AIDS Activist, Author Larry Kramer Has Died

AIDS activist and author Larry Kramer died on Wednesday. He was 84.

Kramer's husband, David Webster, said that Kramer died of pneumonia.

Kramer co-founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) in the early 1980s as a response to the government's inaction to the AIDS epidemic. He protested the government's response to the crisis and apathy toward the victims of the plague with the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987. ACT UP confronted politicians to bring about needed changes in policies.

Kramer is best known for writing The Normal Heart, a 1985 play that focuses on the rise of the HIV/AIDS crisis in New York.

Recently, Kramer told The New York Times that he was writing a play that deals in part with the coronavirus pandemic.

Kramer said that the play, titled An Army of Lovers Must Not Die, was about “gay people having to live through three plagues.” The three plagues in the play were HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, and “the decline of the human body.”

Kramer and his husband, David Webster, began dating in the 1960s. He told the Washington Blade in 2015 that they “got together permanently in 1995 or so and got married just a year or so ago.”

Last year, Kramer said at a rally that he felt that he had “failed” in his AIDS activism, saying that instead of demanding a cure, the LGBT community has accepted expensive drugs with “troublesome” side effects. The pharmaceutical companies “are holding us up to ransom,” he said.