Larry Kramer

Kramer was born June 25, 1935, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to a government attorney father and a mother who worked as a Red Cross social worker; he grew up, by his own account, feeling like an unwanted child of the Depression. At Yale, which he entered in 1953, the isolation nearly killed him — convinced he was the only gay student on campus, he swallowed a bottle of aspirin in an attempted suicide. He recovered, found a first requited relationship with one of his professors, sang in the Glee Club, and graduated in 1957 with a degree in English before serving a stint in the Army Reserve. Nothing in the record yet suggested the man who would spend the 1980s screaming at the federal government in print and in the streets.

He earned an Academy Award nomination for his 1969 screenplay of Women in Love, then detonated his own reputation in the gay press with the 1978 novel Faggots. In August 1981, watching friends fall sick with a disease no one yet had a name for, he called a meeting in his apartment that became Gay Men's Health Crisis the next year; the group he helped start ousted him in 1983 for being too confrontational about official indifference. He founded ACT UP in 1987 instead, telling its first crowd that if the speech did not scare them, they were in real trouble, and led it into the civil disobedience — 17 arrests at the FDA that March alone — that forced faster drug approval. His 1985 play, The Normal Heart, dramatized the same fight and has since been staged more than 600 times.

The book that made him notorious inside his own community, Faggots, got him barred from Manhattan's gay bookstore and, he said, his neighborhood grocery store — a preview of a pattern that ran through his whole career, in which the people most affected by what he was fighting for often could not stand him. Doctors discovered he was HIV-positive in 1988, almost by accident, during surgery for a hernia that also turned up liver damage from hepatitis B. By 2001 the liver was failing, and Mount Sinai in New York rejected him for a transplant at 66; a Pittsburgh hospital took the case instead and gave him a new liver that December. He married his longtime partner, David Webster, in 2013, in the intensive care unit where he was recovering from surgery.

He died of pneumonia on May 27, 2020, a month short of his eighty-fifth birthday. The reputation had already turned by then: Anthony Fauci, whom Kramer once called a murderer in an open letter, spent his later career calling him a hero and a friend, and has credited ACT UP's confrontational tactics with reshaping how the government tests and approves drugs during epidemics. The Normal Heart returned to Broadway in 2011 and became an HBO film in 2014 that won an Emmy, decades after its 1985 premiere at the Public Theater. In 2020 the Stonewall Inn added him to its National LGBTQ Wall of Honor — official recognition for a man who spent four decades making officialdom uncomfortable.

Larry Kramer's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Women in Love film
  Oscar-nominated screenplay adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's novel 1969
• Faggots book
  Novel that got him banned from a Fire Island bookstore and his own grocery store 1978
• Gay Men's Health Crisis company
  Co-founded, then ousted from its board within a year 1982
• The Normal Heart other
  Autobiographical play about the earliest years of the AIDS crisis 1985
• ACT UP company
  AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, founded to force faster drug approval 1987
• The American People book
  Two-volume novel-history of gay life in America, decades in the writing 2015

• 1957 aged ~22 Graduates from Yale with a degree in English
• 1969 aged ~34 Earns an Academy Award nomination for the Women in Love screenplay
• 1978 aged ~43 Publishes Faggots to fierce backlash in the gay press
• August 1981 aged 46 Convenes the apartment meeting that becomes Gay Men's Health Crisis
• 1982 aged ~47 Co-founds Gay Men's Health Crisis
• 1985 aged ~50 The Normal Heart premieres at the Public Theater
• March 24, 1987 aged 51 Leads ACT UP's first protest, at the FDA
• 1988 aged ~53 Learns he is HIV-positive during surgery for a hernia
• December 21, 2001 aged 66 Receives a liver transplant in Pittsburgh

• Anthony Fauci b. 1940
  Physician-scientist who shaped federal responses to HIV/AIDS, emerging infections, and the COVID-19 pandemic. called a murderer, later a friend
• Ryan White 1971–1990
  Teenager with HIV/AIDS whose fight against discrimination changed public perception of the epidemic. fought for federal AIDS funding alongside
• David Ho b. 1952
  Physician-scientist whose research helped establish combination antiretroviral therapy as the standard treatment for HIV/AIDS. AIDS-research ally