Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer (born June 25 1935), American dramatist, author and activist, was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut and was educated at Yale University. He lived in London 1961-70, where he co-produced and co-wrote the film Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.

Kramer next produced and wrote the screenplay for Women in Love, based on the novel by D. H. Lawrence, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Kramer was a gay rights advocate from the early 1970s, but never an orthodox one. His 1978 novel, Faggots, was one of the best-selling gay-themed novels, but was savagely criticised by many gay activists for its negative portrayal of male homosexual lifestyles.

Kramer was living in New York City when the AIDS epidemic began in 1981. He published a series of articles in the gay newspaper the New York Native, including the famous "1,112 and Counting," urging action in response to the new epidemic. He was one of the founders of Gay Men's Health Crisis, a New York-based AIDS advocacy organization, which is still the world's largest provider of services to gay men with AIDS.

In 1987, increasingly discontented with the response to AIDS by both the U.S. government and the gay male community, Kramer helped found the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, ACT-UP, a militant AIDS advocacy and protest organization.

Kramer's 1985 play about the early years of AIDS, The Normal Heart, remains one of the most important cultural responses to the devastation of AIDS in the 1980s. It has had over 600 productions all over the world. Its New York production starred Brad Davis, who later died of AIDS. It is now used as a set text in many schools and universities.

His next play, Just Say No 1988, was an attack on the Reagan administration and the Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, over what Kramer saw as their hypocrisy and inertia in responding to AIDS. It was less successful than The Normal Heart, possibly due to its sharply political tone.

In 1989 Kramer published a book of non-fiction, Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist, a collection of his political writings from The York Times and other publications, which is an important record of the "heroic phase" of AIDS activism in the 1980s.

During the 1990s, following his own diagnosis with HIV infection, Kramer became increasingly preoccupied with treatment issues, although he continued to issue regular polemical attacks on governments and health authorities. In 1998, he founded the Treatment Data Project, a coalition of private sector donors and medical institures, designed to make AIDS treatment more readily available to people with HIV/AIDS.

We Must Love One Another Or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer, an anthology of essays edited by Lawrence D. Mass, is an important source on Kramer's career and the issues he has worked on.

Kramer lives in New York and Connecticut with his lover, architect David Webster. He is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Award in Literature, and he is also the first openly gay person to be honored by a Public Service Award from Common Cause.