LARRY KRAMER ACTED UP

BY: Ramona Duoba

Larry Kramer was a successful writer and playwright and a ferocious AIDS activist who challenged the government, the pharmaceutical industry, the medical establishment and the gay community. He saw first-hand the death and despair among gay men and the horror of a disease no one wanted to acknowledge. Initially identified as the “gay disease,” AIDS stigmatized the queer community. In 1980, Kramer told People magazine he was at a gay enclave on Fire Island in New York when he saw a man carrying his dying lover, pleading, “Does anyone know what’s wrong with Nick?”

In 1981, Larry Kramer co-founded the GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis) along with Nathan Fain, Lawrence D. Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport and Edmund White. At the time, it was the largest volunteer AIDS organization in the world. “In the early years that Gay Men’s Health Crisis was developing, Larry wanted more of the GMHC to be about direct action and less about creating care services, so the board of directors asked him to leave,” said Krishna Stone, Director-Community Relations for GMHC and a 27-year veteran of the organization.

He was kicked out of GMHC, but far from silent. Six years later, Kramer co-founded ACT UP(AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). This more militant organization was successful in drawing attention to the AIDS epidemic and expanding access to treatment. “Their primary purpose was to push the pharmaceutical industry to develop new treatments for HIV, moving them from experimental trials to patients, often in record time,” said Stone.

Kramer was born in 1935 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He had a tumultuous relationship with his father, who he said would often call him a “sissy.” His father, brother and two uncles attended Yale University and so did he. He struggled to fit in and attempted suicide during his freshman year. He graduated in 1957 and pursued a career in Hollywood as a screenwriter.

Back in New York, faced with a growing AIDS crisis, Kramer used his writing to ignite those who wouldn’t listen. In 1983, he wrote 1,112 and Counting, for the New York Native, a bi-weekly gay newspaper. “If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay men may have no future on this earth,” he wrote.

His ouster from GMHC also prompted him to write the award-winning play, The Normal Heart. The autobiographical play sheds light on the HIV/AIDS crisis in New York and the differences of opinions among the founders that could potentially threaten to undermine their mutual goal. The play had a successful off-broadway run in 1985 and it opened on Broadway in 2011. “When The Normal Heart was revived on Broadway, he (Kramer) was out in front of the theater almost every night, handing out flyers about the fact that more work had to be done. No, the stigma in his mind and the need for work to fight AIDS had not gone away,” said Stone.

In a 1985 interview, Kramer told the Los Angeles Times, “I wrote this as a play because I thought I could get the message out faster — and I’m not ashamed to call it a message play — about why it took so long for anything to happen when we had a chance to save a lot of lives and money.”

Larry Kramer could alienate everybody and, at the same time, be endearing to those he offended. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is now leading the nation through the COVID-19 pandemic, was the scientist leading the AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health. To Larry Kramer, anyone who was a government official was the enemy and he confronted them in the most outlandish and aggressive way possible. Dr. Fauci wrote for TIME, “On the front page of the magazine section of the San Francisco Examiner an open letter to an incompetent idiot Dr. Anthony Fauci. He called me a murderer for being negligent about HIV. That shocked me a bit, but it got me to think that I needed to know a little more about this guy. So I reached out — and over the years, we went from acquaintances who were adversarial to acquaintances who were less adversarial to friends to very, very dear friends.”

A few days before the kick-off of Pride Month, on May 27, 2020, Larry Kramer died of pneumonia. He was 84. He was HIV positive since 1988, had a liver transplant in 2002 and continued his work to end the stigma of HIV/AIDS and followed through with his commitment to the gay community. “During our 38 years, GMHC has been able to see further and do more by standing on the shoulders of giants, said Krishna Stone, “which includes Larry Kramer and his vision; his passion and leadership will continue to guide us.”