When Larry Kramer died of pneumonia last week in Manhattan at age 84, the New York Times described him in its headline as a “playwright and outspoken AIDS activist.” In its obituary, however, the first post-mortem quotation came from Dr. Anthony Fauci: “Once you got past the rhetoric,” Fauci said, “you found that Larry Kramer made a lot of sense and that he had a heart of gold.” Which may well be true. Still, if a playwright’s death is most prominently noted by the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and not a fellow writer or scholar of literature, it’s probably closer to the truth to describe him as an outspoken AIDS activist who was also a playwright.

Either way, Kramer’s anger at the emergence of the human immunodeficiency virus, the virus that leads to AIDS and initially devastated the gay community in America, four decades ago was what transformed him from a rising movie production executive (Dr. Strangelove) and Oscar-nominated screenwriter (Women in Love) into the celebrated scourge of the federal government and the scientific establishment during the AIDS pandemic.