Larry Kramer facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Larry Kramer
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Kramer in 2010
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| Born | Laurence David Kramer June 25, 1935 Bridgeport, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Died | May 27, 2020 (aged 84) New York City, U.S. |
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| Education | Yale University (BA) |
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| Years active | 1960s–2020 |
| Spouse |
David Webster
(m. 2013) |
| Relatives | Arthur Kramer (brother) |
Laurence David Kramer (June 25, 1935 – May 27, 2020) was an American playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London, where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for the film Women in Love (1969) and received an Academy Award nomination for his work.
Kramer witnessed the spread of the disease later known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) among his friends in 1980. He co-founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC). Kramer grew frustrated with bureaucratic paralysis and wished to engage in further action than the social services GMHC provided. He expressed his frustration by writing a play titled The Normal Heart, produced at The Public Theater in New York City in 1985.
His political activism continued with the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987, an influential direct action protest organization with the aim of gaining more public action to fight the AIDS crisis. ACT UP has been widely credited with changing public health policy and the perception of people living with AIDS, and with raising awareness of HIV and AIDS-related diseases.
Kramer was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his play The Destiny of Me (1992), and he was a two-time recipient of the Obie Award.
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Early life
Laurence David Kramer was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the younger of two children. His mother, Rea (née Wishengrad), worked as a shoe store employee, teacher, and social worker for Red Cross. His father, George Kramer, worked as a government attorney. His older brother, Arthur Kramer was born in 1927. The family was Jewish.
Kramer's parents struggled to find work during the American Great Depression. When the family moved to Maryland, they found themselves in a much lower socioeconomic bracket than that of Kramer's high school peers. Kramer's father wanted him to marry a woman with money and pressured him to become a member of Pi Tau Pi, a Jewish fraternity.
Kramer's father, older brother Arthur, and two uncles were alumni of Yale University. Kramer enrolled at Yale College in 1953, where he had difficulty adjusting. He felt lonely, and earned lower grades than those to which he was accustomed. Kramer enjoyed the Varsity Glee Club during his remaining time at Yale, and he graduated in 1957 with a degree in English. He served in the U.S. Army Reserve before beginning his film writing and production career.
Career
Early writings
According to Kramer, every drama he wrote derived from a desire to understand love's nature and its obstacles. Kramer became involved with movie production at age 23 by taking a job as a Teletype operator at Columbia Pictures, agreeing to the position only because the machine was across the hall from the president's office. Eventually, he won a position in the story department reworking scripts. His first writing credit was as a dialogue writer for Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, a comedy. He followed that with the 1969 screenplay Women in Love, an adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's novel, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He next penned what Kramer later referred to as (the) "only thing I'm truly ashamed of", the 1973 musical remake of Frank Capra's Lost Horizon, a notorious critical and commercial failure with a screenplay based very closely on Capra's film. Kramer later said that his well-negotiated fee for this work, skillfully invested by his brother, made him financially self-sufficient during the 1980s and 1990s.
Kramer then tried writing for the stage. He wrote Sissies' Scrapbook in 1973 (later rewritten and retitled as Four Friends). The play was first produced in a theater set up in an old YMCA gymnasium on 53rd Street and Eighth Avenue called the Playwrights Horizons. Live theater moved him to believing that writing for the stage was what he wanted to do. Although the play was given a somewhat favorable review by The New York Times, it was closed by the producer and Kramer was so distraught that he decided never to write for the stage again.
Kramer then wrote A Minor Dark Age, which was never produced.
The Normal Heart
The Normal Heart is a play set between 1981 and 1984. It addresses a writer named Ned Weeks as he nurses his lover, who is dying of an unnamed disease. His doctors are puzzled and frustrated by having no resources to research it. Meanwhile, the unnamed organization Weeks is involved in is angered by the bad publicity Weeks' activism is generating, and eventually throws him out. The play is considered a literary landmark. It remains the longest-running play ever staged at the Public Theater, running for a year starting in 1985. It has been produced over 600 times in the U.S., Europe (where it was televised in Poland), Israel, and South Africa. The Polish television adaptation débuted on the TVP channel on May 4, 1989, one month before the first free election in the country since 1928.
Actors following Davis who have portrayed Kramer's alter ego Ned Weeks include; Joel Grey, Richard Dreyfuss (in Los Angeles), Martin Sheen (at the Royal Court in London), Tom Hulce and then John Shea in the West End, Raul Esparza in a highly acclaimed 2004 revival at the Public Theater, and most recently Joe Mantello on Broadway at the Golden Theater.
