A direct verve, which is shocking, but terribly effective. Larry Kramer’s style was like the anti-AIDS association Act-Up, which he created in 1987. The American activist and author, himself infected with HIV, died on Wednesday, May 27 in Manhattan, the consequences of pneumonia. He was 84 years old.
Artists, politicians or anonymous. Since the announcement of his death, tributes have multiplied across the Atlantic to celebrate the one that the essayist Susan Sontag had portrayed as “One of America’s most precious disrupters” .
A description that strikes the right point, as the fight will have marked the literary and militant work of this kid born in 1935 in a family of the upper middle class on the East Coast. After a childhood in Washington, he began his studies at the prestigious Yale University. Mocked for his homosexuality in the very puritan America of the 1950s, he tried to commit suicide from the first semester. It was also there that he became interested in theater and appeared in productions by the faculty, reputed to be the best in the country in this area.
After an early career writing screenplays for Hollywood, crowned with an Oscar nomination in 1969, he moved to New York to devote himself to the theater and the writing of novels. His first success, the novel Faggots, tells of a homosexual’s quest for love in the hedonistic New York environment of the 1970s.
The start of the fight against AIDS
As early as 1981 and the onset of the AIDS epidemic which does not yet bear his name, Kramer founded the group Gay Men’s Health Crisis. That’s when success hits Broadway. His piece The Normal Heart, largely autobiographical, depicts the difficulties of a young New York activist to warn about this new virus. Like the play, Kramer’s fight went into high gear in 1987 with the creation of Act-Up, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, in French the Coalition Against AIDS to liberate power. The organization, with a direct and uncompromising style, like Kramer, was soon to gain popularity and spread out to numerous branches around the world. The Parisian version founded in 1989 is still famous today for his encapotage of the Place de la Concorde obelisk in 1993.
“Your rage helped inspire our movement. We will continue to honor your name and your spirit with action “, said Act-Up New York after the announcement of Kramer’s death. If he were without fear
and hadalmost always right
, according to current New York mayor Bill de Blasio, he did not hesitate to qualify political and medical oils as murderers
. In the early 1980s, he qualified incompetent idiot
Doctor Anthony Fauci, expert in infectious diseases and currently adviser to the White House in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Once he got past his controversial side, what he said made a lot of sense and he had a heart of gold
reacted Doctor Fauci after the announcement of Kramer’s death. A final tribute from the immunologist who had already declared in 2002 in the columns of the New Yorker? : In the history of American medicine, there are two eras: before Larry and after Larry.
Last March, already very weak, Larry Kramer compared government management of the coronavirus pandemic to that of AIDS. He was working on a new play on the subject.
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