Rediscover: Larry Kramer

Author, essayist and playwright Larry Kramer died May 27 at age 84. Kramer, who "had feet in both the world of letters and the public sphere," wrote the New York Times, was co-founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis in 1981, and later founded Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), "whose street actions demanding a speedup in AIDS drugs research and an end to discrimination against gay men and lesbians severely disrupted the operations of government offices, Wall Street and the Roman Catholic hierarchy." His breakthrough as a writer came with the award-winning film adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1969), which he produced after obtaining it for $4,200 of his own money. Kramer's first novel, Faggots (1978), was a "scathing look at promiscuous sex, drug use, predation and sadomasochism among gay men, it was a lightning rod from the day of its publication."

Kramer's play The Normal Heart, which opened at the Public Theater in New York in April 1985 and ran for nine months, was "a passionate account of the early years of AIDS and his campaign to get somebody to do something about it," the Times noted. Other plays include The Destiny of Me and Just Say No, A Play About a Farce. Kramer's books include the historical novels The American People Volume 1, Search for My Heart (2015) and The American People: Volume 2, The Brutality of Fact (2020), as well as nonfiction works Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist (1989, revised 1994) and The Tragedy of Today's Gays (2005). The American People: Volume 2 is available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($40, 9780374104139).

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