Larry Kramer sparked ACT UP to speed AIDS drugs

Person: Larry Kramer
Lived: 1935–2020
Field: AIDS activism, playwriting
From: American

The story

Larry Kramer, born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1935 to a Jewish family, was a writer who had already helped found Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York in 1982. By 1987 AIDS had killed thousands of Americans, and there were very few treatments. Kramer, who was himself infected with HIV, believed that people were dying while officials waited.

In March 1987 he gave a speech at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York. He asked two thirds of the audience to stand, then told them that at the current rate they could be dead within five years. About 300 people met two days later and formed the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, known as ACT UP. Kramer was its catalyst, and civil disobedience became one of its main tools.

ACT UP's first target was the Food and Drug Administration, which Kramer accused of neglecting badly needed HIV medicines. On 24 March 1987 members blocked rush hour traffic on Wall Street outside the FDA's offices, and 17 people were arrested. On 11 October 1988 an estimated 1,100 to 1,500 protesters shut down FDA headquarters for a day, demanding that experimental drugs be made available more quickly and more fairly. Kramer himself was arrested dozens of times over the years.

The pressure worked. The protests helped push the FDA to speed the approval of new drugs. In the following year the FDA and the National Institutes of Health began asking ACT UP for its input and including activists in decision making, giving the people most affected by the disease a voice in how it was fought. After an ACT UP action at the New York Stock Exchange in September 1989, the drug company Burroughs Wellcome lowered the price of AZT, the main AIDS drug of the time, from about $10,000 to $6,400 per patient per year.

Kramer later stepped back from leading ACT UP, and he eventually became a close friend of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whom he had once attacked. Their journey from adversaries to friends reflected how far the activists had moved the government toward listening to patients.

Why it matters

ACT UP's campaign, sparked by Kramer, helped make promising treatments reach seriously ill patients faster and gave people living with HIV a voice in the research meant to save them.

About Larry Kramer

Playwright who co-founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP, whose protests sped up HIV drug approval and won patients a voice in how new medicines are tested worldwide.

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Larry Kramer

1935–2020 · AIDS activism, playwriting

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