uncles were alumni. Kramer enjoyed the during his remaining time at Yale, and he graduated in 1957 with a degree in English.

Career[] Kramer at home in 2007, reviewing the new editions of his work. His Wikipedia article is shown on the computer.Early writings[] According to Kramer, every drama he has written derives from a desire to understand love's nature and its obstacles. Kramer became involved with movie production at age 23 by taking a job as a operator at Columbia Pictures, agreeing to the position only because the machine was across the hall from the president's office. Eventually, he won a position in the story department reworking scripts. His first writing credit was as a dialogue writer for , a teen sex comedy. He followed that with the 1969 -nominated screenplay , an adaptation of 's novel. He next penned what Kramer called "only thing I'm truly ashamed of", the 1973 musical remake of 's , a notorious critical and commercial failure with a screenplay based very closely on . Kramer later said that his well-negotiated fee for this work, skillfully invested by his brother, made him financially self-sufficient during the 1980s and 1990s.

Kramer then began to integrate homosexual themes into his work, and tried writing for the stage. He wrote Sissies' Scrapbook in 1973 (later rewritten and retitled as Four Friends), a dramatic play about four friends, one of whom is gay, and their dysfunctional relationships. Kramer called it a play about "cowardice and the inability of some men to grow up, leave the emotional bondage of male collegiate camaraderie, and assume adult responsibilities". The play was first produced in a theater set up in an old gymnasium on 53rd Street and called the . Live theater moved him to believing that writing for the stage was what he wanted to do. Although the play was given a somewhat favorable review by The New York Times, it was closed by the producer and Kramer was so distraught that he decided never to write for the stage again, later stating, "You must be a to work in the theater and a to succeed on its stages."

Kramer then wrote A Minor Dark Age, which was never produced. , in the foreword to a Grove Press collection of Kramer's less-known works, wrote that the "dreamlike quality of the writing is haunting" in Dark Age, and that its themes, such as the exploration of the difference between sex and passion, "are staples of his entire output" that would portend his future work, including the 1978 novel Faggots.

Faggots[] Main article: In 1978, Kramer delivered the final of four drafts of a novel that he wrote about the fast lifestyle of gay men of and Manhattan. In , the primary character was modeled on himself, a man who is unable to find love while encountering the drugs and emotionless sex in the trendy bars and discos. He stated his inspiration for the novel: "I wanted to be in love. Almost everybody I knew felt the same way. I think most people, at some level, wanted what I was looking for, whether they pooh-poohed it or said that we can't live like the straight people or whatever excuses they gave." Kramer researched the book, talking to many men, and visiting various establishments. As he interviewed people, he heard a common question: "Are you writing a negative book? Are you going to make it positive? ... I began to think, 'My God, people must really be conflicted about the lives they're leading.' And that was true. I think people were guilty about all the promiscuity and all the partying."

The novel caused an uproar in the community it portrayed; it was taken off the shelves of the — New York's only gay bookstore — and Kramer was banned from the grocery store near his home on Fire Island. Reviewers found it difficult to believe that Kramer's accounts of gay relationships were accurate; both the gay and mainstream press panned the book. On the reception of the novel Kramer says, "The straight world thought I was repulsive, and the gay world treated me like a traitor. People would literally turn their back when I walked by. You know what my real crime was? I put the truth in writing. That's what I do: I have told the fucking truth to everyone I have ever met." Faggots, however, became one of the best-selling gay novels of all time.

In 2000, wrote that the novel's lasting relevance is that "anyone who searches out present-day responses on the Internet will quickly find that the wounds inflicted by Faggots are burning still". Although Kramer was rejected by the people he thought would be laudatory, the book has never been out of publication and is often taught in classes. "Faggots struck a chord," wrote , "It exuded a sense that gay men could do better if they understood themselves as fully human, if they could shed their self-loathing and self-deception...."

Gay Men's Health Crisis[] Main article: Initially, while living on Fire Island in the 1970s, Kramer had no intention of getting involved in political activism. There were politically active groups in New York City, but Kramer notes the culture on Fire Island was so different that they would often make fun of political activists: "It was not chic. It was not something you could brag about with your friends ... Guys marching down Fifth Avenue was a whole other world. The whole gestalt of Fire Island was about beauty and looks and golden men."

