Larry Kramer
Born: June 25th, 1935
Died: May 27th, 2020
Larry Kramer, the noted writer whose raucous, antagonistic campaign for an all-out response to the Aids crisis helped shift US 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. Kramer had weathered illness for much of his adult life. Among other things, he had been infected with HIV, 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 – 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 organisation for HIV-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 organisation of sissies”.)
His outbursts were part of a strategy to shock the country into dealing with Aids as a public health emergency
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.
“One of America’s most valuable troublemakers,” Susan Sontag called him. Even some of the officials Kramer accused of “murder” and “genocide” recognised that his outbursts were part of a strategy to shock the country into dealing with Aids as a public health emergency. In the early 1980s, he was among the first activists to foresee that what had at first caused alarm as a rare form of cancer among gay men would spread worldwide, like any other sexually transmitted disease, and kill millions of people without regard to sexual orientation. Under the circumstances, he said, “If you write a calm letter and fax it to nobody, it sinks like a brick in the Hudson.”
The infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was one who got the message, after Kramer wrote an open letter published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1988 calling him a killer and “an incompetent idiot”.
“Once you got past the rhetoric,” Fauci said in an interview for this obituary, “you found that Larry Kramer made a lot of sense, and that he had a heart of gold.”
Bureaucracy
Kramer, he said, had helped him to see how the federal bureaucracy was indeed slowing the search for effective treatments. He credited Kramer with playing an “essential” role in the development of elaborate drug regimens that could prolong the lives of those infected with HIV, and in prompting the Food and Drug Administration to streamline its assessment and approval of certain new drugs.
In recent years Kramer developed a grudging friendship with Fauci, particularly after Kramer developed liver disease and underwent the transplant in 2001; Fauci helped get him into a lifesaving experimental drug trial afterward. Their bond grew stronger this year, when Fauci became the public face of the White House task force on the coronavirus epidemic, opening him to criticism in some quarters. “We are friends again,” Kramer said in an email to the reporter John Leland of the New York Times for an article published at the end of March. “I’m feeling sorry for how he’s being treated. I emailed him this, but his one-line answer was, ‘Hunker down.’”
His abusive ways sometimes overshadowed his achievements as an author and social activist
Up to his death, Kramer was at work on a play centred on the epidemic.
“It’s about gay people having to live through three plagues,” he told Leland – HIV/Aids, Covid-19 and the decline of the human body, an inevitability brought home to him last year when he fell and broke a leg in his apartment, then lay on the floor for hours waiting for a home attendant to arrive.
Kramer enjoyed provocation for its own sake – he once introduced New York mayor Edward Koch to his pet wheaten terrier as the man who was “killing Daddy’s friends” – and his abusive ways sometimes overshadowed his achievements as an author and social activist.
His breakthrough as a writer came with a screen adaptation of DH Lawrence’s Women in Love, for which he had obtained the film rights with $4,200 of his own money. He also produced the film, which was a box-office hit when it was released in 1969 and a high point of more than one career. The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award; Glenda Jackson won an Oscar as best actress for her performance; and the director, Ken Russell, established himself as an important filmmaker.
Gay themes
Four years later, Kramer wrote the screenplay for the ill-fated musical remake of the classic 1937 film Lost Horizon. Kramer eventually turned to gay themes, and in his first novel, Faggots, he did so with a vengeance. A scathing look at promiscuous sex, drug use, predation and sadomasochism among gay men, it was a lightning rod from the day of its publication in 1978.
Laurence David Kramer was born on June 25th, 1935, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the second son of George and Rea (Wishengrad) Kramer. George Kramer had earned undergraduate and law degrees from Yale University but was unable to make a decent living during the Depression. Rea Kramer supported the family by working in a shoe store and teaching English to immigrants. In 1941, George got a government job in Washington, and the family moved.
By his own account, Larry had a miserable childhood and hated his father. His protective older brother, Arthur, was the scholar-athlete of the family, on his way to becoming a prominent lawyer. Larry read the Hollywood gossip columns. “From the day Larry was born until the day my father died, they were antagonists,” Arthur Kramer told Vanity Fair in 1992. Nor were the two brothers always on the easiest terms. In The Normal Heart, Arthur Kramer is represented by the character Ben Weeks, a man with ambivalent feelings about his brother’s homosexuality. But they shared an abiding affection until Arthur’s death in 2008. Arthur gave $1 million to Yale in 2001 to establish the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and his law firm became active in pro bono work for causes such as same-sex marriage.
Larry Kramer himself married his partner, Webster, in 2013, in a ceremony in the intensive care unit of NYU Langone medical centre, where Kramer was recovering from surgery for a bowel obstruction. In 1953, Kramer, like his father and brother before him, enrolled at Yale. He studied English literature, tried to commit suicide once and had a liberating affair with a male professor. After graduating in 1957 and serving a tour in the Army, he worked in New York, first for the William Morris Agency and then for Columbia Pictures. In 1961, Columbia sent him to London, where he worked as production executive on Dr Strangelove and Lawrence of Arabia. He returned to the United States in 1972.
Rare cancer
He got into Aids work in the summer of 1981 after reading an article about deadly cases of a rare cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, among young gay men. It had previously been associated mostly with older men. A meeting of about 80 people in his New York apartment the next week led to the formation of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
For the next several years, Kramer threw himself into fundraising, lobbying and confrontation, and also into his writing. His landmark essay 1,112 and Counting, which appeared in the March 14th, 1983 issue of the New York Native, was one of many articles taking gay men to task for apathy.
In 1988, tests confirmed what Kramer had long suspected: he was carrying the virus that causes Aids. “A new fear has now joined my daily repertoire of emotions, and my nighttime ones, too,” he wrote in the afterword to a later edition of his 1989 book, Reports From the Holocaust: The Making of an Aids Activist. “But life has also become exceptionally more precious and, ironically, I am happier.”
I was known as the angriest man in the world, because I discovered that anger got you further than being nice
He and Webster, an architect, began living together in 1994, and Kramer was able to devote much of his time to writing, in spite of being ill for many more years. Believing that he would die soon, he began putting his literary affairs in order. In fact, The Associated Press reported in 2001 that he had died.
The real plot twist, though, was that the HIV infection had not progressed; he instead had terminal liver disease, traceable to a hepatitis B infection decades earlier. He underwent the liver transplant in Pittsburgh a few days before Christmas 2001.
Looking back in 2017 on his early days as an activist, Kramer, frail but still impassioned, explained the thinking behind his approach. “I was trying to make people united and angry. I was known as the angriest man in the world, mainly because I discovered that anger got you further than being nice. And when we started to break through in the media, I was better TV than someone who was nice.”