Appreciation: Larry Kramer, the AIDS activist whose playwriting saved lives too
Larry Kramer was many things — a firebrand activist, a political gadfly, the loudest voice in any room. He was a founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and Act Up, two organizations that changed the course of the AIDS epidemic in America.
But what he wanted to be seen as first and foremost was a writer — the way he understood himself. Writer-activist, in that order, as he told me inTo his heroic credit, when history called, he didn’t let his literary ambitions thwart his service, as others who feared being pegged asin Manhattan on Wednesday, not speaking up was a signal of a dishonorable combination — of cowardice, willful blindness and greed.
Before the AIDS epidemic, Kramer was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and the author of “Faggots,” a novel whose mission-rattling title, he feared, kept critics from noticing how hard he worked on the book’s style.
Activism, for Kramer, was an unfinishable task. How could he bask in the pride of having built up LGBTQinstitutional and political muscle when all he could see was the refusal of rich and famous gay men to use their power against the homophobic forces that were forever looking for opportunities to turn back the clock?
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