LARRY KRAMER IS DEAD TO ME

OBIT

Right now the only obit is behind the NYT paywall. As soon as I see another one I will post it.

Sad! May he rest in peace (or be reborn in a good life, etc.)!

LARRY!

MARY!

It does not appear to be the rona. Husband says it was pneumonia.

They won't get any sleep up there with Kramer's righteous anger echoing off the clouds.

QUE ?

Larry Kramer, Author and Outspoken AIDS Activist, Dies at 84 He worked hard to shock the country into dealing with AIDS as a public-health emergency. But his often abusive approach could overshadow his achievements.

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.

His husband, David Webster, said the cause was pneumonia. Mr. Kramer had weathered illness for much of his adult life. Among other things he had been infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, contracted liver disease and underwent a successful liver transplant.

Mr. Kramer was a founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first service organization for H.I.V.-positive people, in 1981. His fellow directors effectively kicked him out a year later for his aggressive approach, and he returned the compliment by calling them “a sad organization of sissies.”

He was then a founder of a more militant group, Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), whose street actions demanding a speedup in AIDS drugs research and an end to discrimination against gay men and lesbians severely disrupted the operations of government offices, Wall Street and the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

“One of America’s most valuable troublemakers,” Susan Sontag called him.

Even some of the officials Mr. Kramer accused of “murder” and “genocide” recognized that his outbursts were part of a strategy to shock the country into dealing with AIDS as a public-health emergency.

In the early 1980s, he was among the first activists to foresee that what had at first caused alarm as a rare form of cancer among gay men would spread worldwide, like any other sexually transmitted disease, and kill millions of people without regard to sexual orientation. Under the circumstances, he said, “If you write a calm letter and fax it to nobody, it sinks like a brick in the Hudson.”

The infectious-disease expert Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was one who got the message — after Mr. Kramer wrote an open letter published in The San Francisco Examiner in 1988 calling him a killer and “an incompetent idiot.”

“Once you got past the rhetoric,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview for this obituary, “you found that Larry Kramer made a lot of sense, and that he had a heart of gold.”

Mr. Kramer, he said, had helped him to see how the federal bureaucracy was indeed slowing the search for effective treatments. He credited Mr. Kramer with playing an “essential” role in the development of elaborate drug regimens that could prolong the lives of those infected with H.I.V., and in prompting the Food and Drug Administration to streamline its assessment and approval of certain new drugs.

In recent years Mr. Kramer developed a grudging friendship with Dr. Fauci, particularly after Mr. Kramer developed liver disease and underwent the transplant in 2001; Dr. Fauci helped get him into a lifesaving experimental drug trial afterward.

Their bond grew stronger this year, when Dr. Fauci became the public face of the White House task force on the coronavirus epidemic, opening him to criticism in some quarters.

“We are friends again,” Mr. Kramer said in an email to the reporter John Leland of The New York Times for an article published at the end of March. “I’m feeling sorry for how he’s being treated. I emailed him this, but his one line answer was, ‘Hunker down.’”

At his death Mr. Kramer was at work on a play centered on the epidemic. “It’s about gay people having to live through three plagues,” he told Mr. Leland — H.I.V./AIDS, Covid-19 and the decline of the human body, an inevitability brought home to him last year when he fell and broke a leg in his apartment, then lay on the floor for hours waiting for a home attendant to arrive.

Master of Provocation 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 his abusive ways sometimes overshadowed his achievements as an author and social activist.

The Hollywood Reporter still has up their pending obit.

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.

“Faggots” drew a line between Mr. Kramer and a significant number of gay men, who saw him as an old-fashioned moralist or even a hysteric. In various forums well into the 1990s, he found himself called on to defend his point of view, which was essentially that gay men and lesbians had a diminished chance of living fulfilling lives or producing great art so long as they defined themselves primarily in terms of their sexual orientation.

He preached not only protected sex but also the virtues of affection, commitment and stability — arguments that anticipated the values of the movement for same-sex marriage.

An Uneasy Childhood Laurence David Kramer was born on June 25, 1935, in Bridgeport, Conn., the second son of George and Rea (Wishengrad) Kramer. George Kramer had earned undergraduate and law degrees from Yale University but was unable to make a decent living during the Depression. Rea Kramer supported the family by working in a shoe store and teaching English to immigrants. In 1941, George got a government job in Washington, and the family moved.

