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Larry Kramer used his anger to force elites to respond to the Aids crisis

<span>Photograph: New York Times Co./Getty Images</span>
Photograph: New York Times Co./Getty Images

He put a giant yellow condom over the house of the arch conservative Senator Jesse Helms, and he poured the ashes of Aids victims on the White House lawn. He interrupted live television broadcasts and shut down the New York Stock Exchange. It may be appropriate that Larry Kramer’s protest tactics with Act Up, the Aids activist group that he helped to found, were theatrical; after all, Kramer himself was a playwright. But the mood at the Act Up protests themselves was not so much mischievous as rageful and stricken. “Sure I have a temper, who doesn’t?” Kramer told Newsday in 1992. “It happens when you’ve seen so many friends die.”

Kramer made an enemy of the elite and antagonized politicians, pharmaceutical executives and the medical bureaucracy who he thought were not responding with enough urgency to the Aids epidemic, accusing them in unflinching terms of genocide by inaction. He once wrote an open letter in the San Francisco Examiner calling Dr Anthony Fauci “a murderer” and “an incompetent idiot” for the inaction of the Reagan administration on Aids. His willingness to anger the powerful made him one of the most hated, most divisive and most effective activists of his generation.

Related: Larry Kramer: a titan of gay rights and literature whose prophecies live on

For his own part, Kramer was not supposed to live to be 84, the age at which he died on Wednesday of pneumonia at his home in New York City. When the writer, dramatist and activist began agitating for Aids treatment and research in 1981, forming a group called Gay Men’s Health Crisis, he was in his mid-forties, and the disease that would later become known as HIV/Aids was accumulating a staggering body count among gay men even as it had no name. After being ousted from GMHC over his radicalism, Kramer went on to found Act Up in 1987, and the group took him as a model for much of its own militancy and passion. In 1988, at 53, Kramer learned that he had himself contracted HIV, lending a personal intensity to his activism. It would be eight more years before an effective treatment was introduced.

He is also survived by untold thousands of gay men and others living with HIV who would not be alive if it were not for his work

At the time, most of the people who contracted HIV – primarily gay men, like Kramer – swiftly progressed into Aids and died painful, isolated and early deaths. Kramer took it upon himself to change that, and it is largely because of his advocacy that government authorities began, finally, to respond to the crisis that was decimating the gay community. He died at his home in Manhattan, and is survived by his husband, David Webster. He is also survived by untold thousands of gay men and others living with HIV who would not be alive if it were not for his work. Because of Kramer and the movement he inspired, callous politicians who had withheld funding for Aids research and denied dying gay men the dignity of public acknowledgement were forced to begin mitigating the crisis. Because of Kramer and Act Up, a disease that was once an incurable death sentence has been converted to a manageable, livable condition for many.

Kramer made enemies easily, and this was true even within the gay community that he fought so hard to save. He came under fire for some of his early statements and attitudes about the Aids crisis, which could be construed as blaming gay men for the illnesses and deaths of their friends. These attitudes can still sour Kramer’s reputation among some of the gay community’s more radical and anti-assimilationist sects. He disdained the white gay male subculture that he frequented in Manhattan and on Fire Island in the late 1970s and early 1980s; he found the scene to be catty, vain, immoral and superficial.

His 1978 novel Faggots, about a group of degenerate, depressed and drug-addled gay men, caused a rift between him and the community members who had once been some of his closest friends. In the book, Kramer depicted gay men as engaging in nightlife and casual sex not because they were free from the standards of heterosexual morality, but because they despised themselves for not living up to them. The book has become a favorite among white gay assimilationists of Kramer’s generation and earned him praise from gay conservatives of the likes of Andrew Sullivan. It is still in print, and still inciting anger and hurt among gays.

Larry Kramer has died of pneumonia at 84. Kramer was a vocal activist in the early days of the Aids epidemic.
Larry Kramer has died of pneumonia at 84. Kramer was a vocal activist in the early days of the Aids epidemic. Photograph: Catherine McGann/Getty Images

Many gay people have fraught relationships with their families, chosen and otherwise; Kramer seems to have felt a mixture of anger and hurt, rejection and ownership. But his actions are not the actions of someone who hates gay men, and his life betrays a deep love for the community that felt so ambivalently toward him. Perhaps Kramer could not see that late nights and casual sex can themselves contain their own kinds of compassion, kindness and joy; perhaps he was so preoccupied with saving the lives of gay men that he lost sight of the things that they were living for. Many people have the sense of wounded defensiveness towards others that Kramer seemed to have. Very few of them put this feeling to such righteous good use.

But one of the advantages of the long life that Kramer had, and that he fought for other gay men to have, is that it allows a person to become greater than his most hurtful or controversial actions. With Act Up, Kramer combined his rage at those who allowed gay men to die with his flair for theatricality and media relations; he helped to stage enormous, eye-catching acts of civil disobedience that resulted in mass arrests and maximum media coverage, and the group managed to leverage the attention it received for its actions into sustained public pressure on those in power. Soon, politicians who had previously ignored the Aids crisis were forced to begin responding to it; pharmaceutical companies that had dismissed or exploited HIV patients began to treat their suffering as an urgent area of research. For his own part, Kramer kept writing. His most famous play, The Normal Heart, dramatized the Aids crisis and brought frank depictions of gay life to mainstream theater. Its main character, Ned Weeks, is based on Kramer, and struggles to take care of his dying, closeted lover. The play received wide critical acclaim, and dramatized the moral imperatives that Kramer saw as being at the center of his own life: responsibility, consequence and justice.

Kramer could be prickly. He held grudges and disliked pleasantries. Later in life, he became neighbors with his nemesis, the former mayor of New York City Ed Koch, when Koch moved into Kramer’s Greenwhich Village apartment complex. Reportedly Koch, decades after Kramer accused him of not doing enough to stop the Aids crisis in New York, once tried to pet Kramer’s dog in a mail room. Kramer snatched the animal away. Most would have repressed their own anger and outrage for the sake of neighborly harmony; but Kramer was not the sort of man who would let anyone’s comfort get in the way of doing what he thought was right. Few people have a personal passion that can match the moral urgency of their own professed values like that. But Larry Kramer remained passionate until the very end.

  • Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist