Death of Larry Kramer, screenwriter, playwright and co-founder of Act-Up

If he was at the origin in 1987, in New York, of the foundation of Act-Up, now present in more than sixty countries, Larry Kramer remains nonetheless a playwright and screenwriter of cinema important in the heart of the 70s. American activist, author and playwright, himself infected with HIV, Larry Kramer died, Wednesday May 27 in Manhattan, from pneumonia, at the age of 84 years.

Many artists, politicians and anonymous people who, since the announcement of his death, have paid tribute to him across the Atlantic. From singer Elton John to Ryan Murphy, to actor Mark Ruffalo (the Marvel Hulk) they all praised his energy and his will to live.

"One of America's Most Precious Disrupters"

Before being a staunch activist, ardent defender of the homosexual cause, and co-founder of Act-Up, the one who was portrayed by the essayist Susan Sontag as "one of America's most precious disturbers" will have was an important author, screenwriter of cinema and playwright at the heart of the abundant 1970s.

Larry Kramer was born in 1935 in Bridgeport, Connecticut to a Jewish family, father lawyer and mother social worker for the Red Cross. After a childhood in Washington, he began his studies at the prestigious Yale University. Often ridiculed for his homosexuality in Puritan America in the 1950s, Kramer was depressed and even attempted suicide. It was his discovery of the theater that saved him.

Kramer begins by writing screenplays for Hollywood. We can quote for example Women in love by Ken Russell, in 1969, with Glenda Jackson (who won the Oscar), or Lost Horizon in 1972 by Charles Jarrott (a remake of Frank Capra in the form of a musical), with Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann.

Also crowned with an Oscar nomination in 1969, Kramer moved to New York to devote himself to theater and the writing of novels. His first romantic success, Faggots , tells of a homosexual's quest for love in the hedonistic environment of New York in the 1970s.

In 1981, following the start of the AIDS epidemic which does not yet bear his name, Kramer founded the group Gay Men's Health Crisis . It is at the same time that success arrives on the Broadway stage. His play The Normal Heart, very autobiographical, depicts the difficulties of a young New York activist to warn about this new virus.

Larry Kramer then realizes that his fight must no longer be in the artistic and theatrical field, but in reality. In 1987, with the creation of Act-Up, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (in French the Coalition against AIDS to liberate power), he went into high gear.

The end of his life was entirely dedicated to his activism, sometimes aggressive and assertive. Last March, already very weak, Larry Kramer compared the American government management of the coronavirus pandemic to that of AIDS. He was working on a new play on the subject.