By his own account, Larry had a miserable childhood and hated his father. His protective older brother, Arthur, was the scholar-athlete of the family, on his way to becoming a prominent lawyer. Larry read the Hollywood gossip columns.

“From the day Larry was born until the day my father died, they were antagonists,” Arthur Kramer told Vanity Fair in 1992.

Nor were the two brothers always on the easiest terms. In Mr. Kramer’s autobiographical 1985 play, “The Normal Heart,” Arthur Kramer is represented by the character Ben Weeks, a man with ambivalent feelings about his brother’s homosexuality. But they shared an abiding affection until Arthur’s death in 2008. Arthur gave $1 million to Yale in 2001 to establish the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and his law firm became active in pro bono work for causes like same-sex marriage.

Larry Kramer himself married his partner, Mr. Webster, in 2013, in a ceremony in the intensive care unit of NYU Langone Medical Center, where Mr. Kramer was recovering from surgery for a bowel obstruction.

In 1953, Mr. Kramer, like his father and brother before him, enrolled at Yale. He studied English literature, tried to commit suicide once and had a liberating affair with a male professor.

After graduating in 1957 and serving a tour in the Army, he worked in New York, first for the William Morris Agency and then for Columbia Pictures. In 1961, Columbia sent him to London, where he worked as production executive on “Dr. Strangelove” and “Lawrence of Arabia.” He returned to the United States in 1972.

He got into AIDS work in the summer of 1981 after reading an article about deadly cases of a rare cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, among young gay men. It had previously been associated mostly with older men. A meeting of about 80 people in his New York apartment the next week led to the formation of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.

For the next several years, Mr. Kramer threw himself into fund-raising, lobbying and confrontation, and also into his writing. His landmark essay “1,112 and Counting,” which appeared in the March 14, 1983, issue of The New York Native, was one of many articles taking gay men to task for apathy.

‘The Normal Heart’ 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.”

That production won the Tony Award for best revival of a play. An HBO adaptation, written by Mr. Kramer, won the 2014 Emmy for outstanding television movie.

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.

The next year, tests confirmed what Mr. Kramer had long suspected: He was carrying the virus that causes AIDS.

“A new fear has now joined my daily repertoire of emotions, and my nighttime ones, too,” he wrote in the afterword to a later edition of his 1989 book, “Reports From the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist.” “But life has also become exceptionally more precious and, ironically, I am happier.”

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.”

As the play came to life during rehearsals at the Circle Repertory Company, Mr. Kramer wrote, it was a revelation even to him: “The father I’d hated became someone sad to me; and the mother I’d adored became a little less adorable, and no less sad.”

He and Mr. Webster, an architect, began living together in 1994, and Mr. Kramer was able to devote much of his time to writing, in spite of being ill for many more years. Believing that he would die soon, he began putting his literary affairs in order. In fact, The Associated Press reported in 2001 that he had died.

The real plot twist, though, was that the H.I.V. infection had not progressed; he instead had terminal liver disease, traceable to a hepatitis B infection decades earlier. He underwent the liver transplant in Pittsburgh a few days before Christmas 2001.

At the same time, he had been working on a mammoth project, a historical novel called “The American People,” by which he meant the gay American people — a central tenet of which was that many of the country’s historically important figures, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, had had homosexual relationships.

A first volume, almost 800 pages long, was published in 2015. Volume 2, more than 80 pages longer, was published in 2020.

The reviews for “The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart” were not kind. Dwight Garner of The Times, for example, called it “a frantic novel that builds up little to no narrative momentum.”

“It wasn’t given much serious attention,” Mr. Kramer told The Times in 2017. “Most people seemed to review me, not the book: Loudmouth activist Larry Kramer has written a loudmouth book.”

“The American People, Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact,” whose protagonist was based on Mr. Kramer, took its story almost to the present and took scabrous aim at characters clearly based on Ronald Reagan, Hugh Hefner and others. The reviews were not much better.

But while Mr. Garner for one found much to dislike, his Times review was not unsympathetic.

“It’s a mess, a folly covered in mirrored tiles, but somehow it’s a beautiful and humane one,” he wrote. “I can’t say I liked it. Yet, on a certain level, I loved it.”

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.

[quote]“Once you got past the rhetoric,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview for this obituary, “you found that Larry Kramer made a lot of sense, and that he had a heart of gold.”

To be able to say that shows a lot of character.

He had a hot ass but he couldn’t last forever.

I loved this bitchy cunt! 😍❤️😰

A hero to me. RIP.

He could be a huge cunt, but he cared, and he was right in many ways.

We have lost someone who cared enough to fight.....RIP

I thought he'd keep on going forever through sheer willpower. RIP.

He was a hero to me as well. RIP Mr. Kramer. Well done.

FAGGOTS was a great novel. Funny, bitchy and it completely laid open the dysfunctional world of the gay and lesbian world.

Just another horror to befall us during this endless nightmare.

A cunt maybe, but a heroic cunt with a heart of gold.

What the heck? No way is he gone!

If anyone, Larry Kramer deserves a better headline than the cheap shot here.

Larry's landmark essay

"At the same time, he had been working on a mammoth project, a historical novel called “The American People,” by which he meant the gay American people — a central tenet of which was that many of the country’s historically important figures, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, had had homosexual relationships."

I read the first edition and love it and I am what a gat DLer would call the Frauest of the Fraus. Larry Kramer could write!

I do not want this man to rest in peace, I want a second coming.

Larry Kramer did more for AIDS in the 80's than any politician.

That's why people who bitch and moan about "Hollywood" and how celebrities need to shut up and not voice their opinions can fuck off.

Entertainers were there for us when the President of the United States wouldn't even utter the word AIDS in public. They were responsible for spreading the word and calming people's fears. Calling people out on their bigotry. Demanding government DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING.

Liz Taylor was another hero.

I shudder to think where we would even be without either of their voices.

Dead to me is the DL tradition r26, its not a cheap shot

I met him once at a gay and lesbian studies conference at Yale in 1991 or so. The New Haven police had arrested some people at the conference for putting up posters in the streets with an explicit Tom of Finland illustration. When a meeting was convened to figure out how to respond, he stood up nearly screaming, and he was so angry both with the police (whom he compared to the Gestapo) and the conference organizers for not doing more to get the attendees out of jail he was literally spitting. I had never seen someone so angry before.

Mr. Kramer was what and who he was. If you didn't want to have dinner with him, at least recognize his lasting and critical contributions to counter the shameful ignorance and hateful dismissal of what HIV and the AIDS catastrophe did to us and the world.

And anyone who is gay who is ignorant and dismissed the lessons of the early AIDS epidemic, read your history.

In part you're seeing it repeat. In other ways you need to know that the same right wing and "shhhh" "progressive" do-nothings would sell your life for a quarter at any drop of the Dow or homophobic hiccup in society.

Silence IS death, and today most people are silent.

Who will inherit the scarves?

I agree. He was often infuriating, but necessary. NORMAL HEART is a classic of its kind. He made us all pay attention. RIP

This is a terrible day for ME.

Wow so DL crashed for a little bit once the news broke.

The only time I have experienced Datalounge crashing based on current evens was during Jodie Foster's infamous Golden Globes speech.

I was lucky to have had dinner with Larry Kramer, and he was smart and charming and funny and wicked and compassionate and so curious about everything, asking a thousand questions and listening to every reply, finding the things we had in common. He never wanted to be the subject of conversation, not at dinner anyway. Working with him could go either way or both: scary enraged or the heart of gold, usually at least a fair dose of the former, but at dinner, he was utterly charming. I'll remember angry Larry and charming, vital Larry.

The angels better have their shit together or Larry is gonna let them have it!

Wow. Sad. RIP.

I don't think DL crashed because of news of Larry's death. There just haven't been enough posts on this or the other threads to make that likely.

I knew from friends who knew him that he was a very difficult person to know, and almost impossible to maintain a friendship with unless your skin was as thick as the plating on a battleship. But he was a great leader. I would have been so curious to see how his psychiatrists diagnosed his anger problem. He had it long before the AIDS crisis started (as his novel "Faggots" will attest--it goes back to his childhood and his abusive father). It was great though that he learned how to harness it for drawing attention to the inaction over AIDS.

