Larry Kramer and the heroic era of AIDS activism
Today, World AIDS Day, always brings back memories of Larry Kramer and the era of heroic AIDS activism. It was 1981; gay men were dying of a mysterious disorder that compromised the immune system, leaving the victim vulnerable to a host of baffling diseases.
Larry Kramer - playwright, activist, provocateur - wrote a famous article in the gay press entitled "1,112 and counting," urging the community to act. While the government took some early initiatives, partly at the behest of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an organization Kramer helped to found, the response was predictably inert and bureaucratic.
As friend upon friend passed into Hades, Kramer believed that a more combative activism was the only solution, so he founded the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP). This was a full frontal, fuck all movement; and it had to be. I still recall the time ACT UP activists busted onto the set of CBS Evening News while it was on air; and can still hear the chant - "Act up, act now, fight AIDS!" - they declaimed with desperate commitment at the Halloween parades in Greenwich Village. Their resolve came amid a time of manifest despair, when a whole community lay exhausted from the relentless round of funerals; it galvanized them to fight against extinction.
Kramer contracted HIV himself, though he lived on as his friends continued to die. Recently, there was a rumor that he had died after a liver transplant (necessitated by chronic Hepatitis B infection), but he emerged from that as well, and continues, at 72, to taunt the government and the gay community for its indifference to the suffering and the dying.
While his play, The Normal Heart, may be his most famous work, I would recommend Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist, which is a compilation of his writings in various newspapers, including the New York Times. In Reports, we have a vituperative voice battling a host of public figures -Senators, Mayor Ed Koch, prominent scientists and fellow gays - for indifference to a horror he likened to the Holocaust. In some ways his rage reminds one of King Lear, but, unlike Lear, Kramer is sane, too sane for most.
His heroism is not easily emulated, and because of that, frequently condemned, but history, I am persuaded, will see him as a pivotal figure in America’s continual struggle against the many varieties of human injustice.
