An unwanted child in a Jewish family
Laurence David Kramer was born on June 25, 1935, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the younger of two sons in a Jewish family. His father, George, was a lawyer who later took a government job in Washington; his mother, Rea, worked at various times in a shoe shop, as a teacher and as a Red Cross social worker. The family moved to the Maryland suburbs of Washington when Larry was a small boy. Money was tight, and Kramer later described himself as an unwanted child whose parents had struggled through the Depression. His brother Arthur, eight years older, became his protector.
Kramer knew early that he was attracted to men. His father pressed him to join a Jewish fraternity and to marry well. In 1953 he followed his father, brother and two uncles to Yale, where he felt so isolated, he later said, as the only gay student on campus, that he tried to take his own life with an overdose of aspirin. He survived, and the experience left him determined to fight for the worth of gay people. He graduated in 1957 with a degree in English and served in the Army Reserve.
Hollywood and a scandalous novel
Kramer began at Columbia Pictures as a teletype operator, choosing the job because the machine sat across the hall from the president’s office, and worked his way into the story department. In London he wrote and produced Women in Love (1969), the film of D. H. Lawrence’s novel, and was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay. He later called his next script, the 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon, the only thing he was truly ashamed of, but the fee, invested by his brother, made him financially independent for the rest of his life.
In 1978 he published Faggots, a satirical novel about the hedonistic gay scene of Fire Island and Manhattan, written from his own longing for love. It caused an uproar. Gay readers and critics accused him of betraying his own community, and a New York gay bookshop took it off its shelves. Yet it became one of the best-selling gay novels ever published, and it established the pattern of his public life: Kramer said what he believed to be true, loudly, and accepted the anger that followed.
Raising the alarm
In 1980 and 1981 Kramer watched friends fall ill with rare cancers and infections that doctors could not explain. In August 1981, months before the disease had a name, he invited a group of gay men to his Manhattan apartment to hear a doctor describe the new illness and the need for research money. Out of that meeting came Gay Men’s Health Crisis, founded with Kramer and others in 1982. It was one of the first organisations anywhere to respond to AIDS, running a hotline that received more than a hundred calls on its first day, and it grew into one of the largest AIDS service organisations in the world.
Kramer wanted GMHC to do more than care for the dying. He wanted it to fight City Hall and Washington for research and funding, and to warn gay men urgently about the risks of sex while the cause of the disease was still unknown. In March 1983 he published an essay, “1,112 and Counting,” in the New York Native, attacking public health agencies, the mayor of New York, Ed Koch, the press and gay men themselves for complacency. The journalist Randy Shilts later called it one of the most influential works of advocacy journalism of the decade. Many fellow activists found his tone alarmist and his attacks on colleagues hurtful, and later that year GMHC’s board forced him out.
The Normal Heart
Kramer channelled his despair into a play, despite having vowed never to write for the stage again. On a trip to Europe after leaving GMHC he visited the Dachau concentration camp and learned it had opened in 1933, years before the world chose to act. The parallel with official indifference to AIDS shaped The Normal Heart, which opened at the Public Theater in New York in April 1985. Its hero, Ned Weeks, is a furious writer, very like Kramer, who nurses his dying lover while battling politicians, the press and an AIDS organisation that finally expels him. Kramer had lost his own partner to AIDS in 1984.
The play ran for a year at the Public Theater and has since been staged hundreds of times around the world, from London to Israel and South Africa. Kramer often stood outside the theatre handing out leaflets telling audiences that AIDS was a worldwide plague with no cure. A 2011 Broadway revival won the Tony Award for best revival of a play, and Kramer’s own screen adaptation for HBO won the Emmy for outstanding television movie in 2014. For many people in the 1980s, The Normal Heart was the first time they had seen the epidemic, and the people dying of it, portrayed with full humanity.
ACT UP and the fight for faster drugs
In March 1987, asked to speak at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York, Kramer told two-thirds of the audience to stand up and said that at the current rate they could be dead within five years. He asked how long it would take them to get angry and fight back. Within days the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, ACT UP, was formed. Its first demonstration, on March 24, 1987, blocked rush-hour traffic on Wall Street to protest the slow pace of drug approval and the price of AZT, then the only approved AIDS drug; seventeen people were arrested. ACT UP went on to stage disciplined civil disobedience at the Food and Drug Administration, the New York Stock Exchange and drug company headquarters, and grew into a network of chapters across the United States and Europe.
