- Born
- 25 June 1935Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA
- Died
- 27 May 2020New York City, USA · aged 84
Larry Kramer
The angriest voice of the AIDS crisis co-founded GMHC and ACT UP – and shouted until the world listened.
Larry Kramer grew up in Connecticut and Maryland and studied at Yale. He worked in the film industry and was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay of “Women in Love” (1969). His novel “Faggots” (1978), a satire of promiscuous gay life in New York, made him enemies in the gay community.
When a mysterious disease began killing his friends in 1981, Kramer was among the first to sound the alarm. In 1982 he co-founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), but was soon pushed out because of his confrontational style. His play “The Normal Heart” (1985) told the story of these years with fury.
In 1987 he founded ACT UP, whose spectacular protests – at the Food and Drug Administration, on Wall Street, in St Patrick’s Cathedral – forced authorities and drug companies to speed up research and approval of AIDS drugs. Kramer attacked politicians and officials relentlessly; even his opponents later admitted that he had saved lives.
Kramer himself was HIV-positive and received a liver transplant in 2001. In 2013 he married his long-time partner David Webster. He died in New York in 2020, aged 84.