ACT UP

LARRY KRAMER

WRITER, AIDS ACTIVIST

Through his writing and the organizations he founded Kramer as been in the forefront of AIDS activism in word and deed.

Born in 1935 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Larry Kramer graduated from Yale in 1957. He worked in the film industry during he 1960s as a story editor and writer. For his best-known creenplay, Women in Love (1970), he received an Oscar omination. His novel Faggots (1978) made him a somewhat controversial figure in the gay community in New York, but he did not become a gay activist until the onset of the AIDS epidemic.

Alarmed by the way AIDS was killing homosexuals, in 1981, Kramer and a few friends founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis (see card 108), the first AIDS service group. His play The Normal Heart 1985) describes the early years of the epidemic in a dramatic and ouching way. The Reagan administration's bungling attempts at lealing with AIDS struck Kramer and some friends as genocidal, so in 1987 they organized ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (see card 105), a confrontational protest group. In Time nagazine, Kramer called ACT UP "a street-smart bunch of very Courageous scrappers whose mission is to end the AIDS epidemic."

In 1988, Kramer tested positive for HIV himself, and his play The Destiny of Me (1992) seemed to be a summing-up of his life. Asked then why he seemed less angry and more serene than in revious years, he said the first actions of President-elect Bill Clinton made him optimistic, and, "Dr. David Baltimore, of Rockefeller University, has said he thinks a cure for AIDS can be ound. We have never heard anyone say a thing like that before." Next Card 98: MATHILDE KRIM: Biologist, AmFAR Co-Founder AIDS AWARENESS: PEOPLE WITH AIDS

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