From the New York Times obit by Daniel Lewis on “Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken AIDS Activist”:
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. . . .
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.”). . .
Mr. Kramer enjoyed provocation for its own sake — he once introduced Mayor Edward I. Koch of New York to his pet wheaten terrier as the man who was “killing Daddy’s friends” — and this could sometimes overshadow his achievements as an author and social activist.
His breakthrough as a writer came with a screen adaptation of D.H. 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.
Four years later, Mr. Kramer wrote the screenplay for the ill-fated musical remake of the classic 1937 film “Lost Horizon.”
Mr. 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.
Some reviewers simply found it beyond belief. (On the contrary, Mr. Kramer responded, it was more a documentary than a work of fiction.) Others complained that it libeled gay people generally, that it lacked literary merit, and that the narrator’s epiphany — one “must have the strength and courage to say no” — was not exactly a stroke of genius. . . .
The urgency of his life found its way into his plays. “The Normal Heart,” which opened at the Public Theater in April 1985 and ran for nine months, was a passionate account of the early years of AIDS and his campaign to get somebody to do something about it.
“The Normal Heart” returned to the stage in 2011, to powerful effect. “By the play’s end,” Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote in his review, “even people who think they have no patience for polemical theater may find their resistance has melted into tears. No, make that sobs.”. . .
Less successful was Mr. Kramer’s “Just Say No,” a sendup of official morality aimed at familiar targets, including Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Widely criticized as crude and nasty, it opened Off Broadway in October 1988 and closed a month later. . . .
He turned his attention to another autobiographical play, ultimately titled “The Destiny of Me,” which opened in 1992. Recalling the development of that work in an essay for The Times, he called it “one of those ‘family’-slash-‘memory’ plays I suspect most playwrights feel compelled to try their hand at in a feeble attempt, before it’s too late, to find out what their lives have been all about.”. . .
Looking back in 2017 on his early days as an activist, Mr. 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.”
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
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From the Washington Post obit by Matt Schudel headlined “Larry Kramer, who sounded the alarm on AIDS, dies at 84”:
From the beginning, Mr. Kramer’s brand of advocacy was neither muted nor polite. He was full of rage and wanted people to know it. “Sure, I have a temper, who doesn’t?” he told Newsday in 1992. “It happens when you’ve seen so many friends die.”. . .
ACT UP demonstrators shut down the New York Stock Exchange, picketed the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration, surrounded St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and shouted down speakers at AIDS conferences.
In 1991, protesters charged into the studio of the “CBS Evening News,” interrupting a broadcast by anchor Dan Rather; they also interrupted a “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour” program. That same year, demonstrators covered the Arlington, Va., house of ultraconservative Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) in a giant yellow condom. During a 1990 speech, protesters threw condoms at Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan, and they once attempted to pour the ashes of an AIDS victim on the White House lawn. . . .
He held particular scorn for closeted gay men who worked against gay interests. At a Washington fundraiser in 1985, he reportedly tossed a glass of water in the face of Terry Dolan, a founder of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which actively opposed gay rights. Dolan, who was known to frequent gay bars, died of AIDS in 1986. . . .
Using graphic descriptions of sexual acts, he depicted a superficial subculture in which gay men were wasting their talents on promiscuity and drugs. Several years before the AIDS crisis unfolded, Mr. Kramer suggested that the uninhibited pursuit of sex and hedonism could lead to widespread illness and a culture of self-indulgence.
Despite harsh criticism — author Barbara Grizzuti Harrison called the novel “revolting” in her review for The Washington Post — the novel became a bestseller and is still in print.
But it was divisive in the gay community and led some to vilify Mr. Kramer for divulging unsavory aspects of gay life and for criticizing a newfound sense of sexual liberation.
“The straight world thought I was repulsive, and the gay world treated me like a traitor,” Mr. Kramer told the New Yorker magazine in 2002. “People would literally turn their back when I walked by. You know what my real crime was? I put the truth in writing.”. . .
Mr. Kramer was especially antagonistic toward Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Fauci coordinated much of the nation’s research on HIV/AIDS, but in Mr. Kramer’s view he wasn’t moving fast enough.
He taunted Fauci at every turn, calling him incompetent, a murderer and the public face of a callous federal government. Yet, despite Mr. Kramer’s inflammatory rhetoric, the two became friends and forged an unlikely social and medical alliance.
At Mr. Kramer’s urging, Fauci and other NIH officials began to consult with the people afflicted by a disease during the development of new drugs. The approval process for new treatments was speeded up, and patients were given a greater voice in clinical trials. The practice has become standard for other diseases, as well. . . .
“In American medicine, there are two eras. Before Larry and after Larry,” Fauci told the New Yorker in 2002. “There is no question in my mind that Larry helped change medicine in this country. And he helped change it for the better. When all the screaming and the histrionics are forgotten, that will remain.”
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