Larry Kramer

One of the most well-known gay activists of the late 20th century, Larry Kramer was also an author and playwright. Initially a screenwriter and then novelist, Kramer started his life in gay politics during the beginning days of the AIDS epidemic. He founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1981 and then ACT UP in 1987, as well as writing the groundbreaking semi-autobiographical play, The Normal Heart (1985). His contributions to politics, public health, and art are numerous. Famously known for his combative attitude, Larry Kramer found a way to harness his righteous anger in both his activism and his art.

 

Kramer was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut to a Jewish family in 1935. Growing up in a post-Depression era house, he describes his childhood as an unhappy one. His father, a government attorney, was abusive while his mother, a Red Cross social worker, was often absent. The family moved to Maryland, after which Kramer attended Yale for college. In New Haven he was deeply unhappy, believing himself to be the only gay man in the entire school. Kramer explores much of his childhood and early adolescence in his play, The Destiny of Me (1993). 

 

After college, Kramer moved to London to work for Columbia Pictures. His first screenplay was an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love for which he received an Oscar nomination in 1970. He worked on one more picture before leaving the movie business behind. Kramer then began writing his first novel which was titled Faggots. Published in 1978, the book was Kramer’s response to the gay community’s embrace of promiscuity and drug use during the 1960s and ‘70s. He criticised that the community was centred on sex and left no room to find real love, a notion that many gay men resented. As a result, Faggots was quite controversial because many in the gay community saw sexual promiscuity as the reward for their fight against oppression during the liberation movement. Some called Kramer out for betraying his own community, calling the book an act of self-hatred. However, Kramer stood up for himself as a truth-teller.

 

Three years after Faggots was published, the first cases of AIDS were discovered in New York City. The epidemic officially began on June 5th, 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a rare disease found in five homosexual men in Los Angeles. At the time, Kramer was living on Fire Island, a well-known gay village off Long Island, New York. He noticed that many young and healthy men around him were suddenly falling ill and in many cases, dying quickly thereafter. So little was known about what was happening in his community and it seemed like no one cared so Kramer took it upon himself to get involved. He began hosting meetings in his apartment with other members of gay New York to discuss the “cancer” that was spreading in their community. In January of 1982, Kramer co-founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis whose main purpose was to raise money for research and provide social services to victims. Kramer worked for the GMHC for a year, though his approach to activism often opposed the wishes of the GMHC’s elected leaders. Kramer had a provocative anger that he directed at every party associated with AIDS, from President Ronald Reagan to his fellow gay community members. It is well-documented that President Reagan, his Republican government, and the New York City mayor Ed Koch were ignoring the AIDS plague because it was most rampant in gay men and drug users. Sensing something drastic was necessary, Kramer published an essay in The New York Native titled “1,112 and Counting.”   The essay, grim and severe, was meant to instil a great fear in the gay community and rouse the attention of the government. However, the GMHC believed in peaceful diplomacy, which opposed Kramer’s fear-mongering approach and so Kramer resigned from the organisation in 1983 after many months of contention. He saw combative direct action as the only way forward.

 

Recovering from being ousted from the organisation he started, Kramer went to Europe on an extended trip. While in Munich, Germany, Kramer visited the Dachau concentration camp which opened in 1933, months after Hitler’s rise to power. Shocked by the revelation that Dachau operated for eight long years before American intervention in the Second World War, Kramer saw a correlation between the Holocaust and the AIDS plague. “He knew exactly how the Nazis could kill for eight years without anyone doing anything. Nobody cared. That was what was happening with AIDS. People were dying, and nobody cared.”   After Dachau, Kramer was moved to write a play that would chronicle the previous three years of his life. Written in less than six weeks, The Normal Heart was a roman à clef of Kramer’s involvement in the GMHC and the rise of AIDS. The main character, Ned Weeks, is Kramer’s mirror but he says “I was not trying to present myself as a hero. I was trying to present myself as a pain in the ass.”   The Normal Heart premiered Off-Broadway in 1985 to great success. In 2000, the National Theatre in London named The Normal Heart one of the 100 greatest plays of the 20th century. Kramer would write a sequel to The Normal Heart eight years later called The Destiny of Me.

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Though incredibly influential, play-writing was not enough for Kramer and so in 1987, he turned to more grassroots activism. He became one of the first members of the political group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) that engaged in civil disobedience in support of those living with AIDS. Perhaps learning from his mistakes with the GMHC, Kramer insisted that ACT UP remain leaderless and instead consist of democratic committees. Kramer wanted ACT UP “to be based on anger and protest,”    so the group organised public demonstrations and marches advocating for a wide-range of AIDS related issues. ACT UP protested for access to experimental AIDS drugs, the rising costs of those drugs by the Food & Drug Administration, the Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception and homosexuality, among many other issues. ACT UP is still active to this day, “united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.”

Larry Kramer passed away on May 27, 2020 from pneumonia, after battling HIV for over thirty years. He left behind a legacy of a righteous fury that fueled an activism that saved lives. Through his efforts, the composition of public health in America changed completely. Alongside his impressive political life was his contributions to art and literature, with The Normal Heart a landmark piece of theatre. Larry Kramer was a pioneer who was unafraid of the truth, unafraid of anger, and unafraid of love.