LARRY KRAMER

(25 June 1935 - 27 May 2020)

The American author, playwright, screenwriter, film producer and social and political activist Larry Kramer, who has died from pneumonia at the age of 84, will be remembered mainly for his 1985 play The Normal Heart, the first artistic endeavour to deal with the subject of Aids. He was born into a Jewish family, father a government attorney, mother a teacher and social worker. A difficult childhood and early homosexual experiences at junior high school made him question and explore his sexuality and an attempted suicide. After a spell in the US Army, he began script-editing for Columbia Pictures and later became a production executive on Lawrence of Arabia, Dr Strangelove and Darling. He co-wrote his first screenplay, Clive Donner’s comedy Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush and then adapted D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love for Ken Russell, which earned Kramer Academy Award and Bafta nominations. After these successes came the flop that was the musical film of Lost Horizon. On stage he began to develop gay themes in his play Sissies’ Scrapbook (aka Four Friends). He then published a novel, Faggots, detailing the promiscuous lives of American gay men which, although not well-received by the gay community, was a best-seller. Kramer joined the gay men’s activist group called Gay Men’s Health Crisis when the threat of Aids impinged on his own life but later left when the group failed to live up to its ideals. Instead he wrote The Normal Heart detailing the life of a writer caring for his dying partner of, at that time, an unnamed disease. From 1985 the play has enjoyed over six hundred US productions and other stagings all over the world. It was also filmed for television. In 1987 Kramer was a part founder of ACT UP, a group created to force governments to fund members of the LGBT communities. He also wrote Just Say No, a Play About a Farce, detailing public indifference to the cause that produced the Aids epidemic. Destiny of Me, filmed in 2015, was a sequel to The Normal Heart, fighting the general complacency of government actions. Having been diagnosed as HIV positive himself, Kramer continued to write books and articles in support of LGBT causes. More recently he began covering the Covid-19 pandemic in a play called An Army of Lovers Must Not Die. In his time he won or was nominated for many Arts and Letters awards including a Tony, Obie and Emmy Awards and he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1993. Larry Kramer’s partner was the architectural designer David Webster who he had known from the 1970s. However, later on they split up only to be reunited in 1991. They were married in 2013.

MICHAEL DARVELL