However, when friends he knew from Fire Island began getting sick in 1980, Kramer became involved in gay activism. In 1981, although he had not been involved previously with gay activism, Kramer invited the "A-list" (his own term) group of gay men from the New York City area to his apartment to listen to a doctor say their friends' illnesses were related, and research needed to be done. The next year, they named themselves the (GMHC) and became the primary organization to raise funds for and provide services to people stricken with (AIDS) in the New York area. Although Kramer served on its first board of directors, his view of how it should be run sharply conflicted with that of the rest of its members. While GMHC began to concentrate on social services for men who were dying, Kramer loudly insisted they fight for funding from New York City. Mayor became a particular target for Kramer, as did the behavior of gay men, before the nature of how the (HIV) was transmitted was understood.

When doctors suggested men stop having sex, Kramer strongly encouraged GMHC to deliver the message to as many gay men as possible. When they refused, Kramer wrote an essay entitled "1,112 and Counting", printed in 1983 in the , a gay newspaper. The essay discussed the spread of the disease, the lack of government response, and apathy of the gay community. The essay was intended to frighten gay men and anger them to the point where they would respond to government indifference. writes in The New Yorker, "it was a five-thousand-word screed that accused nearly everyone connected with health care in America – officials at the , in Atlanta, researchers at the , in Washington, doctors at , in Manhattan, and local politicians (particularly Mayor ) – of refusing to acknowledge the implications of the nascent . The article's harshest condemnation was directed at those gay men who seemed to think that if they ignored the new disease, it would simply go away. , who won the 1993 for his play about the impact of AIDS in the United States, described the essay as "With that one piece, Larry changed my world. He changed the world for all of us."

Kramer's confrontational style proved to be an advantage, as it earned the issue of AIDS in New York media attention that no other individual could get. He found it a disadvantage when he realized his own reputation was "completely that of a crazy man". Kramer was particularly frustrated by bureaucratic stalling that snowballed in cases where gay but closeted men were the ones in charge of agencies that seemed to ignore AIDS. He confronted the director of a National Institutes of Health agency about not devoting more time and effort toward researching AIDS because he was closeted. He threw a drink in Republican fundraiser 's face during a party and screamed at him for having affairs with men but using the fear of homosexuality as a reason to raise money for conservative causes. He called Ed Koch and the media and government agencies in New York City "equal to murderers". Even Kramer's personal life was affected when he and his lover – also a board member on GMHC – split over Kramer's condemnations of the political apathy of GMHC.

Kramer's past also compromised his message, as many men who had been turned off by Faggots saw Kramer's warnings as alarmist, displaying negative attitudes toward sex. Playwright responded to his New York Native article, saying, "Read anything by Kramer closely, and I think you'll find the subtext is always: the wages of gay sin are death". The GMHC ousted Kramer from the organization in 1983. Kramer's preferred method of communication was deemed too militant for the group.

The Normal Heart[] Main article: Astonished and saddened about being forced out of GMHC, Kramer took an extended trip to Europe. While visiting he learned that it had opened as early as 1933 and neither Germans nor other nations did anything to stop it. He became inspired to chronicle the same reaction from the American government and the gay community to the AIDS crisis by writing , despite having promised never to write for the theater again.

The Normal Heart is a play set between 1981 and 1984. It addresses a writer named Ned Weeks as he nurses his lover, who is dying of an unnamed disease. His doctors are puzzled and frustrated by having no resources to research it. Meanwhile, the unnamed organization Weeks is involved in is angered by the bad publicity Weeks' activism is generating, and eventually throws him out. Kramer later explained, "I tried to make Ned Weeks as obnoxious as I could ... I was trying, somehow and again, to atone for my own behavior." The experience was overwhelmingly emotional for Kramer, as at one time during rehearsals he watched actor hold his dying lover played by on stage; Kramer went into the bathroom and sobbed, only moments later to find Davis holding him. The play is considered a literary landmark. It contended with the AIDS crisis when few would speak of the disease afflicting gay men, including gays themselves; it remains the longest-running play ever staged at the , running for a year starting in 1985. It has been produced over 600 times in the U.S., Europe (where it was televised in Poland), Israel, and South Africa. Actors following Davis who portrayed Kramer's alter ego Ned Weeks included , (in Los Angeles), (at the in London), and then in the West End, in a highly acclaimed 2004 revival at the Public Theater, and most recently on Broadway at the . Upon seeing the production of The Normal Heart, commented, "No one else on the left at that time ... ever used the moral framework that is so much a part of Kramer's voice, and that the right has coopted so skillfully. Conscience, responsibility, calling; truth and lies, clarity of purpose or abandonment of one's moral calling; loyalty and betrayal ..."

