Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken AIDS Activist, Dies at 84 (original) (raw)

U.S.|Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken AIDS Activist, Dies at 84

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/us/larry-kramer-dead.html

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.

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.Credit...Catherine McGann/Getty Images

May 27, 2020

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.”)

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.

Image

Mr. 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.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT