In the documentary “How to Survive a Plague,” Larry Kramer silences a room full of AIDS activists with just one word. The scene takes place in 1991, a decade into the epidemic, and the members of Act Up, an organization Mr. Kramer helped found, are squabbling. “Plague!” he yells, stilling the room. He resumes, adding a few profanities that are omitted here. “We are in the middle of a plague! And you behave like this! Plague! Forty million infected people is a plague!” Mr. Kramer glowers like an Old Testament prophet. “Until we get our acts together, all of us, we are as good as dead.”
Let it be said that Mr. Kramer, now 81 and frail from illness, still does righteous fury like no one else.
He arrived in New York in 1958, after six months of compulsory military service, paying $20 a week for a big room on East 66th Street and working in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency. Since then, he has written an Oscar-nominated movie, started and feuded with two AIDS organizations, won a Tony Award and two Obies, been declared dead by a news service, called government officials idiots and murderers, compared friends to Nazi war criminals and been the first-ever recipient of the Larry Kramer Activism Award. Even people he excoriated say he helped save tens of thousands of lives. He has had his moments. When it comes to alienating people, Mr. Kramer’s closest friend once told The New Yorker, “Larry is a virtuoso with no peer.”
Now Mr. Kramer is running out of time and money, trying to finish the second volume of a novel whose 800-page first volume was widely dismissed. At an age he never expected to reach, married to a man he once skewered in print, he speaks softly and wears turquoise jewelry to ward off dangers to his health. His hearing aids emit occasional yawps of feedback.
On a spring afternoon in his cluttered Greenwich Village apartment, he was still restless, taking stock of his life. “I spend a lot of time now that I’m coming to the end, trying to look back,” he said. “Was I really happy? What are the happy memories I had? It’s often hard to come up with many of them.”
Mr. Kramer wearing turquoise jewelry to ward off dangers to his health.Credit...Joshua Bright for The New York Times He said he only recently learned to accept that his husband could really love him. “Isn’t everyone like that?” he asked. “Do you feel loved?”
He added, “Perhaps my basic dissatisfactions are what motivate me.”
Mr. Kramer grew up outside Washington, the younger of two sons born to a Yale-educated lawyer and a Red Cross social worker. Arthur Kramer, eight years older, was the athletic son their father wanted; Larry, unhappy as a child, put on plays in his bedroom, “pretending someone was applauding me for my wonderful performance,” he said. When he swallowed an overdose of aspirin his freshman year at Yale, Arthur got Larry into therapy. “If it weren’t for my brother, I probably wouldn’t be alive today,” Larry said.
For Mr. Kramer, New York in the 1960s and ’70s was a haven of sexual revolution, which he both participated in and later criticized. He had returned to the city from London after writing the screenplay for “Women in Love,” which featured a nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed and earned him an Oscar nomination. His next screenplay was for “Lost Horizon,” which he called the worst movie ever made, but which made him rich.
“There was a lot of cruising on the streets,” he said of New York when he arrived. “That’s how people met each other. I remember the first time I went to Fire Island. I stayed in a tent. That’s all they had, big tents. You were really camping out.”
It is tempting to imagine that Mr. Kramer came into the world screaming “plague” and never stopped. But this would miss the full story, said Dr. Lawrence D. Mass, a physician and a friend of his for 50 years, through occasional estrangements and recriminations.
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