Larry Kramer helped found Gay Men's Health Crisis

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

The story

Larry Kramer was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1935 to a Jewish family. He became a writer in New York. In the summer of 1981, when the disease that would be called AIDS did not yet have a name and only a few dozen people had been diagnosed, Kramer saw friends falling ill and dying of a mysterious 'gay cancer'. He decided that someone had to act.

In August 1981 about 80 men gathered in Kramer's apartment to talk about the illness and to start raising money for research. That informal meeting laid the groundwork for a new organisation. In January 1982 Kramer and five others, Nathan Fain, Lawrence Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport and Edmund White, formally founded Gay Men's Health Crisis, known today as GMHC. It was incorporated in June 1982 and soon became the largest volunteer AIDS organisation in the world.

GMHC filled a gap that government and hospitals were not yet filling. A volunteer, Rodger McFarlane, used an answering machine in his home as the world's first AIDS hotline, and it took more than 100 calls on its first night. In 1982 the group printed 50,000 free copies of its first newsletter for doctors, hospitals and clinics, sharing what little was known about the disease. It also created a Buddy program, in which volunteers helped people with AIDS with their day to day needs as the illness took hold.

Kramer wanted the group to campaign more aggressively, while other board members chose to focus on support services, and he split with GMHC in 1983. But the organisation he helped create kept growing. In 1983 GMHC funded the first AIDS discrimination lawsuit and sponsored the first major AIDS fundraiser. In later decades it offered HIV testing and prevention counselling, nutrition and free hot meals, a food pantry, legal and housing help, mental health support and case management.

GMHC is often described as the world's oldest AIDS service organisation, and through the worst years of the epidemic it cared for the sick and educated doctors and the public when few others would. By 2010 it said it had served more than 100,000 New Yorkers.

Why it matters

GMHC, the organisation Kramer co-founded, still provides HIV testing, prevention, meals, legal help and care in New York, more than four decades after Kramer and his friends first met in his apartment.

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.

Read the full profile

Larry Kramer

1935–2020 · AIDS activism, playwriting

View profile →