Larry Kramer: The Fighting Heart
It took more than 30 years for Larry Kramer’s play “The Normal Heart,” about gay New Yorkers struggling with AIDS, to be turned into a movie. But for the playwright, there is still work to be done.
By Natalia V. Osipova and Oresti Tsonopoulos on Publish Date May 21, 2014. Photo by Ruth Fremson/The New York Times.Larry Kramer and Gay Men’s Health Crisis are coming full circle. The volunteer AIDS organization, which grew out of a gathering in Mr. Kramer’s living room in 1982, but whose leaders ousted him the next year due to his confrontational tactics for drawing attention to the epidemic, will honor him at its annual spring gala on March 23 by creating a lifetime achievement award bearing his name, the group announced on Friday.
Mr. Kramer, a writer who dramatized the early deaths from AIDS and the struggles of Gay Men’s Health Crisis in his landmark play “The Normal Heart,” will be the first recipient of the Larry Kramer Activism Award; in subsequent years it will be given to advocates who reflects his “spirit, passion and fearlessness,” said Roberta A. Kaplan, co-chair of the organization’s board.
Mr. Kramer, who went on to help found the protest group Act Up and, at 79, remains a prominent voice on gay issues and AIDS, has dipped back into the fold of Gay Men’s Health Crisis before. He was invited to speak at its 10th anniversary ceremony, where he called out board members for not doing enough to fight and prevent AIDS. But the new award will be a permanent recognition of Mr. Kramer’s contributions to the organization, as well as an attempt “to bring a sense of closure and healing” between Mr. Kramer and the group, Ms. Kaplan said. The depiction of that rift in “The Normal Heart” reached wide audiences with a Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of the play in 2011 and a recent movie adaptation on HBO.
“There would be no G.M.H.C. without Larry Kramer,” said Ms. Kaplan, the lawyer who argued on behalf of Edith Windsor in 2013 before the United States Supreme Court in a case where a majority of justices struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act and extended federal benefits to married same-sex couples.
Mr. Kramer, who has been weakened from recent illnesses, nevertheless remains busy. The first volume of his epic novel, “The American People,” running 800 pages, will be published in April by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and a new documentary about his life, “Larry Kramer: In Love and Anger,” is scheduled to air on HBO in June.
Mr. Kramer, reached by email on Friday, said, “It is both an irony and an honor to be remembered by this historically essential organization that was started in my living room.”
Tickets for Gay Men’s Health Crisis gala, which will be held at Cipriani 42nd Street, will go on sale on Tuesday.