Larry Kramer

KRAMER vs CREMA

 

Playwright Larry Kramer has died of pneumonia a month before his 85th birthday.  Already a well regarded writer after his adaptation of Women in Love (with Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling naked) and other such works in the 1970s. However he became far wider known and respected as an ardent campaigner for LGBT rights and AIDS awareness from the 1980s onwards. He co-founded Gay Mens Health Crisis, the leading AIDS fighting charity, and through the research donations raising ACT UP  was credited with changing US public health policy on the disease. He himself then came down with HIV in 1988, but lived another 32 years, surviving to read his own obituary on more than one occasion. His plays included The Normal Heart, about early AIDS cases, and Just Say No, a thinly veiled satire attacking his enemy Ed Koch (Mayor of New York).  In March he announced he was writing a new play about the coronavirus outbreak, but has died soon after. In short, he began his activism in a time when bigots towards the AIDS epidemic were in the actual White House, and ended his life having helped fund drugs which extended sufferers lives, and made AIDS, while incurable, no longer the death sentence that robbed the world of Freddie Mercury, Rock Hudson and a thousand other loved ones that never made the front pages back in the 80s and 90s.

Kramer was a unique for Larry King Dead on CNN.

 

Larry Kramer
25 June 1935 – 27 May 2020
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