In 2014, HBO produced a film version directed by Ryan Murphy with a screenplay by Kramer. It starred Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer (who won a Golden Globe Award for his performance), Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons, Alfred Molina, Julia Roberts, Joe Mantello, Jonathan Groff, and BD Wong.
ACT UP
In 1987, Kramer was the catalyst in the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (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. ACT UP was formed at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Services Center in New York City. Kramer was asked to speak as part of a rotating speaker series, and his well-attended speech focused on action to fight AIDS. Their first target became the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which Kramer accused of neglecting badly needed medication for HIV-infected Americans.
Engaging in civil disobedience that would result in many people being arrested was a primary objective, as it would focus attention on the target. On March 24, 1987, 17 people out of 250 participating were arrested for blocking rush-hour traffic in front of the FDA's Wall Street offices. Kramer was arrested dozens of times working with ACT UP, and the organization grew to hundreds of chapters in the U.S. and Europe.
Two decades later Kramer continued to advocate for social and legal equity for homosexuals.
In later decades, Kramer also continued to argue for funding research into cures for AIDS, contending that existing treatments disincentivized the pharmaceutical industry from developing cures.
The Destiny of Me
The Destiny of Me picks up where The Normal Heart left off, following Ned Weeks as he continues his journey fighting those whose complacency or will impede the discovery of a cure for a disease from which he suffers. The play opened in October 1992 and ran for one year off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre by the Circle Repertory Company. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was a double Obie Award winner and received the Lortel Award for Outstanding Play of the Year. The original production starred John Cameron Mitchell.
The American People: A History
Around 1981, Kramer began researching and writing a manuscript called The American People: A History, an ambitious historical work that begins in the Stone Age and continues into the present. In 2002, Will Schwalbe, editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books – the only man to have read the entire manuscript to that date – said, "He has set himself the hugest of tasks," and he described it as "staggering, brilliant, funny, and harrowing."
The book was published as a novel by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2015. The second volume, 880 pages, was published in 2020.
Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies
In 1997, Kramer approached Yale University, to bequeath several million dollars "to endow a permanent, tenured professorship in gay studies and possibly to build a gay and lesbian student center." At that time, gender, ethnic and race-related studies were viewed warily by academia. The then Yale provost, Alison Richard, stated that gay and lesbian studies was too narrow a specialty for a program in perpetuity.
In 2001, both sides settled upon establishing the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies, which would include visiting professors and a program of conferences, guest speakers and other events. Arthur Kramer endowed the program at Yale with $1 million to support a five-year trial. The five-year program ended in 2006.
An Army of Lovers Must Not Die
In 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Kramer began to write a play titled An Army of Lovers Must Not Die.
Personal life
Kramer and his partner, architectural designer David Webster, were together from 1991 until Kramer's death. On July 24, 2013, Kramer and Webster married in the intensive care unit of NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City while Kramer recovered from surgery.
Residence
Kramer divided his time between a residence in Manhattan, near Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, and Connecticut. Another resident of Kramer's Manhattan residential complex was Kramer's longtime nemesis, Ed Koch, who had been mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989. The two saw each other relatively infrequently, since they lived in different towers.
Death
Kramer died of pneumonia on May 27, 2020, at age 84, less than a month short of his 85th birthday.
Awards and recognition
- 1970: Nominated for the Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for Women in Love for his screenplay adaptation of the novel by D. H. Lawrence
- 1993: Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Destiny of Me
- 1993: Winner of two Obie Awards for The Destiny of Me
- 1996: American Academy of Arts and Letters, Award in Literature
- 1996: Public Service Award from Common Cause
- 1999: The Normal Heart named as one of the Hundred Best Plays of the 20th Century by the National Theatre of Great Britain
- 2005: Elected to the American Philosophical Society
- 2006: Named by Equality Forum as one of their 31 Icons of the LGBT History Month.
- 2011: The Normal Heart won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play
- 2012: Montgomery Fellowship at Dartmouth College
- 2013: PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist
- 2014: Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special for the HBO movie adaptation of The Normal Heart
- 2015: Inaugural Larry Kramer Activism Award from Gay Men's Health Crisis
- 2020: In June 2020, Kramer was added among American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City's Stonewall Inn. The SNM is the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history.
In the media
- Kramer's early activism is featured in the second episode of the fifth season of the podcast Fiasco, hosted by Leon Neyfakh.
