He told Fresh Air, 'My mind went back to incidences over the preceding couple years, where I had had friends who were mysteriously ill, lovers carrying their lovers around literally in their arms from doctor to doctor, from hospital to hospital, begging for 'Have you heard of anything this could remotely resemble?' ' Kramer had radical makings, even before the day in 1981 when he read a newspaper story about a new so-called gay cancer. The controversial satire became a bestseller, although some bookstores - including a gay bookstore - refused to carry it. Unless we can generate, visibly, numbers, masses, we are going to die.įaggots was the name of Kramer's first novel, written a few years before AIDS destroyed his world. Every gay man who was unable to come forward now and fight to save his own life is truly helping to kill the rest of us. And suddenly I was no longer the white man from Yale, I was a faggot without a name.' I was on my way to making a great deal of money I was not a gay man first by any manner of means until I became involved in fighting AIDS, and because someone close to me died. In 1992, he told NPR's Fresh Air, 'I was in the film industry. Kramer wasn't always what his friends called a 'message queen.' In the 1970s, he was an up-and-coming writer with an Oscar-nominated screenplay for his film adaptation of the D.H.

In the 1990 documentary Positive, he told a group of gay men, 'I am going to go out screaming so f****** rudely that you will hear this coarse, crude voice of mine in your nightmares! You are going to die, and you are going to die very, very soon unless you get up off your f****** tushies and fight back!' Kramer was one of the great provocateurs of the late 20th century (and below you'll see he wasn't shy about using language that might shock or offend). Kramer died Wednesday morning of pneumonia in Manhattan, Will Schwalbe, his friend and literary executor, told NPR. He became a high-profile, high-volume, one-man crusade against the disease.

In the early 1980s, Kramer witnessed hundreds, then thousands of gay men die before the government took action to stop the spread of HIV. Larry Kramer was one of the first activists against AIDS, back when the disease didn't even have a name. Writer and activist Larry Kramer, here in 1989, was an unapologetically loud and irrepressible voice in the fight against AIDS.Įditor's note: This story contains language that may be offensive.

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