One of the things about great leaders who rise up out of nowhere is that they often have psychological conditions that can be usefully harnessed for their causes. If the cause had never been necessary, they would have led very different lives.

May he Rest In Peace!

[quote]Dead to me is the DL tradition [R26], its not a cheap shot

No shit, he deserves better.

R26 wants to speak to the manager

[quote]he fell and broke a leg in his apartment, then lay on the floor for hours waiting for a home attendant to arrive.

Well, I hope he used his time wisely. Perhaps working on that play.

Thanks Larry for the screaming and shouting, for GMHC, for ACTUP, for the plays the books. For giving a fuck. And for being you.

RIP

He was a pain in the ass, but that's what made him so effective.

He completely changed the way America, and much of the world, saw HIV.

IMHO, he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize for his revolution

The Normal Heart is such a heart wrenching play. The TV version doesn't even come close to how effective this is in the theatre

If you have a minute, watch this September 1982 street interview. Early days and you can see his passion and anger peeking through.

He's FINE.

He sends his contempt.

Why isn't anyone even focusing on how I am taking the news? What it's been like for ME?? How broken MY normal heat is from the tragedy?

R51 meet R35.

R51 Nobody finds you funny!

LARRY!

r48 - I can only imagine. I only saw the HBO version and was still deeply moved. Lord, Joe Mantello's monologue had me frozen.

You cunts wish you had an ounce of his courage. RIP Larry.

Omg, I’d love to have had dinner with him R32. He was one of the only NY personages I wanted to meet that I wasn’t able. I would be very scared though, and probably hide immediately upon greeting him.

Is The American People good?

[quote]Four years later, Mr. Kramer wrote the screenplay for the ill-fated musical remake of the classic 1937 film “Lost Horizon.”

I never miss a Liv Ullmann musical.

I read "Faggots" at a really difficult time for me ... I was still coming to terms with my sexuality and it scared the hell out of me. I thought being gay meant being like the characters in the book and I was appalled by most of them. So, thanks for scaring me back into the closet, Lar.

A true hero.

One of my great gay heros. Well done, Larry.

Larry Kramer - In Love and Anger.

Was he in Follies?

R63 Yes, he was a fabulous Phyllis.

‘The Normal Heart’ Director Ryan Murphy Praises Larry Kramer As ‘The Most Important Gay Activist Of All Time”

He was probably exhausting to hang out with, but you’d learn a lot.

I find Lady Murphy and his stable of faghags and girly boys exhausting.

I’m sure they are devastated, r67

People don't pass they DIE. I hate this respectful shit. People died of aids. They die from all kinds of illnesses, of old age and in accidents. Everybody who says pass as if the deceased were a character in an old Hollywood film who closes their eyes peacefully and then never wakes up deserves a slap.

And yes R26 is an idiot.

Good works, but a tiresomely cantankerous man.

[quote]I find Lady Murphy and his stable of faghags and girly boys exhausting.

Well, seeing you will never work or even meet any of them, you should be well rested.

“It’s all there – all through history we’ve been there, but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what’s in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighbourhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we’re doomed. That’s how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war.”

Heartbroken.

R72 - is that from the Normal Heart, a speech...?

People who are too young to know of Larry’s work in the age of AIDS don’t realize how important he was. I hope history regards him as important as Harvey Milk was to LGBT history.

This was a young Larry.

I’m shocked.

Say hi to all your friends Koch killed, Larry, wherever you are!

As irascible as you were, we as a community owe you a deep debt of gratitude.

So sad, so really fucking sad. What a man.

...and Lost Horizon is fucking brilliant.

❤️❤️

"A scathing look at promiscuous sex"

Wasn't that what fueled his righteous anger, that he was too unappealing to get fucked? His envy ate him up inside.

how do you fit 80 men into a NYC apartment?

"Omg, I’d love to have had dinner with him"

He'd regard you with a dim sneer, critique your every bite and excuse himself for the restroom- but leave and stick you with the check.

I wonder how much these guys pay their "longtime companions" to stay with them so they won't have an obituary that indicates "died alone"?

I read an article a few years ago where the author interviewed Larry & his husband David.

His book "Faggots" was about falling in love with the rakish David. David didn't want to settle down & wanted to screw everything in sight They came back into each other's lives 20 years later and were together for the next 31 years.

