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.
In 1981, Kramer founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first service organization in the country designed to assist HIV-positive patients, but was ousted one year later for his aggressive tactics and rhetoric. On the rebound, he swiftly organized the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), which married AIDS activism to theatrical flair, and the rest is history. Whereas the Gay Men’s Health Crisis emphasized social services and personal assistance, ACT UP was essentially a political organization designed to accelerate the search for drugs and palliative treatments for HIV/AIDS through public pressure.
Kramer’s tactics, which became his signature, were neither subtle nor diplomatic: He routinely accused politicians and public health officials of “genocide,” invaded clinics and church services and scientific conferences with flash mobs, and delighted in personal abuse, once describing Fauci as a “killer [and] incompetent idiot.”
Kramer’s rage and passion were understandable: At the time, a diagnosis of HIV was essentially a death sentence, and Kramer was a gay man whose lawyer father bullied him in childhood as a “sissy” and, following in his father’s footsteps to Yale, attempted suicide during his freshman year because he felt out of place. It was Kramer’s conviction that both the federal government, notably the Food and Drug Administration, and medical researchers were slow to respond to AIDS, or worse, indifferent to its effects and long-term implications because most of its initial victims were homosexual. His best-known work for the stage, The Normal Heart (1985), chronicled the suffering of his circle of friends in New York at the hands of the mysterious killer.
In one sense, Kramer had a point. In the high tide of the HIV/AIDS crisis from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, the urgent process of researching and developing a medical protocol for the treatment of HIV (for which there remains no vaccine) and saving lives could be frustratingly slow and deliberate. In the words of the New York Times, Fauci “credited Kramer with playing an ‘essential’ role in the development of elaborate drug regimens … and in prompting the [FDA] to streamline its assessment and approval of certain new drugs,” for which Kramer deserves full credit.
At the same time, there are troublesome echoes in the age of COVID-19. What Kramer mistook for deliberate bigotry or incompetence was the gradual realization in the early 1980s of the nature of a host of bewildering symptoms that defied conventional treatment and proved fatal. Then as now, the development of palliative drugs and vaccines is not solely a matter of funding or official mobilization but the careful, deliberate processes of scientific research. Miracles cannot be mandated. Then, too, Kramer’s deliberately incendiary language has become habitual in our politics: “I discovered that anger got you further than being nice,” he once explained.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
