JUNE 2020 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 73
OBITUARIES
KRAMER
LARRY TIRELESS AIDS ACTIVIST, AUTHOR
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
Gay City News
Larry Kramer, who was one of the founders
of Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982 and
whose speech on AIDS at Manhattan’s
LGBT Community Center in 1987 helped
galvanize the formation of ACT UP, the
AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, has
died at the age of 84.
In addition to his decades as an outspoken
activist, Kramer was also a celebrated
screenwriter, playwright, and author.
According to The New York Times,
Kramer’s husband, David Webster, said
the cause of death was pneumonia. Kramer,
who lived with HIV for four decades,
had been in ill health in recent years, but
had successfully come through a liver
transplant in 2001.
Kramer’s political style was confrontational,
but his anger was not only
directed at government officials, the medical
establishment, and American society
— indifference and hostility to gay men,
he argued ferociously, led to hundreds
of thousands of AIDS deaths — but also
at the LGBTQ community, which he often
said was timid and even self-hating in
its unwillingness to stand up for itself.
Kramer inspired thousands of activists,
in ACT UP and elsewhere, but he could
often be scolding when speaking to gay
audiences.
In a 2004 appearance at the 92nd Street
Y, Kramer proclaimed himself angry at
“everybody,” including himself, for the
queer community’s lack of progress.
“I am motivated by what is so wrong,” he
said, “and it is wrong that we are treated
like such shit.”
Kramer’s depiction of gay life in Manhattan
and on Fire Island in his 1978 novel
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Faggots also shined a stark light on the
community, which the book painted as
caring more about sex than love. As a
screenwriter, Kramer had his greatest
success with his Oscar-nominated adaptation
of D.H. Lawrence’s 1920 novel
Women in Love for Ken Russell’s 1969
film of the same name.
Larry Kramer
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