In a review for The New York Times, said:

> He accuses the governmental, medical and press establishments of foot-dragging in combating the disease—especially in the early days of its outbreak, when much of the play is set—and he is even tougher on homosexual leaders who, in his view, were either too cowardly or too mesmerized by the ideology of sexual liberation to get the story out. "There's not a good word to be said about anyone's behavior in this whole mess", claims one character—and certainly Mr. Kramer has few good words to say about Mayor Koch, various prominent medical organizations, The New York Times or, for that matter, most of the leadership of an unnamed organization apparently patterned after the Gay Men's Health Crisis.

In 2014, HBO produced a directed by with a screenplay by Kramer. It starred , (who won a for his performance), , , , , , , and .

ACT UP[] Main article: In 1987, Kramer was the catalyst in the founding of the (ACT UP), a protest organization that chose government agencies and corporations as targets to publicize lack of treatment and funding for people with AIDS. ACT UP was formed at the in New York City. Kramer was asked to speak as part of a rotating speaker series, and his well-attended speech focused on action to fight AIDS. He began by having two-thirds of the room stand up, and told them they would be dead in five years. Kramer reiterated the points introduced in his essay "1,112 and Counting": "If my speech tonight doesn't scare the shit out of you, we're in real trouble. If what you're hearing doesn't rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men will have no future here on earth. How long does it take before you get angry and fight back?" Their first target became the (FDA), which Kramer accused in The New York Times of neglecting badly needed medication for HIV-infected Americans.

Engaging in civil disobedience that would result in many people being arrested was a primary objective, as it would focus attention on the target. On March 24, 1987, 17 people out of 250 participating were arrested for blocking rush-hour traffic in front of the FDA's offices. Kramer was arrested dozens of times working with ACT UP, and the organization grew to hundreds of chapters in the US and Europe. Immunologist stated, "In American medicine there are two eras. Before Larry and after Larry." Playwright offered his opinion of why Kramer fought so relentlessly: "In a way, like a lot of Jewish men of Larry's generation, the Holocaust is a defining historical moment, and what happened in the early 1980s with AIDS felt, and was in fact, holocaustal to Larry."

Two decades later Kramer continued to advocate for social and legal equity for homosexuals. "Our own country's democratic process declares us to be unequal, which means, in a democracy, that our enemy is you," he wrote in 2007. "You treat us like crumbs. You hate us. And sadly, we let you."

Just Say No, A Play about a Farce[] Main article: Continuing his commentary on government indifference toward AIDS, Kramer wrote Just Say No, A Play about a Farce in 1988. He highlights the sexual hypocrisy in the Reagan and Koch administrations that allowed AIDS to become an epidemic; it concerns a , her gay son, and the closeted gay mayor of America's "largest northeastern city". Its New York production, starring Kathleen Chalfant, Tonya Pinkens, and David Margulies, was prized by the few who came to see it after its negative review by The New York Times. Social critic and writer wrote of the piece, "Larry Kramer is one of America's most valuable troublemakers. I hope he never lowers his voice."

Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist[] Main article: Further information: First published in 1989, and later expanded and republished in 1994, Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist contains a diverse selection of the nonfiction writings of Larry Kramer focused on AIDS activism and LGBT civil rights, including letters to the editor and speeches, which document his time spent at , , and beyond.

The central message of the book is that gay men must accept responsibility for their lives, and that those who are still living must give back to their community by fighting for People With AIDS (PWA's) and LGBT rights, for, as Kramer states, "I must put back something into this world for my own life, which is worth a tremendous amount. By not putting back, you are saying that your lives are worth shit, and that we deserve to die, and that the deaths of all our friends and lovers have amounted to nothing. I can't believe that in your heart of hearts you feel this way. I can't believe you want to die. Do you?" The first publication provides a portrait of Kramer as activist, and the 1994 edition contains commentary written by him that reflects on his earlier pieces and provides insight into Larry Kramer as writer.

