Larry Kramer, who has died aged 84 of pneumonia, enraged many gay readers with his lurid 1978 novel Faggots, a cautionary bestseller warning against the perils of promiscuity, before addressing the Aids crisis in his 1985 play The Normal Heart, in which an activist-writer warns against the perils of promiscuity. Publishers Weekly said he “made red-faced fist-pumping into his art”.
He also put his mouth where his money was. As co-founder of two Aids advocacy groups, Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power), he improved the lives of people suffering from HIV and Aids, and pilloried mercilessly and tirelessly those politicians and medical professionals who refused to take the epidemic seriously. Each of these figures he excoriated in lengthy screeds, or on the streets in a voice described by the LA Times as a “nasal bullhorn”.
His attacks could be parochial (he threw a drink over the closeted Republican politician Terry Dolan at a Washington fundraiser) or expansive: he was one of those credited with the idea of encasing the home of the Republican senator Jesse Helms in an enormous yellow condom. He led protests that succeeded in disrupting, among other things, the New York Stock Exchange and St Patrick’s Cathedral during Mass; many of these resulted in his arrest.
Also in his crosshairs was Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, who was leading the US government’s ineffectual response to Aids. In 1988, the San Francisco Examiner published an open letter by Kramer in which he wrote: “Anthony Fauci, you are a murderer. Your refusal to hear the screams of Aids activists early in the crisis resulted in the deaths of thousands of Queers.” Fauci acknowledged that Kramer forced him to reassess his entire approach to the disease.
The pair grew to be friends, with Fauci inspiring a character in Kramer’s 1992 play The Destiny of Me and even becoming his doctor when the writer’s health – he had been diagnosed with HIV once tests became available in 1985 – was at a particularly perilous stage. “There is no question in my mind that Larry helped change medicine in this country,” Fauci told the New Yorker in 2002.
Larry was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to George Kramer, whose job as a government attorney necessitated the family’s move to the Washington area when Larry was six, and Rea (nee Wishengrad), a social worker for the Red Cross. He was educated at Woodrow Wilson high school in Washington and studied English at Yale University. He tried to take his own life during his first year there. Following his recovery, he came out as gay to his brother, who sent him to a psychiatrist.
After graduation and military service, Kramer worked for the William Morris agency and then at Columbia Pictures, where he began as a production assistant before working his way up to be an executive on films including Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dr Strangelove (1964). He also persuaded the studio to acquire and release Darling (1965), starring Julie Christie; its director, John Schlesinger, was briefly a partner of his.
Kramer produced Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), having rewritten the adaptation of DH Lawrence’s novel when the one he had commissioned from the playwright David Mercer proved unusable. He was Oscar-nominated for that but savaged for his next film, the maligned musical Lost Horizon (1973), which he called “the one thing I have done in my life that I truly regret”.
He first sounded the alarm about Aids in the pages of a gay periodical, the New York Native, in 1981, though it was a piece two years later in the same newspaper that provided the angriest clarion call. The 5,000-word feature, 1,112 and Counting, began: “If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble.” It catalogued methodically the failings of institutions including the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes for Health, while upbraiding the “useless” gay press and complacency in the community at large. “Unless we fight for our lives, we shall die,” he wrote.
If Faggots had made him a pariah in some eyes – in the wake of the book’s publication, Kramer was banned from at least one store on Fire Island, New York, the popular gay haunt where he kept a holiday home – then The Normal Heart was received as an urgent response to a steeply escalating emergency.
The play took aim at an assortment of Kramer’s enemies including New York’s mayor Ed Koch, the New York Times (which he accused of suppressing early reports about Aids – a charge the paper rejected in print) and his former colleagues at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which he had left a year after its inception in a disagreement over confrontational tactics.
The New York Times critic Frank Rich complained of the play’s “pamphleteering” tone, but no one could say that Kramer didn’t take that to its logical conclusion: he could sometimes be found outside the theatre distributing literature to audience members, keen that their emotional responses to his work should be put to practical and political use rather than evaporating as soon as the tears on their cheeks had dried. In 2014, the play was adapted as a television film starring Mark Ruffalo and Julia Roberts.
As a writer, Kramer was vulnerable to hectoring and grandiosity, nowhere more so than in his mammoth 2015 novel The American People Vol 1: Search for My Heart, which filtered history through a radical queer perspective that reimagined Franklin, Lincoln and Reagan as gay. For all the advances Kramer made in public health and civil rights, it bothered him to see his artistic reputation eclipsed by his activism. “I like to think I work very hard on my writing,” he told the Guardian in 2015. “And unfortunately in this country you can’t be taken seriously as an artist if you’re also an activist.”
He lamented his “loudmouth” persona, though he had only himself to blame: in a 2009 interview with New York magazine he professed not to understand why “every gay person doesn’t agree with everything I say”. In 2002, he said: “I put the truth in writing. That’s what I do: I have told the fucking truth to everyone I have ever met.’’
He is survived by his husband, David Webster, whom he married in 2013.
• Laurence David Kramer, writer and activist, born 25 June 1935; died 27 May 2020
