Acclaimed writer and outspoken activist Larry Kramer dies at 84

Writer and activist Larry Kramer died in Manhattan on Tuesday. He was 84.

The cause of death was reported at pneumonia, Kramer had been ill for many years.

An Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Kramer was perhaps best known for his autobiographic plays including “The Normal Heart,” and “The Destiny of Me,” both of which directly addressed the AIDS crisis.

Kramer became a well known activist in the early 1980s, when the AIDS crisis began to severely impact gay communities around the country. He founded several support and advocacy groups for people affected by the disease, including the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which announced his death earlier today.

Kramer’s specific brand of activism was understood by his friends and foes to be aggressive and theatrical. In 1987, he founded ACT UP – the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power – a group whose directive was to perform public acts of disruption, bringing light to the crisis within the political, religious, and scientific realms.

“We’re not here to make friends, we’re here to raise the issues,” Kramer told Time magazine in a 1990 interview about his group. “Activism is fueled by anger, so people should not be surprised when that anger erupts in ways that not everyone approves of.”

Kramer had a difficult relationship with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the NIH. Recently, Fauci has become the public scientific face of the coronavirus pandemic, but for a decade and a half, Fauci was responsible for running a significant portion of America’s HIV/AIDS research.

Kramer often openly criticized Fauci’s work, lamenting the slow pace of the progress the U.S. government was making in fighting the deadly illness.

Despite Kramer’s initial hostility, he and Fauci ultimately found a way to become friends and work together on the problem at hand. Having caught their attention with his outlandish activism, Fauci and his colleagues at the NIH began taking Kramer’s recommendations to consult people suffering from AIDS as they worked to develop new drugs and treatment regimens.

“There is no question in my mind that Larry helped change medicine in this country. And he helped change it for the better. When all the screaming and the histrionics are forgotten, that will remain,” Fauci told the New Yorker in 2002.