Larry Kramer

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Larry Kramer in 1989

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Larry Kramer (born June 25, 1935), American dramatist, author and gay rights activist, was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut and was educated at Yale University (class of 1957). He lived in London 1961-70, where he co-produced and co-wrote the film Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.

Kramer next produced and wrote the screenplay for Women in Love, based on the novel by D. H. Lawrence, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Kramer had far less luck on his next film, a musical version of James Hilton's Lost Horizon released in 1973. It became one of the most notorious flops of the decade.

Kramer was a gay rights advocate from the early 1970s, but never an orthodox one. His 1978 novel, Faggots, was one of the best-selling gay-themed novels, but was heavily criticised by many gay activists for its negative portrayal of male homosexual lifestyles.

Kramer was living in New York City when the AIDS epidemic began in 1981. He published a series of articles in the gay newspaper the New York Native, including the famous "1,112 and Counting," urging action in response to the new epidemic. He was one of the founders of Gay Men's Health Crisis, a New York-based AIDS advocacy organization, which is still the world's largest provider of services to gay men with AIDS.

In 1987, increasingly discontented with the response to AIDS by both the U.S. government and the gay male community, Kramer helped found the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), an AIDS advocacy and protest organization often engaged in civil disobedience.

Kramer's 1985 play about the early years of AIDS, The Normal Heart, remains one of the most important cultural responses to the devastation of AIDS in the 1980s. It has had over 600 productions all over the world. Its New York production starred Brad Davis, who later died of AIDS. It is now used as a set text in many schools and universities.

His next play, Just Say No 1988, was an attack on the Reagan administration and the Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, over what Kramer saw as their hypocrisy and inertia in responding to AIDS. It was less successful than The Normal Heart, possibly due to its sharply political tone.

In 1989 Kramer published a book of non-fiction, Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist, a collection of his political writings from The York Times and other publications, which is an important record of the "heroic phase" of AIDS activism in the 1980s.

During the 1990s, following his own diagnosis with HIV infection, Kramer became increasingly preoccupied with treatment issues, although he continued to issue regular polemical attacks on governments and health authorities. In 1998, he founded the Treatment Data Project, a coalition of private sector donors and medical institutes, designed to make AIDS treatment more readily available to people with HIV/AIDS.

In April 2001, Yale formally accepted a donation of Kramer's literary and political papers, along with a one million dollar donation from Kramer's brother Arthur Kramer to endow a gay and lesbian studies program. Kramer had been discussing the donation with Yale for several years, and the University had rejected a similar donation in 1997. Commenting on the results of their donation, in 2004, Kramer said: "My own college, Yale, with $1 million of my own brother’s money to do just this, will not teach what I call gay history, unencumbered with the prissy incomprehensible gobbledygook of gender studies and queer theory."

In December 2001, Kramer underwent liver transplant surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He needed this transplant to survive liver disease caused by a chronic hepatitis C infection. The operation was successful, despite initial incorrect reports on the Internet that he had died. This was the first high-profile organ transplant for a person with HIV in the United States.

After the November 2004 elections, Kramer gave a widely covered speech declaring that gay rights were "officially dead" in America, that most homosexuals were too busy with drugs or sex to care about their future, and that AIDS was exploited as part of a long-range plan by the government to exterminate homosexuals. He also blasted Human Rights Campaign and other gay organizations for what he saw as timidity and selfishness.

Kramer lives in New York and Connecticut with his partner, architect David Webster. He is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Award in Literature, and he is also the first openly gay person to be honored by a Public Service Award from Common Cause.

[edit] Outside Reading

"The Making of an AIDS Activist: Larry Kramer," pp. 162-164, Johansson, Warren and Percy, William A. Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence. New York and London: Haworth Press, 1994.

"Public Nuisance, Larry Kramer the man who warned America about AIDS, can't stop fighting hard and loudly." Michael Specter, The New Yorker, May 13, 2002.