SILENCE=DEATH
RIP Larry Kramer, playwright and AIDS activist, dies at 84

Kramer was known for his public fight to secure medical treatment, acceptance and civil rights for people with AIDS.



AIDS activist and author Larry Kramer posing for a portrait in his apartment in New York City, the United States [File: Lucas Jackson/Reuters]

Larry Kramer, the playwright whose angry voice and pen raised theatregoers' consciousness about AIDS and roused thousands to protest in the early years of the epidemic, has died at 84.

Bill Goldstein, a writer who was working on a biography of Kramer, confirmed the news to The Associated Press news agency. Kramer's husband, David Webster, told The New York Times that Kramer died of pneumonia on Wednesday.

Kramer, who wrote the play The Normal Heart and founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, lost a partner to acquired immune deficiency syndrome in 1984 and was himself infected with the virus. He also suffered from hepatitis B and received a liver transplant in 2001 because the virus had caused liver failure.


He was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay Women in Love, the 1969 adaptation of DH Lawrence's novel. It starred Glenda Jackson, who won her first Oscar for her performance.

He wrote the 1972 screenplay Lost Horizon; a novel, Faggots; and plays including Sissies' Scrapbook, The Furniture of Home, Just Say No and The Destiny of Me, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.

For many years he was best known for his public fight to secure medical treatment, acceptance and civil rights for people with AIDS. He loudly told everyone that the gay community was grappling with a plague.

In 1981, when AIDS had not yet acquired its name and only a few dozen people had been diagnosed with it, Kramer and a group of his friends in New York City founded Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), one of the first groups in the country to address the epidemic.

He tried to rouse the gay community with speeches and articles such as 1,112 and Counting, published in gay newspapers in 1983.

"Our continued existence as gay men upon the face of this earth is at stake," he wrote. "Unless we fight for our lives, we shall die."

The late journalist Randy Shilts, in his best-selling account of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On, called that article "inarguably one of the most influential works of advocacy journalism of the decade" and credited it with "crystallizing the epidemic into a political movement for the gay community."

Kramer lived to see gay marriage a reality and joined one such union himself in 2013, but never rested. "I'm married," he told The Associated Press. "But that's only part of where we are. AIDS is still decimating us, and we still don't have protection under the law."

Kramer split with GMHC in 1983 after other board members decided to concentrate on providing support services to people with AIDS. The non-profit organisation remains one of the largest AIDS-service groups in the country.
'Please know AIDS is a worldwide plague'

After leaving GMHC, Kramer gave voice to his grief and frustration by writing The Normal Heart, in which a furious young writer - not unlike Kramer himself - battles politicians, society, the media and other gay leaders to bring attention to the crisis.

Kramer often stood outside the theatre passing out fliers asking the world to take action against HIV/AIDS. "Please know that AIDS is a worldwide plague. Please know there is no cure," the fliers said.

In 1987, Kramer founded ACT UP, the group that became famous for staging civil disobedience at places like the US Food and Drug Administration, the New York Stock Exchange and Burroughs Wellcome Corp, the maker of the chief anti-AIDS drug, AZT.

ACT UP's protests helped persuade the FDA to speed the approval of new drugs and Burroughs Wellcome to lower its price for AZT.

Kramer soon relinquished a leadership role in ACT UP, and as support for AIDS research increased, he later found some common ground with health officials whom ACT UP had bitterly criticised. (At the Emmy Awards, Kramer wore an ACT UP baseball cap.)

"There are many people who feel that ACT UP hurt itself by so many of us going to work inside, with the very system that we were formed to protest against," Kramer told The New York Times in 1997. "There's good reason to believe that. On the other hand, when you are given the chance to be heard a little better, it's hard to turn down."

Kramer never softened the urgency of his demands. He found time in 2011 to help the American Foundation for Equal Rights mount their play - called 8 - on Broadway and bring attention to the legal battle over same-sex marriage in California.

One of his last projects was the massive two-volume The American People, which chronicled the history of gay people in the US. It took him decades to write.

"I just think it's so important that we know our history - the history of how badly we're treated and how hard we have to fight to get what we deserve, which is equality," he told the AP.


SOURCE: AP NEWS AGENCY


Larry Kramer, major gay rights and AIDS activist , dies at 84

Issued on: 27/05/2020

New York (AFP)

Larry Kramer, a prominent gay rights activist whose vociferous writings and actions took on a lagging government response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, has died. He was 84 years old.

"Rest in power to our fighter Larry Kramer. Your rage helped inspire a movement. We will keep honoring your name and spirit with action," tweeted Act Up -- the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power -- one of several groups he founded as the HIV virus ravaged the gay community in the late 20th century.

Citing Kramer's husband, The New York Times attributed his death to pneumonia. The octogenarian had suffered a number of afflictions in his storied life, including HIV and liver disease, for which he underwent a transplant in 2001.


In 1981 Kramer founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis, the first organization supporting HIV-positive people, leaving a year later following disputes with his fellow organizers.

He went on to found Act Up in 1987, leading protest marches and disruptions of government offices, Wall Street and Catholic leadership to shock US leaders into combatting AIDS.

Born on June 25, 1935 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Kramer graduated from Yale in 1957 before doing a stint in the Army.

He then made a foray into film, working in London on "Dr. Strangelove" and "Lawrence of Arabia."

He was known as a provocative screenwriter, nabbing a 1971 Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love."

He later turned to themes of homesexuality, publishing in 1978 a lightning rod of a first novel -- "Faggots" -- which through its piercing satire explored promiscuity, drug use and sadomasochism in the gay community.

In the early 1980s Kramer was among the first activists to recognize AIDS as a fatal infection likely to spread and kill globally across lines of gender.

"Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get.... Unless we fight for our lives we shall die," he wrote in a 1983 essay published in a gay-focused outlet, the New York Native.

Though his harsh rhetoric and often combative style alienated some, he channeled his furor over the government's perceived apathy on AIDS into urgent work that ultimately transformed American health care.

"In American medicine, there are two eras -- before Larry and after Larry," Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease expert now leading the US fight against the coronavirus pandemic, told The New Yorker in 2002.

Fauci, who became one of the nation's most prominent voices on federal AIDS research, developed a friendship with Kramer after the activist grabbed his attention after dubbing the doctor an "incompetent idiot" and killer in 1988.

Kramer's singular voice played a key role in pushing the federal government to improve testing and approval of drug regimes for HIV patients.

"Once you got past the rhetoric," Fauci told the NYT upon learning of the activist's death, "you found that Larry Kramer made a lot of sense, and that he had a heart of gold."

"Larry Kramer's death hits our community hard," tweeted GLAAD, a nonprofit centered on LGBTQ acceptance.

"He was a fighter who never stood down from what he believed was right, and he contributed so much to the fight against HIV/AIDS."