# Larry Kramer Born June 25, 1935 in Bridgeport, Connecticut; died May 27, 2020 in Manhattan. American playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and AIDS activist. **The single most consequential individual organizer of the early American AIDS response**, and the founder or co-founder of the two most important early-AIDS organizations — **Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC)** in 1982 and **[[ACT UP]]** in 1987. ## Pre-AIDS Career Kramer was a working screenwriter (Oscar nomination for the 1969 adaptation of *Women in Love*) and novelist (*Faggots*, 1978 — a controversial satirical novel about gay male sexual culture in pre-AIDS New York that anticipated some of the public-health crises to come). ## The AIDS Years In August 1981, Kramer convened the first meeting in his Manhattan apartment that led to the founding of GMHC — initially as a fundraising and information-distribution organization, since the official public-health apparatus was providing essentially nothing. By 1983, Kramer's growing fury at the pace of governmental response led to his explosive *New York Native* essay **"1,112 and Counting"** — widely considered the most influential single piece of AIDS journalism of the early epidemic. His 1985 autobiographical play **"The Normal Heart"** dramatized the GMHC era and ran for nearly a year off-Broadway; the 2014 HBO adaptation directed by Ryan Murphy reached the mainstream audience the original play had not. The 2011 Broadway revival won the Tony for Best Revival of a Play. In **March 1987**, Kramer gave a speech at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in Manhattan that produced the founding meeting of **[[ACT UP]]** — the organization that defined the next decade of confrontational AIDS activism and changed federal drug-approval policy. ## Style Kramer was famously confrontational, alienated many allies over the course of his career, and remained polarizing within LGBTQ circles for his harsh public critiques of gay sexual culture, of fellow activists, and of public-health officials (Anthony Fauci in particular). His position — that the early AIDS movement underperformed because the gay community was too politically passive and too sexually defiant — was bitter, sometimes unjust, and frequently correct on the merits. He lived to see the cocktail-therapy breakthrough, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and the publication of his magnum-opus historical novel *The American People* (2015, 2020). --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[ACT UP]] - [[AIDS Crisis]]