Larry Kramer: HIV/AIDS Activist, Playwright, and Author Dies at 84

Larry Kramer, the writer whose furious voice and pen-raised theatergoers’ awareness about HIV/AIDS and stirred thousands to activist protests in the early years of the pandemic, has died on Wednesday morning in Manhattan at 84. Larry Kramer was the prominent author whose raucous, antagonistic campaign for a full-scale response to the AIDS emergency helped move national health policy during the 1980s and ’90s.

Bill Goldstein, an author who was working on a biography of Kramer, affirmed the news to The Associated Press. Kramer’s husband, David Webster, disclosed that Kramer passed on of pneumonia on Wednesday.

Larry Kramer, who stated “The Normal Heart” and established the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, lost his lover to HIV/AIDS in 1984 and was himself tainted with the virus. He additionally experienced hepatitis B and got a liver transplant in 2001 because the virus had caused liver failure.

He was selected for an Academy Award for his screenplay for “Women in Love,” the 1969 adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s novel. It featured Glenda Jackson, who won her first Oscar for her performance.

Larry Kramer additionally composed the 1972 screenplay “Lost Horizon,” a novel, “Faggots,” and the plays “Sissies’ Scrapbook,” “The Furniture of Home,” “Just Say No” and “The Destiny of Me,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.

Be that as it may, for many years he was most popular for his public fight to make sure about medical treatment, acknowledgment, and civil rights for individuals with HIV/AIDS. He loudly told everybody that the gay community was pondering a plague.

In 1981, when HIV/AIDS had not yet gained its name and just a few dozen individuals had been diagnosed with it, Larry Kramer and a group of his companions in New York City established Gay Men’s Health Crisis, one of the first groups in the nation to address the epidemic.

Larry Kramer attempted to rouse the gay community with speeches and articles, for example, “1,112 and Counting,” published in gay newspapers in 1983.

“Our continued existence as gay men upon the face of this earth is at stake,” he wrote. “Unless we fight for our lives, we shall die.”

The late columnist Randy Shilts, in his best selling account of the HIV/AIDS epidemic “And the Band Played On,” called that article “inarguably one of the most influential works of advocacy journalism of the decade” and credited it with “crystallizing the epidemic into a political movement for the gay community.”

Larry Kramer lived to see gay marriage a reality and went along with one such union himself in 2013 however never rested. “I’m married,” he told The AP. “But that’s only part of where we are. AIDS is still decimating us and we still don’t have protection under the law.”

Larry Kramer split with GMHC in 1983 after other board individuals chose to focus on offering help services to individuals with HIV/AIDS. It stays one of the biggest AIDS-service groups in the nation.

In the wake of leaving GMHC, Larry Kramer offered a voice to his grief and frustration by stating “The Normal Heart,” wherein an irate youthful author — similar to Kramer himself — fights politicians, society, the media, and other gay leaders to point out the emergency.

The play debuted at The Public Theater in April 1985. Associated Press dramatization critic Michael Kuchwara called it an “angry but compelling indictment of society as well as a subculture for failing to respond adequately to the tragedy.”

A recovery in 2011 was all around lauded by pundits and earned the best revival Tony. Two actors from it — Ellen Barkin and John Benjamin Hickey — likewise won Tonys. Joe Mantello played the main character of Ned Weeks, the adjust ego of Kramer.

“I’m very moved that it moved so many people,” he said at the time. Larry Krameroften stood outside the theater passing out fliers asking the world to take action against HIV/AIDS. “Please know that AIDS is a worldwide plague. Please know there is no cure,” it said.

The play was transformed into a TV film for HBO in 2014 featuring Mark Ruffalo, Jonathan Groff, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons, Alfred Molina, Joe Mantello, and Julia Roberts. It won the Emmy for best film, and Kramer stood on stage in heavy winter apparel as the statuette was introduced to director Ryan Murphy.

The 1992 play “The Destiny of Me,” proceeds with the tale of the character Weeks from “The Normal Heart.” Weeks, in the hospital for an experimental HIV/AIDS treatment, thinks about the past, especially his relationship with his family. His parents and sibling seem to carry on what occurred previously, as does the youthful Ned, who stands up to his older self.

In 1987, Larry Kramer established ACT UP, the aggressor group that got popular for staging civil disobedience at places like the Food and Drug Administration, the New York Stock Exchange, and Burroughs-Wellcome Corp., the creator of the chief anti-AIDS drug, AZT.

ACT UP’s protests convinced the FDA to speed the approval of new medications and Burroughs-Wellcome to bring down its cost for AZT.

Larry Kramer soon surrendered a leadership role in ACT UP, and as help for HIV/AIDS research expanded, he later discovered some common ground with health authorities whom ACT UP had harshly reprimanded. (At the Emmy Awards, Kramer wore an ACT UP baseball cap.)

“There are many people who feel that ACT UP hurt itself by so many of us going to work inside, with the very system that we were formed to protest against,” Larry Kramer told The New York Times in 1997. “There’s good reason to believe that. On the other hand, when you are given the chance to be heard a little better, it’s hard to turn down.”

In 1997, Larry Kramer conflicted with administrators at his alma mater, Yale University, when they turned down his multimillion-dollar offer to endow a professorship in gay studies.

He said such the field could think about not only gays’ contributions ever, sociology, politics, and culture, but also on aspects of physical identity. The school said the field was too limited for a permanent professorship and, plus, there was a recruiting freeze.

At the 2013 Tonys, he was honored with the Isabelle Stevenson Award, which praises an individual from the theater community for philanthropic or civic efforts.

A few months after the fact, Larry Kramer wedded his long-lasting partner, architect David Webster, in the intensive care unit NYU Langone Medical Center, where Kramer has been recouping from surgery for a bowel obstruction. He had set up the wedding plans before his health crisis and wouldn’t let that stop him.

The moment was bittersweet: The legendary gay rights activist at long last got the chance to celebrate his union legitimately yet was wiped out to the point that he was unable to sign his name. He had wanted to trade promises on his balcony yet was knocked into a stupor two days before the event.