Thread by @MatthewWolfff

🏳️‍🌈TODAY’S PRIDE HERO🏳️‍🌈
Larry Kramer (b. June 25, 1935)

Playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist.

Larry founded the direct action protest group ACT UP, credited with making the AIDS crisis a priority of public health policy.

Kramer was born in Bridgeport CT. He attended Yale in 1953, where he fell into a depression, imagining himself the only gay man on campus. A suicide attempt left him determined to explore his sexuality, and sent him on a path to fight for “gay people’s worth.”

Kramer became involved with movie production at 23, taking up a job as a teletype operator at Columbia Pictures. Eventually, he earned a position in the story dept developing scripts. His second screenwriting credit, “Women in Love,” earned an Oscar nomination in 1969.

Wanting to incorporate homosexual themes into his writing, Kramer started writing for the stage. Although early works were mild successes, Kramer became distraught when productions were shut down early by producers.

In 1978, Kramer finished the novel “Faggots,” about the fast lives of gay men on Fire Island and Manhattan. Kramer researched the book, talking to many men who wanted to know if it was going to be positive. He felt that gay men were conflicted about the lives they lived.

“Faggots” was panned by both the mainstream and gay press, and causes an uproar in the gay community. “The straight world thought I was repulsive, and the gay world treated me like a traitor.” The novel became one of the best selling gay novels of all time.

Kramer was originally reluctant to get involved in gay activism, but as friends started getting sick in 1980, Kramer felt compelled to act. He co-founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis to raise funds and provide services to men stricken with AIDS in the NY area.

Kramer soon clashed with the rest of the board of the GMHC. While they wanted to focus on social services for the dying, Kramer wanted to fight for public funding and to get at the cause of the disease.

When the GMHC refused to spread the message that sexual contact was the likely method of spreading the disease, Kramer published an essay entitled "1,112 and Counting,” discussing the spread of the disease, lack of funding, and the apathy of the gay community.

Kramer’s confrontational style was an advantage, earning much needed attention in the NY press. Kramer began calling out men in positions of authority widely understood to be closeted gay for refusing to take action, including NY mayor Ed Koch. Kramer was forced out of the GMHC.

During an extended trip to Europe, Kramer visited the Dachau concentration camp. While it had opened as early as 1933, neither Germans nor other nations did anything to stop it. Recognizing the same reluctance by gays and the US Gov, he was inspired to write “The Normal Heart.”

The protagonist of the play is thinly veiled autobiographical, highlighting his activism and frustration at the gay community that sees him as alarmist. The play is considered a literary landmark, and was produced by HBO as a film in 2014.

In 1987, Kramer founded ACT UP, a direct action protest organization that chose government agencies and corporations as targets to publicize lack of treatment and funding for people with AIDS.

A primary target was the FDA, which Kramer accused of holding up badly needed AIDS medication. ACT UP engaged in confrontational civil disobedience, with the goal of arrests focusing attention on the crisis. The organization grew to hundreds of chapters around the world.

Immunologist Anthony Fauci states "ACT UP put medical treatment in the hands of the patients..There is no question in my mind that Larry helped change medicine in this country. In American medicine there are two eras. Before Larry and after Larry.”

Two decades later Kramer continued to advocate for social and legal equity for homosexuals. "Our own country's democratic process declares us to be unequal, which means, in a democracy, that our enemy is you.”

Larry defines the AIDS crisis as a holocaust. The US Gov failed to respond quickly because the suffering of gay people was a joke to them. Witness the laughter questions about the spread of AIDS prompts in the WH briefing room.

Larry Kramer was a catalyst for getting America to take notice of the AIDS crisis, through loud civil dissobediance. He was also key in making it known that sex spread the disease, even as his detractors denounced him as alarmist and sex-negative.

#LGBTVoices is wrapping up our June Pride project. Check out our tweets on the heroes of the struggle for LGBTQ rights in the moment below. Check our hashtag for the final tweets in this series in the coming days. RT and spread this message of activism!

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