Remembering Larry Kramer
Seeing Larry Kramer’s primal scream of a play “The Normal Heart” when it premiered in April of 1985 was a passionate, heartbreaking, and harrowing experience I’ll never forget.
The play was meant to be an in-your-face polemic with no place to hide. Theatergoers were surrounded by walls scrawled with the names of those who died of HIV/AIDS. Set in the early days of that pandemic, which decimated the gay community, the play followed writer Ned Weeks – an outspoken, exasperating gay man who, like Kramer himself, found himself rising to a historical moment in a role for himself he had never envisioned.
In the play – and in life – Kramer boldly named names, calling out New York City Mayor Ed Koch, President Ronald Reagan, The New York Times and even the gay community itself, for its lack of action in the face of the growing scourge. He was the living embodiment of the war cry of the era: “Silence = Death.”
At that point, the disease had taken tens of thousands of lives. Hundreds of thousands more would perish in the United States, and millions more globally, by the time the play was revived in 2004. When the drama finally made it to Broadway in 2011 in a Tony Award-winning revival, and later became a television movie on HBO in 2014, AIDS no longer made headlines. It was an increasingly distant memory for some, and for a new LGBTQ generation, it meant hardly anything at all.
Larry Kramer, the Bridgeport-born, Yale University-educated writer-activist, died May 27 at age 84 of pneumonia.
I interviewed Kramer several times over the years at his Manhattan apartment off of Washington Square, a home that he shared with his husband, David Webster. My first visit was in 1986, when New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre presented its own …