In Memoriam

In One of His Final Interviews Larry Kramer, 84 and Infirm, Still Roared

As COVID was beginning to lay siege to the country, who else to turn to but the resilient AIDS activist and writer who raged so hard against the plague that preceded it? One reporter recalls his last interview with a longtime subject.

By Michael Shnayerson

May 28, 2020

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By Catherine McGann/Getty Images.

In April, I called Larry Kramer to see if he had any thoughts on how one plague compared to another: COVID-19 to AIDS. I had first met him in 1987, while reporting a story for Vanity Fair on the heavy toll AIDS was taking in the arts—a pivotal piece, it turned out, that came to be called “One by One.”

The legendary AIDS activist picked up the phone himself, with some effort, as if the receiver was too heavy to hold. When I asked him for his thoughts on the devastating impact of the new virus, he sighed audibly. “Haven’t we said all there is to say?”

Gently, I said I thought there might be more. Kramer sighed again, and told me to wait. He put down the receiver, and I could hear a wheelchair rolling away; it was a long minute, maybe two. Finally the wheelchair returned. “I’m about to be 85,” Kramer wheezed. He had weathered HIV; hepatitis B and a liver transplant; and recently a bad fall, which had left him on his apartment floor, unattended for a time, with a broken leg. The prospect of dying from COVID-19 scared him. “I haven’t left my apartment since early March,” he said.

In those first pandemic weeks, Kramer had seen a lot of his old friend Dr. Anthony Fauci on television and in the newspapers. In the early 1980s, when Kramer had spoken out about a new disease killing his friends, and raised a lone voice about the careless sex that seemed to be helping it spread, Fauci—then and now the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—was one of the few government officials who’d listened.

“He was not the best for us in the beginning,” Kramer said, blunt as always. “He was very slow, and he was the enemy of the activists for quite some time.” Kramer persisted throughout the 1980s, forming the Gay Men’s Health Crisis to help the sick, and then the provocative collective ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), when nothing less than radical politics would push the government into developing new drugs. “All the drugs that are out there are out there because of AIDS activism,” Kramer told me, “and our pressuring the drug companies, and Fauci, and anyone else we could get a hold of.” It was Kramer, he said, who persuaded Fauci to identify AIDS, publicly and formally, as a plague.

Fauci became an ally and friend—a good friend—but even his support was not enough. Kramer had to fight intransigence from the Food and Drug Administration, where AIDS bore a stigma and no drugs existed to put through the pipeline. He had to fight an even more archaic bureaucracy at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “They did everything in longhand!” Kramer recalled. “They didn’t use computers!” That was when everyone was going digital. “And that,” Kramer insisted, “was why it took so long for drugs to get approved.”

Even now, with Fauci, a leading member of the White House’s efforts against COVID-19, the CDC and the U.S. government have been slow in their response to both pandemics. AIDS has its battery of life-extending drugs, but not yet a vaccine. A federal-testing program for the novel coronavirus has yet to be set up. For a moment, on the phone, I heard a trace of Kramer’s famous rage. “The White House has been awful on everything,” he muttered. “That guy Robert Redfield at the CDC? He’s an idiot. A villain.”

Kramer had gained renown as an important writer as well as activist. His largely autobiographical play, The Normal Heart, had run for nine months at the Public Theater in 1985, then again on the stage in 2011, landing a Tony. His HBO adaption won the 2014 Emmy for outstanding television movie. Along the way, he had written another autobiographical play, The Destiny of Me. Still, he had felt for much of that time that his days were numbered. I remember profiling him for Vanity Fair on the occasion of his 57th birthday. When he blew out the candles on his cake, the moment seemed almost macabre.

Life-saving drugs had given Kramer—and a whole generation of people with HIV and AIDS—the prospect of many more birthdays, though Kramer in our phone chat voiced resentment toward the pharmaceutical firms’ profit motives. “AIDS drugs have made Gilead a lot of money,” Kramer noted, referring to the drug giant’s medicine Biktarvy. With the drug companies, it was often about the money.

Kramer, for one, used much of his unexpected time writing an epic tome, a novelistic history of gay America called The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart. It weighed in at 800 pages and drew withering reviews when it was published in 2015. Kramer, always happy to shock, had not only included real-life historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, but declared one after another of them to be gay.

Unstoppable, Kramer had gone on to write a Volume 2, even longer than the first, which brought his history almost up to the present, with one of its major characters a pre-presidential Donald Trump. The New York Times’s Dwight Garner had rapped the first volume, but came around on the second. “It’s a mess, a folly covered in mirrored tiles, but somehow it’s a beautiful and humane one,” Garner wrote. “I can’t say I liked it. Yet, on a certain level, I loved it.”

The Brutality of Fact as Kramer subtitled his Volume 2, had come out in January, a whopping 880 pages. With its savage treatment of the Reagan administration’s failure to step up on AIDS, it was, in a sense, a remarkable feat of timing: an epic about one plague appearing just as the next one did.

To an 84-year-old who had survived AIDS, COVID-19 seemed all too familiar. Both were terrifying. Both appeared to target certain cohorts—and then expanded to the entire world. And in both, the sick, all too often, died alone. Was there something, perhaps, that these two pandemics signified, coming one after another as they had?

Kramer was quiet for a moment; I heard him breathing on the line. It was a stupid question, I was about to tell him. These were viruses; they didn’t mean anything.

“That evil exists in the world,” he managed at last.

Six weeks later, Larry Kramer died in his Manhattan apartment. His husband, architect David Webster, reported the cause of death as pneumonia.

Michael Shnayerson

Royal Watch