Kramer directly and deliberately defines AIDS as a because he believes the United States' government failed to respond quickly and expend the necessary resources to cure AIDS, largely because AIDS initially infected gay men, and, quite soon after, predominantly poor and politically powerless minorities. Through speeches, editorials, and personal, sometimes publicized, letters to figures such as politician , former New York Mayor , several reporters, and head of the , , Kramer personally advocates for a more significant response to AIDS. He implores the government to conduct research based on commonly accepted scientific standards and to allocate funds and personnel to AIDS research. Kramer ultimately states that the response to AIDS in America must be defined as a holocaust because of the large number deaths that resulted from the negligence and apathy that surrounded AIDS in the , , and early presidencies.

The Destiny of Me[] Main article: The Destiny of Me picks up where The Normal Heart left off, following Ned Weeks as he continues his journey fighting those whose complacency or will impede the discovery of a cure for a disease from which he suffers. The play opened in October 1992 and ran for one year off Broadway at the by the . It was a finalist for the , was a double winner and received the for Outstanding Play of the Year. The original production starred , "a young actor who dominates the show with a performance at once ethereal and magnetic", according to reviewer Frank Rich. Most powerful, Rich wrote, was the thematic question Kramer posed to himself: "Why was he of all people destined to scream bloody murder with the aim of altering the destiny of the human race?" Kramer states in his introduction to the play:

> This journey, from discovery through guilt to momentary joy and toward AIDS, has been my longest, most important journey, as important as—no, more important than my life with my parents, than my life as a writer, than my life as an activist. Indeed, my homosexuality, as unsatisfying as much of it was for so long, has been the single most important defining characteristic of my life.

Its 2002 London production was the No. 1 Critics Choice in .

The Tragedy of Today's Gays[] Main article: Tragedy was a speech and a call to arms that Kramer delivered five days after the 2004 re-election of that he turned into a book. Kramer believed that Bush was re-elected largely because of his opposition to , and found it inconceivable that voters would respond so strongly to that issue when there were so many more pressing ones:

> Almost 60 million people whom we live and work with every day think we are immoral. "Moral values" was top of many lists of why people supported George Bush. Not . Not the economy. Not terrorism. "Moral values". In case you need a translation that means us. It is hard to stand up to so much hate.

The speech's effects were far-reaching, and had most corners of the gay world once again discussing Kramer's moral vision of drive and self-worth for the LGBT community.

Kramer even stated:

> Does it occur to you that we brought this plague of AIDS upon ourselves? I know I am getting into dangerous waters here but it is time. With the cabal breathing even more murderously down our backs it is time. And you are still doing it. You are still murdering each other.

Kramer, again, had his detractors from the community. Writing for , Richard Kim felt that once again Kramer personified the very object of his criticism: homophobia.

> He recycles the kind of harangues about gay men (and young gay men in particular) that institutions like the Times so love to print – that they are buffoonish, disengaged dancing, drugging and fucking their lives away while the world and the disco burn down around them.

The American People: A History[] Around 1981, Kramer began researching and writing a manuscript called The American People: A History, an ambitious historical work that begins in the and continues into the present. For example, there is information relating to Kramer's assertion that . In 2002, Will Schwalbe, editor-in-chief of – the only man to have read the entire manuscript to that date – said, "He has set himself the hugest of tasks," and he described it as "staggering, brilliant, funny, and harrowing." In 2006, Kramer said of the work, "[It is] my own history of America and of the cause of HIV/AIDS ... Writing and researching this history has convinced me that the plague of HIV/AIDS has been intentionally allowed to happen."

The book was published as a novel by in 2015. In , Dwight Garner wrote, "I wish I could report that The American People, Volume 1 had power to match its scope. It does not. As a work of sustained passion, it is formidable. As a work of art, it is very modest indeed. The tone is talky and digressive; few real characters emerge; one feels lashed to the mast after only 50 pages or so." In the book, Kramer writes that in addition to Abraham Lincoln, , , , , , , , , and were gay. The second volume, 880 pages, was published in 2020.

Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies[] In 1997, Kramer approached , to bequeath several million dollars "to endow a permanent, tenured professorship in gay studies and possibly to build a gay and lesbian student center." At that time, gender, ethnic and race-related studies were viewed warily by academia. The then Yale provost, , stated that gay and lesbian studies was too narrow a specialty for a program in perpetuity. Kramer's rejected proposal read: "Yale is to use this money solely for 1) the study of and/or instruction in gay male literature, by which I mean courses to study gay male writers throughout history or the teaching to gay male students of writing about their heritage and their experience. To ensure for the continuity of courses in either or both of these areas tenured positions should be established; and/or 2) the establishment of a gay student center at Yale. . . ."

