Larry Kramer, the playwright, author and Oscar-nominated screenwriter who was described in a 1992 Vanity Fair profile as “the grand old man and central figure in the decade-long history of AIDS advocacy in this country,” died Wednesday in Manhattan at the age of 84. The cause of death was pneumonia, his husband, David Webster, told the New York Times.
Kramer was best known for his Tony Award–winning 1985 autobiographical play, The Normal Heart, which focused on the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis in New York in the early 1980s. Revisiting the work, adapted for the screen by Ryan Murphy for HBO, in 2014, James Wolcott praised the play’s potent “Paddy Chayefskyan humanism, rhetorical blammo, bristling nerves, and siege mentality.”
Kramer cofounded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and cofounded ACT UP, whose website declares: “We advise and inform. We demonstrate. WE ARE NOT SILENT.”
As Michael Shnayerson wrote in his 1992 Vanity Fair profile, “To his critics, he is arrogant, self-promoting, irrationally angry and rude, cruel, deluded, double-dealing, and possibly deranged. To his admirers he is an Old Testament prophet whose early warnings to the gay community about sexual profligacy and AIDS now read as eerily prescient.”
Born Laurence David Kramer on June 25, 1935, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Kramer had a dysfunctional relationship with his father and later told interviewers he had an unhappy childhood. He graduated from Yale in 1957. He entered the film industry, working as a production executive on Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.
As a screenwriter, he earned an Academy Award nomination for his 1969 adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, for which Glenda Jackson won the Academy Award for best actress. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon, which was a critical and box office flop.
Kramer’s subsequent writing focused on the gay experience in America. His controversial 1978 novel, Faggots (New York’s only gay bookstore refused to sell it), was an unflinching portrayal of the 1970s New York gay subculture that got him shunned by many in the gay community. In a 2002 New Yorker profile, he proclaimed, “I put the truth in writing. That’s what I do: I have told the fucking truth to everyone I have ever met.”
Kramer became radicalized after reading an article in 1981 about a rise in young gay men being diagnosed with a rare cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma. His 1983 essay, “1,112 and Counting,” which appeared in the New York Native, was provocative in its anger at the apathy Kramer perceived in the gay community toward the health crisis. It read: “If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get.”
The Normal Heart, about activists in the early days of the AIDS crisis, premiered in 1985 at New York’s Public Theater. The New York Times theater critic Frank Rich called it a “fiercely polemical drama” in which “the playwright starts off angry, soon gets furious, and then skyrockets into sheer rage.” It went on to become the longest-running play in Public Theater’s history. The 2011 revival earned Tony Awards for best revival of a play, best featured actress (Ellen Barkin), and best featured actor (John Benjamin Hickey). In his acceptance speech, Kramer said, “To gay people everywhere, whom I love so, The Normal Heart is our history. I could not have written it had not so many of us so needlessly died. Learn from it and carry on the fight. Let them know that we are a very special people, an exceptional people, and that our day will come.”