They really had a loving and devoted life together.

RIP Larry

[quote]how do you fit 80 men into a NYC apartment?

He had a place at 2 Fifth Ave., overlooking Washington Square Park, bought many years ago. I never saw it but it wasn't tiny, but like most apartments and even large houses not an easy place to fit 80 people for a meeting. His husband is an architect and they built a big country house on some acreage on a lake in Litchfield County in the 1990s. They sold it about several years ago.

PBS NewsHour:

WATCH: Dr. Anthony Fauci remembers the late HIV/AIDS activist Larry Kramer:

"He was just an extraordinary man. ... He changed the relationship between the afflicted community with a given disease and the scientific and regulatory community that has such a great impact on them."

What did he live on for 40 years- selling ACTUP paraphernalia? And in expensive NYC? Selling a couple screenplays 50 years ago couldn't have been that lucrative.

R84: His big earnings were invested by his lawyer brother.

Nice memory from Fauci, R83.

People fixate on Kramer's style, but it was just style: abrasive, headache-inducing, angering, severe, but all to a point. His point was that he changed the world, as Fauci says, of how treatments are developed for patients - of all serious disease, not just HIV.

The gays who dismiss Kramer with their silly speeches about "more flies from honey" will one day benefit--either themselves or their loved ones--from Kramer's work throwing vinegar around.

he had that certain look with the naso-labial folds in a perpetual sneer, and his eccentric way of dressing. By all accounts he was a difficult man, even outside of AIDS activism.

He was sort of like an Elie Wiesel type figure: unconcerned with how he presented outwardly to humanity, absorbed only in his only work and message.

R78, around the time FAGGOTS was published there was this interview Vito Russo had with Larry Kramer. Larry's showing off his pecs and you can see he has a nice body. In fact, in his day, he got plenty of ass.

What fueled his righteous anger was the behavior of stupid faggots like you.

So fuck you, you snide cunt.

I loved Larry Kramer's book FAGGOTS. I have read it more than once.

Of course, what he wrote in that novel was true.

How did a man who was at the forefront of the AIDS crisis wind up being infected with HIV himself?

He was the one advocating for abstinence.

Because he was diagnosed after AIDS kicked in, dummy R91. And here's another concept: all it takes is to have sex with one person who has it.

how did he qualify for a liver transplant? as far as I know he didn’t just have a silently controlled HIV infection, he was frequently suffering from acute HIV illnesses and on lots of different treatments of varying success.

Fauci recommended his liver transplant, I believe. Fauci definitely helped him get advanced treatment. I have no problem with that. Do you, R93?

I'd say Larry Kramer did plenty for a lot f people. He deserved his liver transplant.And indeed, he lived 7 years after it.

[quote] And here's another concept: all it takes is to have sex with one person who has it.

So he was diagnosed at the very beginning?

And, no, all it takes is to have UNSAFE sex with one person who has it.

Fixded.

BTW, I have no problem with Larry and posted above that we owe him a deep debt of gratitude. I was just genuinely curious and surprised that he was HIV positive. I thought he was one of the ones who “escaped” the initial crisis.

"Fixded."

Oh, my sides, R95!

AIDS incubated in people. He could have gotten it years before 1981. Dummy.

You’re completely missing my point.

In the very beginning of AIDS, no one knew what caused it, how it was transmitted, etc., but what was known back then was if you got it, you died. It was a literal death sentence then.

What I’m asking is if he was among the first to get it, how did he not die like the others? And if he wasn’t among the first, when did he get it? I don’t mean the exact time, I’m talking about generally, such as in 1988 or 1993 or whenever.

Stop being a cunt because someone is asking questions of your hero, whom I’ve already lauded as one.

R98, since your tone is accusatory of him, you're the cunt. Second, not everyone died from it. I've heard of people who were diagnosed early with HIV (which is what happened with him) and they didn't die from it. I personally know someone who was diagnosed in 1986. He's still alive and he's doing well. Kramer was diagnosed long before 1988 or 1993.

R91 There are no words for the stupidity of this question!

Not everyone progresses on the same time table with HIV infection. There is great variability. Also condoms break. R91 I hope you are just young and naive.

