Larry Kramer, Author and Trailblazing AIDS Activist, Dead at 84

Larry Kramer, the author, playwright, and activist revered for his unrelenting and sometimes abrasive advocacy to bring attention to the AIDS epidemic, died Wednesday morning in his Manhattan apartment. According to his husband, David Webster, the cause was pneumonia. Kramer was 84.

Kramer’s long career in activism began in the summer of 1981, when he first learned of a rare cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, mainly afflicting young gay men. The next week, Kramer, then in his mid-40s, organized a meeting of around 80 people to discuss the disease and what Kramer worried might be the start of an unimaginable crisis. As the New York Times reports, the meeting would lead to the formation of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, one of the first organizations supporting HIV positive people. Even in those early days, he had a flair for the provocative, and was kicked out of the group in 1983 for his ferocious style.

Being ousted from the GMHC did not cool Kramer’s passionate approach. In 1985, Kramer went on to write The Normal Heart, an autobiographical play about a young, combative writer fighting to force society to recognize the enormity of the AIDS crisis. It premiered at the Public Theater and ran for nearly 300 performances; a 2011 Broadway revival went on to win three Tony awards, and was turned into an Emmy award-winning film for HBO by Ryan Murphy in 2014.

New York Daily News

In 1987, Kramer helped found ACT UP, and with it became one of the main faces of AIDS advocacy during the 1980s and 90s. He helped organize direct actions that political and cultural leaders who had turned a blind eye to the AIDS crisis could not possibly ignore, from blocking rush hour traffic in front of the FDA’s Wall Street office to scattering ashes of people who had died of AIDS on the lawn of the White House.

ACT UP’s advocacy would force the LGBTQ+ community to treat AIDS as a political and public health crisis, and led to the accelerated approval of new AIDS drugs and lowered pricing of AZT, then the leading antiretroviral medication in the treatment of AIDS. After publicly battling for years with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who led the country’s response to the epidemic — a man Kramer once called a murderer and an “incompentent idiot” — the two eventually reconciled.

“There is no question in my mind that Larry helped change medicine in this country,” Fauci told The New Yorker in 2002. “And he helped change it for the better. When all the screaming and the histrionics are forgotten, that will remain.”

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Kramer’s work as a writer and playwright ensures that at least a portion of his “screaming” and “histrionics” will never be forgotten. As a writer, Kramer approached his craft with the same biting style as he did his activism, penning some of the era’s most provocative novels and plays. After spending his early years in the literary world writing romantic screenplays, Kramer turned to more explicitly queer subject matter with his fiercely satirical 1978 novel, Faggots. Beyond The Normal Heart, Kramer wrote a number of other plays that commented on political action within the gay community, including 1988’s Just Say No, A Play About a Farce and The Destiny of Me, a 1992 continuation of The Normal Heart.

A towering figure in the history of LGBTQ+ activism and literature, Kramer’s death has been received with great sadness and moving tributes from members of the queer community.