ALWAYS READY FOR HIS CLOSE-UP Larry Kramer in 2010, when he was in his mid-70s. He died in Manhattan on Wednesday, May 27, 2020.
LARRY KRAMER’S OBITUARY IN The New York Times would have probably made him smile. Or curse. Or both. The headline read “An Activist Who Gave People With AIDS a Voice. A Loud Voice.” And the article began on Page 1 (A1, as we old newspaper people say).
Written by Daniel Lewis and published in The Times’s print edition on May 28, 2020, the obituary told the story of Kramer’s many passions and careers — including those of playwright and AIDS warrior with all the dates and names in their proper places. But one sentence stood out. (Like many writers, I love a good three-point summary predicate.)
"In 1953, Mr. Kramer, like his father and brother before him, enrolled at Yale. He studied English literature, tried to kill himself once and had a liberating affair with a male professor.”
THE FRONT PAGE Kramer’s obituary in the print edition of The New York Times.
Kramer, whose chief importance to American theater history is his Tony-winning play, “The Normal Heart,” was born in Bridgeport, Conn., in 1935, grew up in Maryland (his father had taken a government job in Washington) and died in Manhattan.
The cause of death was given — by his husband, David Webster — as pneumonia. Kramer had also had a liver transplant in 2001 and had been H.I.V.-positive since at least 1988 (when he was tested).
The first time I ever heard of Larry Kramer was one night in 1981 when I was meeting RDS (to avoid 10,000 words of exposition, let’s just call him an “old friend”) at his apartment on Horatio Street for our dinner date. RDS was late, which was not like him. When he finally came rushing into the building lobby, he explained that he had been at a kind of emergency meeting at Larry Kramer’s apartment.
JUDGING BY ITS COVER Kramer’s novel “Faggots,” set on Fire Island, was published in 1978. The first edition had no cover art at all — just type. Both Susan Sontag and Erica Jong gave the book and its author high praise.
.“A lot of people despise him, but I’ve always been nice to him,” RDS said. It seems Kramer had written a novel called “Faggots” three years before, and the gay men whose hedonistic sex lives, drug habits and personality flaws were depicted in the book, set mostly on a certain fashionable stretch of Fire Island, were not happy with the way they came off.
Outsiders — i.e., the majority of straight people — found it ridiculously exaggerated. Kramer later said no, it was pretty much a documentary. Anyway, this Larry Kramer, whoever he was, was now organizing a group called Gay Men’s Health Crisis to take action because of a “rare cancer,” as The Times called it, that had just killed about three dozen gay men. Had I heard of it? Yes, I’d read the tiny article in The Times. (The Times didn’t say “gay” back then, so the word “homosexuals” was in the headline.)
IS THIS MIKE ON? Kramer at an AIDS conference in 1987, the year he founded ACT UP.. Gay Men’s Health Crisis held its first meeting in 1981 in his living room. According to GMHC, more than 35 million people have now died of AIDS worldwide.
GMHC grew to be a vital resource for people with AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome, as the cancer and its related infections would soon be named). Kramer was thrown out (by his fellow board members, as I recall), reportedly for being too abrasive. So he just started a new organization, determined to be even grittier. ACT UP stood for Aids Coalition to Unleash Power.
Later, after Kramer became famous and I read more about him, I learned he had a movie-industry background. He had produced and written the screenplay of “Women in Love,” the 1969 Ken Russell film based on D.H. Lawrence’s novel. RDS and I had seen it together in our extreme youth. At that time, RDS was — let’s say “undeclared.” (It’s an election year., and “closeted” is so overused.) But I noticed that he did enjoy the nude wrestling scene, with Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, quite a bit.
MAKING A FASHION STATEMENT. Kramer in ACT UP merch, with the organization’s tag line.
When “The Normal Heart,” which covered the early days (1981-84) of the AIDS pandemic, opened at the Public Theater in 1985, some critics called it a screed. Just this guy Ned Weeks (based on Kramer) yelling like a crazy man about a disease that everyone else was ignoring, a disease afflicting gay men. But the play did win a couple of Obie Awards. It was later nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
By the time “The Normal Heart” returned, this time to Broadway, its quality and tone and importance had been re-evaluated.
THE BIG TIME Video clips from the Broadway production of “The Normal Heart” (2011). Keep watching. There is dialogue, eventually. From left, Lee Pace, Joe Mantello, Jim Parsons and Patrick Breen..
“More than a quarter of a century after it first scorched New York, ‘The Normal Heart’ is breathing fire again,” Ben Brantley wrote in his 2011 New York Times review. He explained the play’s premise as “an indictment of a world unwilling to confront the epidemic that would come to be known as AIDS.”
During its long-ago Off Broadway run, Brantley recalled, the play “sounded like a hoarse, relentless ‘J’accuse!’ “ But surprisingly many theatergoers, even then, “felt that Mr. Kramer was beautiful when he was angry.” The Broadway production won three Tony Awards, including the one for best play revival.
EMMY IS A NICE NAME, TOO. Three years after the 2011 Broadway production of “The Normal Heart” won the Tony Award for best play revival, the HBO version won the Emmy Award for best television movie. At the awards, from left, Julia Roberts, Ryan Murphy, Kramer, Mark Ruffalo and Alfred Molina.
Then it became an Emmy-winning 2014 HBO movie, with Mark Ruffalo as Ned Weeks and Julia Roberts as Dr. Emma Brookner, the paraplegic physician who played a major role in AIDS awareness. (Ellen Barkin had played Brookner on Broadway.)
And if being on the front page of The New York Times were not enough to make Kramer happy, I’m sure the tribute to him in The Advocate would have done the trick. That publication compared him to Sister Teresa and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2020/5/28/larry-kramer-was-our-loudmouth-lgbtq-mother-teresa