Funny how medical researchers found two hookers in Kenya who have an alleged resistance to HIV several years ago and now no one ever talks about it anymore. This was supposed to be big news. What happened?

According to Wiki Larry was diagnosed in 1988. He was hospitalized for a congenital hernia & required surgery. During surgery they found liver damage due to a past infection of Hepatitis B. They then diagnosed him with HIV.

R91 why are any gay men still testing positive? We've all been educated. We are all aware. A good friend of mine who worked for GMHC and did AIDS/condom outreach at Roxy c. 2001 seroconverted around 2004. And I can think of two guys I know from the sober community in NYC who tested positive after they became sober.

At times, sexual urges, thoughts, feelings, chemistry, impulses etc can be very powerful given the right situation, so much so that they can overwhelm rational thought, which is where all one has been taught about safe sex and AIDS prevention reside.

The Times printed this appraisal today from their theatre critic

Larry Kramer, Prophet and Pussycat

On the stage and on the page, his fury was fueled by an often-cloaked belief in the power of love.

By Jesse Green

On the same sweltering Dallas day that later found him screaming at a crowd of gay revelers, I saw Larry Kramer offer water to a horse.

That was at the start of the city’s 2009 Pride parade, in which Mr. Kramer, the honorary grand marshal, was drawn along the route in a flower-bedecked open carriage, looking like a blissed-out maharajah. “But won’t the horse be thirsty?” he worried. “Let’s see if he’ll drink something.”

The horse was confused, and so was I. Mr. Kramer, who died on Wednesday at 84, was far better known as an apostle of anger than a pussycat. In his many careers — activist, journalist, playwright, novelist, curmudgeon — he had served as a kind of reverse lightning rod, drawing out homophobia from American society to light up the sky with danger.

But to really understand plays like “The Normal Heart” and “The Destiny of Me,” and novels like “Faggots” and “The American People,” you needed to know, or sense between the lines of their barely redacted ire, his other side. This was a man who, lonely and self-hating, tried to commit suicide as an undergraduate at Yale; who, obsessed but patient, waited decades to snag the man he loved; who, after alienating many of his friends and allies, cried and cajoled until most of them once again succumbed to his sweetness. To be on his A-list you had first to be in his doghouse.

That combination of mush and belligerence made Mr. Kramer especially difficult to categorize as a playwright. “The Normal Heart,” first performed at the Public Theater in 1985, is a fairly accurate and nearly contemporaneous retelling of his own experience at the beginning of AIDS. It sets forth in plain scenes the story of how he helped create the service and advocacy organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis only to be kicked out when his tactics no longer seemed respectable. For its unblinking portrait of a city bureaucracy and a besieged community unable or unwilling to act, some decried it as a screed; for its story of human love and loss — the Kramer character marries his boyfriend as the boyfriend languishes on his deathbed — others dismissed it as sentimental.

It was neither, or perhaps it was what happens when something is exceedingly both. Mr. Kramer hated attempts to dismiss his work as “merely” political, and yet he sniffed at the pretentiousness of those who would call it art. He wanted to erase the arbitrary line between agitprop and aesthetics, since neither of them alone addressed the apparently bottomless drives pushing him in opposite directions, toward engagement and denunciation. He was happy with the word “reportage.”

Yet “The Normal Heart” (and I’d argue as well for “The Destiny of Me” and “Faggots”) is more art than he was willing to allow. That a play actually changed lives in real time, as the 1985 production did, can hardly be held against it. But the real test of “The Normal Heart” came when it made its Broadway debut a quarter of a century later.

Somewhat removed from the heat of the crisis — though Mr. Kramer characteristically stood outside the John Golden Theater handing out fliers reminding playgoers that AIDS wasn’t over — it had to stand on its own internal merits and blazingly did. Time allowed it to be seen as part of a lineage of drama that derives from the classic Greek plays of fate and hubris. Such plays don’t observe distinctions between politics and poetry; they get to the catharsis of pure shared grief not with needles but with hammers.