In 2001, both sides agreed to a five-year trial with seed money of $1 million Arthur Kramer endowed to Yale to finance the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies. The money would pay visiting professors and a program coordinator for conferences, guest speakers and other events. Kramer agreed to leave his literary papers and those chronicling the AIDS movement and his founding of and to Yale's . "A lot has changed since I made my initial demands," said Kramer. "I was trying to cram stuff down their throat. I'd rather they fashion their own stuff. It may allow for a much more expandable notion of what lesbian and gay studies really is." The program was closed down by Yale in 2006.

An Army of Lovers Must Not Die[] In 2020, in response to the , Kramer began to write a play titled An Army of Lovers Must Not Die.

Personal life[] Relationship with his brother[] See also: Kramer's relationship with his brother, , founding partner of the law firm , exploded into the public sphere with Kramer's 1984 play, . In the play, Kramer portrays Arthur (as Ben Weeks) as more concerned with building his $2 million house in than in helping his brother's cause. Humorist , a friend of both Larry and Arthur, once called The Normal Heart "the play about the building of [Arthur's] house". Anemona Hartocollis observed in that "their story came to define an era for hundreds of thousands of theatergoers". Arthur, who had been his younger brother's protector against the parents they both disliked, couldn't find it in his heart to reject Larry, but also couldn't accept his homosexuality. This caused years of arguing and stretches of silence between the siblings. In the 1980s, Larry wanted Arthur's firm to represent the fledgling , a nonprofit Larry organized. Arthur said he had to clear it with his firm's intake committee. Larry saw this as a cop-out — rightly, as Arthur said later. Larry called for a gay boycott of , a prominent Kramer Levin client, which Arthur saw as a personal affront. In 1992, voters passed , an anti-gay rights referendum, and Arthur refused to cancel a ski trip to .

Throughout their disagreements, they still stayed close. Larry writes of their relationship in The Normal Heart: "The brothers love each other a great deal; [Arthur's] approval is essential to [Larry]."

In 2001, Arthur gave Yale a $1 million grant to establish the , a program focusing on gay history.

Kramer Levin went on to become one of the gay rights movement's staunchest advocates, helping on such high-profile cases as before the and before the . Arthur Kramer retired from the firm in 1996 and died of a stroke in 2008.

Health[] In 1988, stress over the closing of his play Just Say No, only a few weeks after its opening, forced Kramer into the hospital after it aggravated a congenital hernia. While in surgery, doctors discovered liver damage due to , prompting Kramer to learn that he was . In 2001, at the age of 66, Kramer was in dire need of a , but he was turned down by 's list. People living with HIV were routinely considered inappropriate candidates for organ transplants because of complications from HIV and perceived short lifespans. Out of the 4,954 liver transplants performed in the United States, only 11 were for HIV-positive people. The news prompted to announce Kramer was dying in June 2001, and the in December of the same year to claim Kramer had died. Kramer became a symbol for infected people who had new leases on life due to advances in medicine. "We shouldn't face a death sentence because of who we are or who we love", he said in an interview. In May 2001, the at the , which had performed more transplants for HIV positive patients than any other facility in the world, accepted Kramer on its list. Kramer received a new liver on December 21, 2001. In April 2019 he suffered a broken leg.

Relationships[] Kramer and his partner, architectural designer David Webster, were together from 1991 until Kramer's death. Webster's ending of his relationship with Kramer in the 1970s had inspired Kramer to write (1978). When asked about their reunion decades later, Webster replied: "He'd grown up, I'd grown up." On July 24, 2013, Kramer and Webster married in the intensive care unit of in New York City.

Residence[] Kramer lived in , near in , and in . Another resident of Kramer's Manhattan residential complex was Kramer's longtime nemesis, , who had been mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989. The two saw each other relatively infrequently, since they lived in separate towers. When Kramer saw Koch looking at the apartment in 1989, Kramer reportedly told him, "Don't move in here! There are people here who hate you!" On another occasion, Koch tried to pet Kramer's dog in the building's mail area, and Kramer snatched the dog away.

Death[] Kramer died from pneumonia on May 27, 2020, at age 84, less than a month short of his 85th birthday.

Public image[] Larry Kramer in Love and Anger, a biographical film about Kramer's life directed by Jean Carlomusto, premiered at the .

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