Larry Kramer, who died on May 27, 2020, was alternately lionized and loathed for his full-volume, uncompromising positions on issues related to the gay rights movement. For almost forty years, he mixed advocacy with art, and many considered him to be the most prominent activist of the AIDS era. “When you have a health emergency, you tell the world, and you do something about it,” he declared. “It’s called responsibility.”
Kramer wrote many acclaimed, and often controversial, plays, novels, and nonfiction essays about gays and lesbians in American society. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his 1969 screenplay adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love (1920), while his 1978 best-selling novel, Faggots, created a scandal for its indictment of a sex-fueled gay lifestyle that did not prioritize love between two people. Kramer’s largely autobiographical play, The Normal Heart (1985), examined the cultural consequences of the AIDS crisis and proved especially powerful. The play won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play in 2011.
In 1982, Kramer cofounded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and in 1987, he created the organization ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), whose tactics of direct confrontation and civil disobedience owed much to the pivotal Stonewall Rebellion of 1969.
Robert Giard’s likeness of Kramer is one in a large series of portraits of prominent gay and lesbian writers that the photographer created after seeing The Normal Heart. In the portrait, Kramer is shown holding his beloved Wheaten terrier, “Molly.” He has pinned an ACT UP button on a sweatshirt that bears the organization’s logo of a pink triangle (the symbol that the Nazis assigned to homosexuals during the Holocaust) above the words “Silence=Death.”