Hammer wielders don’t win Nobel Prizes, as Mr. Kramer probably should have, if not for literature then for implacability. His reputation is based not only on “The Normal Heart” and its 1992 follow-up “The Destiny of Me,” both real-time news tickers, but also on “Faggots,” published in 1978. That novel foresaw the way promiscuity, fueled by alcohol, drugs and self-hatred, was destroying the greatest part of gayness and would soon devastate gay men themselves. Though it reads as satire (the Kramer stand-in is called Fred Lemish) and was roundly despised by the community it depicted, in hindsight it is nothing less than a Book of Jeremiah, if Jeremiah were on the prowl in the Fire Island Pines.

The surprise when you get under the hood of Mr. Kramer’s work is that fury is not the engine. Looking for love — “Not universal love/But to be loved alone,” as Auden put in the poem that gave “The Normal Heart” its name — is what makes the plays go, though part of the drama is the effort they make to hide or contradict that. Even “The American People,” his monumental and nearly insane two-part, 1,700-page novel reframing of the history of the United States as a tale of gay vs. evil, is ultimately a work of romance. It comes to life most successfully when it considers (or fantasizes) Abraham Lincoln in bed with Joshua Speed or “major gay” George Washington and the “love of his life,” Alexander Hamilton. The rest is a carapace, a refuge.

Anger, then, was Larry Kramer’s closet — what he showed the world first. Back in Dallas, at the end of the parade route, his message to the barely listening crowd was a classic harangue in that vein: You are hated, you are passive, you need to be screaming like banshees. But even then, as in his plays, his motive was that of a man who would offer a horse a drink. He knew what thirst was.

According to the HBO documentary about Kramer, he made so much money for his Lost Horizon script that he could have retired right then.

It seems he lived off of those funds forever

He must have got the money up front. It was Ross Hunter's last film when he could have continued for many more years. I imagine the fortune he made from Airport was enormous.

Kramer's screenplay for LH is absolutely one of the worst ever for a major Hollywood production. Written as if Hunter gathered together some of his pre-teen nieces and nephews and asked them to write the script.

So are we saying that he was an AIDS activist for 8 years and never was tested? Can you go multiple years without being detectable back then? Without drugs?

You think they had a test in 1981 R109? Oh my sides!

For the first half of the eighties AIDS might have been caused by indoor track lighting on gray carpet for what anyone knew, just ask the hemophiliacs of that time. Oh wait, you can’t because they are all dead.

R110 - Love you ElderLez!!

Love you too R111.

I did steal that indoor track lighting comment from someone else. I *think* it came from from David B. Feinberg, but it was 30 years ago so not entirely sure.

Not in 1981 - but HIV testing was available in 1985, so 3-4 years before Kramer was diagnosed. Did he not get tested? Just seems weird.

It's kind of fascinating to me that his death was upstaged in the press by events in Minneapolis, of all places.

One of the things about Larry Kramer was that he was so incredibly narcissistic that he always acted during the 1980s as if the entire country outside of New York City and Fire Island didn't even exist. He always talked about the New York Times as if it were the only newspaper in the entire country, and about Ed Koch as if he were somehow the vice-president rather than the mayor. (He could acknowledge there was a Hollywood he once worked in, and a DC where Reagan lived, and a New Haven where he went to school--but that was basically it.)

[quote] According to the HBO documentary about Kramer, he made so much money for his Lost Horizon script that he could have retired right then. It seems he lived off of those funds forever

It wasn't the money itself for writing "Lost Horizon" as much as what his brother did with that money. His brother was an investment banker, and turned immediately invested that money for him, and made Larry Kramer millions (literally). That's how LK managed to live in the 80s and thereafter in a beautiful and large Manhattan apartment without having to work.

He also had the income of his partner who was an architect.

R114

Larry dragged Reagan for filth. What are you talking about, Willis?

He and Meryl Streep were sensational in that groundbreaking movie about divorce.

That wasn’t him, you idiot.

He played the neighbor on that Seinfeld show.

While testing may have become available, many gay men didn’t rush out to get tested. There was no treatment so why bother?

[quote] Larry dragged Reagan for filth. What are you talking about, Willis?

In no way does that negate my post. Of course you pay attention to the person you hate the most if you're an extreme narcissist. You define them against yourself and yourself against them.

Was Kramer even even nominated for a Nobel Prize in Peace? He deserved it as his work affected the world

One doesn’t normally associate the word “peace” with Larry, but I get your point.

I think the Presidential Medal of Freedom would have been more apropos.