Larry Kramer, Noted Playwright & Trailblazing AIDS Activist, Dies at 84

Larry Kramer, the playwright, author, outspoken AIDS activist and Oscar-nominated screenwriter, has died at the age of 84, according to published reports. Kramer is perhaps best known for his play The Normal Heart, which won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play in 2011. Kramer died of pneumonia on Wednesday morning in Manhattan, his husband, David Webster, told The New York Times. He was 84.

Kramer’s two best-known works are the semi-autobiographical plays The Normal Heart (1985) and its sequel, The Destiny of Me, which was a 1992 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, chronicling the early days of the AIDS crisis. His other plays include Sissies’ Scrapbook, Just Say No and A Minor Dark Age. He wrote and produced the film Women in Love, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award in 1971. In 2014, HBO released a film version of Kramer's seminal work The Normal Heart, which was directed by Ryan Murphy. The film starred Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Jim Parsons, Taylor Kitsch, Alfred Molina, Joe Mantello and Julia Roberts and won the 2014 Emmy Award for Outstanding TV Movie. The Tony Awards Administration Committee honored Kramer for his writing and activism with the Isabelle Stevenson Award in 2013.

Kramer’s methods of advocacy, often confrontational, have been credited by many with initiating the nationwide response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the United States. Following the announcement of an outbreak of Kaposi sarcoma, a form of cancer that was eventually attributed to AIDS, he set off in pursuit of a solution of this “mysterious illness” that was affecting his friends. In 1981, he co-founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City, but he fought with the board from the beginning. In a 1983 editorial in the gay publication New York Native, he called out the National Institutes of Health, the unfairness of health insurance protocols and Mayor Ed Koch’s perceived apathy towards the outbreak. When in April 1983 he was not invited to a GMHC meeting with Koch to discuss the disease, he resigned from the group, with little objection from its leadership. Kramer went on to create ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in 1987. The organization used protests and demonstrations to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS and combat the political and economic forces impeding the development of treatment. ACT UP’s blockade of Wall Street that same year created awareness that helped lower the price of the HIV drug azidothymidine (AZT), making it more widely available.

Kramer was born on June 25, 1935, in Bridgeport, Connecticut and spent much of his childhood in Mount Rainier, Maryland. He graduated from Yale University with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1957. He started his career as an assistant to a film executive and went on to adapt and write scripts and become a producer.

He was diagnosed with HIV in 1989, just four years after The Normal Heart premiered at the Public Theater. He would go on to be diagnosed with a terminal liver disease. In December 2001, Kramer underwent a liver transplant, replacing an organ ravaged by a hepatitis B infection. In 2013 he married architect Webster, with whom he had lived since 1994, in a New York hospital, where Kramer had just undergone abdominal surgery to remove a bowel obstruction.

In addition to his plays and Women in Love, Kramer penned the screenplay for a musical adaptation of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. Though the film did not make a splash, his first novel certainly did. In 1978, he released Faggots, which chronicled a middle-aged gay man’s search for love in New York City in the 1970s. Though criticized by some gay men for its nihilistic assessment of gay sexual and romantic behavior and by social conservatives for its graphic depictions of homosexual intercourse, the novel was ultimately a critical and commercial success. Kramer’s writings on AIDS in The New York Times, Village Voice and other publications were collected as Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist in 1989. Kramer received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature in 1996. In 2004, a speech he delivered four days following the re-election of former president George W. Bush became the book The Tragedy of Today’s Gays. He released two volumes of The American People, one in 2015 and one in 2020. The New York Times reported Kramer had most recently been writing a play for the age of COVID-19 .

Kramer is survived by his husband.