REMEMBRANCE
Larry Kramer, Activist Giant, Dies at 84
With anger and art, playwright, author changed the face of public health advocacy
BY ANDY HUMM
Who will there be to
be angry at Larry
Kramer’s memorial
service (if and when
we are able to have memorial services
again)?
When his gay and AIDS activist
comrade Vito Russo died of AIDS
in 1990, Kramer got up in front of
a packed service at the Great Hall
of the Cooper Union — then home
to ACT UP meetings that attracted
500 people every Monday night —
and spat, “You killed Vito! Every
one of you!,” chiding us all for not
doing enough amidst the plague
that defi ned our gay lives and his
own activism and art.
Kramer’s work arguably saved
millions of lives around the globe.
His own life ended May 27, 2020
after a long illness and a bout with
pneumonia. He was 84 and is survived
by his husband, David Webster,
and those countless millions.
Kramer will be most remembered
as a catalyst. When mysterious
maladies were killing off young gay
men in 1981, he crowded scores of
us into his 2 Fifth Avenue apartment
on Washington Square to
listen in terror to Dr. Alvin Friedman
Kien’s description of what
was happening — the beginnings
of an epidemic that would turn
into a pandemic and what Kramer
always called “a plague.”
Kramer then gathered some
friends in his kitchen to found the
Gay Men’s Health Crisis in a community
not practiced in philanthropy
for itself. He took a tin can
out to Fire Island to collect money
for the new group, stood on the pier
himself, and took in a grand total
of $60. He demanded government
and press attention but could get
neither from New York’s closeted
homosexual Mayor Ed Koch nor
the city’s then anti-gay leading
newspaper, The New York Times.
And when GMHC did get a meeting
with Koch, the group excluded its
angriest board member: Kramer.
Much of this is dramatized in
Kramer’s own “The Normal Heart”
from 1985 at the Public Theater, a
Larry Kramer with amfAR’s Mathilde Krim and the NIH’s Anthony Fauci at a 2006 New York Times panel
on AIDS.
searing and topical play that nevertheless
spoke to a new generation
in 2011 and won Best Revival
of a Play for him. In 2014, the
American Theatre Wing awarded
Kramer a special Tony for his humanitarian
work.
His friend Dr. Larry Mass, who
wrote the fi rst articles about the
emerging epidemic in May 1981
in the New York Native (“Cancer
in the Gay Community”) and was
also one of the founders of GMHC,
once said of him, “Larry Kramer
is a colossus of courage, genius,
character, drive, achievement, and
providence with no counterpart.
He has cut a huge swath across
populations, communities, continents,
time spans, literature, theater,
medicine, and science. Where
would we be without him? Alas,
the answer to that is already nipping
at our heels.”
When Kramer wrote his controversial
and picaresque novel “Faggots”
in 1978, he was relatively
unknown in gay activist circles.
It sparked a furor in the community
for unapologetically portraying
promiscuity among gay men.
(The gay Oscar Wilde Memorial
Bookshop on Christopher Street
refused to stock it, but it sold well
elsewhere.) He also wrote an op-ed
piece in The Times saying gays in
New York didn’t deserve our rights
because we didn’t work for them
DONNA ACETO
like our brothers and sisters in
San Francisco — ignoring the profound
political differences between
that small city in California and
the metropolis in New York that
at that time consisted of four conservative
boroughs in addition to
Manhattan.
But prior to that, Kramer was
an Academy Award-nominated
screenwriter for the 1969 Ken Russell
adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s
“Women in Love” starring Alan
Bates and Oliver Reed, playing
friends who engaged in a famous
nude wrestling scene, and Glenda
Jackson, who won the Oscar for
Best Actress.
Kramer went on to become a
movie producer and while his production
of a star-studded musical
of “Lost Horizon” in 1973 was
a critical and box offi ce failure, it
paid him enough money, which
— invested by his brother Arthur
Kramer — gave him the fi nancial
security to pursue more daring
projects such as writing “Faggots”
in 1978 and, when AIDS hit
in 1981, taking a lead in pushing
the gay community to heightened
activism.
Through sheer force of will, he
was able to get activists to join
him at that fi rst meeting in August
1981 that led to the founding
of GMHC. Kramer was the group’s
fi rebrand, writing front-page articles
in the gay New York Native
— such as “1,112 and Counting” in
1983 desperately trying to draw attention
to the thousands who were
sick and dying, usually within a
year or two at most of diagnosis,
and urging gay men basically to
curb our sexual practices until we
knew exactly what was causing
the syndrome and how to protect
ourselves from it.
“All it seems to take is the one
wrong fuck. That’s not promiscuity
— that’s bad luck,” he wrote.
That led some in the community
to condemn him as anti-sex, but
attacks never deterred him.
“If this article doesn’t scare the
shit out of you,” he wrote, “we’re in
real trouble. If this article doesn’t
rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and
action, gay men may have no future
on this earth. Our continued existence
depends on just how angry
you can get… Why isn’t every gay
man in this city so scared shitless
that he is screaming for action?
Does every gay man in New York
want to die?”
As so many die due to government
inaction and ineptitude and
malice in the current pandemic,
Kramer’s 1983 piece bears rereading.
Kramer called for “a pool of 3,000
activists prepared to engage in civil
disobedience,” but that did not materialize
until his co-founding of
ACT UP four years later.
He once threw a drink in the face
of closeted conservative activist
Terry Dolan when he encountered
him at a Washington party.
Kramer also yelled at The New
York Times, whose executive editor
Abe Rosenthal, killed coverage of
AIDS in its early years, and television
producers. Joe Lovett, an out
producer who did the fi rst big national
piece on AIDS on “20/20” at
ABC in 1983, said that Kramer’s
yelling at him gave him the courage
to keep going back to the executives
at ABC to push for the
kind of coverage it needed and deserved.
Kramer got Joe Papp to pro-
➤ LARRY KRAMER, continued on p.5
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