headquarters, in the Washington sub-
urbs. An advisory panel was consider-
ing whether to approve a new treatment
for one of the more debilitating infec-
tions that AIDS can cause. Kramer, and
many other activists, believed that the
government was taking far too long to
approve new treatments, and he was in
the audience that day to say so. In front
of several hundred people, he let loose
a tirade against the “AIDS establish-
ment,” by which he meant the doctors,
reporters, and politicians (among many
others) who he believed were conspir-
ing, through negligence, ill will, and
sheer stupidity, to kill gay men. It was
a typical Kramer tantrum, and I wasn’t
paying much attention until I heard him
say my name, followed quickly by the
words “Nazi” and “murderer.” The AIDS
epidemic was entering its most viru-
lent phase in the United States, and I
had just begun to cover it as a medical
reporter for the Washington Post. Al-
though Kramer reserved his most with-
ering hatred for the Times, he was con-
vinced that the Post (and nearly every
other paper) was ignoring the severity
of the epidemic largely because so many
of those affected were gay.
I thought that Kramer was a com-
plete lunatic. Over the years, however,
I came to realize that he is not quite as
emotional or as spontaneous as he ap-
pears. (“I don’t walk around the streets
of the Village screaming at my green-
grocer, you know,” he told me one day.
“I am extremely shy. People, when they
meet me, are always shocked that I’m
not foaming at the mouth or shouting
obscenities.”) In fact, Kramer uses anger
the way Jackson Pollock worked with
paint; he’ll fling it, drip it, or pour it
onto any canvas he can find—and the
bigger the canvas the more satisfied he
is with the result. Subtlety repulses him.
His novels, plays, and essays are filled
with lists of enemies, hyperbolic cries
of despair, and enough outrage to fill
the Grand Canyon. His nonfiction work
is collected in a volume called “Reports
from the Holocaust,’’ named, as Kramer
told me, because “AIDS is genocide
against our people. It’s a more success-
ful holocaust than Hitler could have
imagined.’’
To straight America, Kramer has
often seemed a radical gay extremist.
The truth is more complex; Kramer oc-
cupies a strange niche in the history of
activism. For years, he was reluctant to
get involved with any political group,
and then, when he did jump in, the
groups were often reluctant to have him.
“Larry is priceless, but he frightens peo-
ple,’’ said Sean Strub, an AIDS activist
from the early days, who went on to
start POZ, the first major magazine
dedicated to people infected with H.I.V.
“Fear is one of the most powerful mo-
tivational forces on earth, and it has
been Larry’s most effective ally. But his
tactics and his style can be difficult to
take. As a result, he was not always wel-
come, even when he was saving peo-
ple’s lives.”
By the late nineteen-eighties, though,
the streets of the Village and of the Cas-
tro, in San Francisco, seemed like a new
kind of war zone; the buildings were
intact, but everything else had been de-
stroyed. Lovers, brothers, roommates,and friends were dying by the hundred,
and it was no longer possible for any-
one to ignore.
Kramer’s fame grew as the epidemic
intensified. He wrote two autobiograph-
ical AIDS plays, “The Normal Heart”
and “The Destiny of Me,” which brought
him equal measures of acclaim and con-
troversy. “The Destiny of Me” was a
finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 (los-
ing to “Angels in America”), and it won
an Obie as the best play written that
year. “The Normal Heart,” which is gen-
erally viewed as a touchstone in the lit-
erature of AIDS, has been produced hun-
dreds of times since it opened, in 1985,
and it is the longest-running play ever
staged at the Public Theatre. For the
past two decades, Kramer has been at
work on a manuscript called “The Amer-
ican People,” an ambitious historical
novel that begins in the Stone Age, in-
cludes, for example, details of Kramer’s“There’s a nice little pasture two miles down
the road that’s open for lunch.”