The pressure worked. Kramer surrounded himself with young activists who taught themselves immunology and trial design and came to meetings with detailed proposals. Their demand was simple: when people are dying and no proven treatment exists, it is not ethical to make them wait years for every trial to finish. In June 1989 Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, publicly endorsed a “parallel track,” under which promising experimental drugs would be given to patients who could not join controlled trials while those trials continued. The policy was formally adopted in 1992. The same year the FDA introduced accelerated approval, which lets a drug for a serious disease reach the market on the basis of early evidence that it is reasonably likely to help, with confirmatory studies to follow. The first drug approved that way, in June 1992, was an HIV medicine. Burroughs Wellcome also lowered the price of AZT under the pressure of the protests.
How it changed medicine for everyone
These changes reached far beyond AIDS. Accelerated approval has since been used to speed many new medicines for cancer and other serious and rare diseases to patients, and expanded-access programmes for experimental drugs are now a standard part of drug development. Just as important was a change in culture. ACT UP established that patients have a right to a seat at the table: to help design trials, sit on advisory committees and challenge researchers and regulators. Patient groups for breast cancer, rare diseases and many other conditions have since drawn on the same model.
The people who had been Kramer’s targets came to agree. Fauci, whom Kramer had attacked in an open letter in the San Francisco Examiner headlined “I call you a murderer,” said in 2020 that behind the theatrics Kramer had important points to make about involving the community in the research agenda and in clinical trials, and that the two men had become deep friends. Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Kramer fundamentally changed medical research by making officials see that it is not ethical to deny people treatment when no proven treatment exists. UNAIDS said his actions helped to save the lives of millions of people living with HIV around the world.
A confrontational style
Kramer’s methods were deliberately abrasive, and he was open about it. He called public officials murderers, shouted down opponents and attacked journalists, colleagues and fellow activists in print. He once threw a drink in the face of a conservative political fundraiser at a party. Supporters argued that his anger was what made the press and the government pay attention when gay men’s deaths were being ignored; the writer Susan Sontag called him one of America’s most valuable troublemakers. Critics, including many gay men, said his warnings about sex sounded moralistic and that his attacks drove allies away. Gregg Gonsalves, one of the younger activists who left ACT UP to form the Treatment Action Group in the early 1990s, recalled that Kramer could be unbearably cruel, and also remarkably generous.
Kramer acknowledged that his reputation had become that of a crazy man, and said he had made Ned Weeks in The Normal Heart as obnoxious as he could in part to atone for his own behaviour. He also understood its uses. Fauci recalled that after Kramer denounced him on national television, Kramer phoned to say how well it had gone, because they had made their point.
Jewish identity and the Holocaust
Kramer’s worldview was shaped by his Jewish identity, and above all by the Holocaust. The playwright Tony Kushner said that for many Jewish men of Kramer’s generation the Holocaust was the defining historical event, and that what happened with AIDS in the early 1980s felt, and was, holocaustal to him. Kramer titled his 1989 collection of essays and speeches Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist, arguing that governments had let a catastrophe unfold because its first victims were people society did not value.
The comparison was controversial. Some fellow activists, including fellow Jews, rejected his analogies between AIDS and the Holocaust as overheated. Scholars have since traced how his thinking drew on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and on parallels he saw between antisemitism and homophobia as causes of public silence. For Kramer the lesson was moral rather than rhetorical: when people are dying and others look away, silence is complicity.
Later years and legacy
Kramer learned in 1988 that he was HIV-positive, after surgery revealed liver damage from hepatitis B. By 2001 he needed a liver transplant, but HIV-positive patients were then routinely refused; he was accepted by the transplant institute at the University of Pittsburgh and received a new liver in December 2001. He kept writing: The Destiny of Me (1992), a sequel to The Normal Heart, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and his vast two-volume novel The American People appeared in 2015 and 2020. In 2013 he married his partner, the architectural designer David Webster, in a hospital intensive care unit. He died of pneumonia in Manhattan on May 27, 2020, aged 84, while writing a play about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kramer’s legacy is measured in lives. He helped turn a frightened, grieving community into one of the most effective health movements in history, and the reforms it won changed how new medicines are tested and approved for patients with any serious disease. Millions of people have benefited from faster access to treatment and from the principle he fought for: that the people whose lives are at stake deserve a voice in the research meant to save them.
Sources & further reading
Larry Kramer, playwright and AIDS activist, dies at 84, Associated Press via KQED (May 27, 2020) · He was a ‘force of nature’: Anthony Fauci, Tom Frieden, and others remember Larry Kramer, STAT (May 28, 2020) · UNAIDS celebrates the life of pioneer AIDS activist Larry Kramer, UNAIDS (May 28, 2020) · Prominent AIDS activist Larry Kramer, JTA via Jewish News (June 2020) · Larry Kramer, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.