Silence = Death

Roger Berkowitz

The AIDS activist and playwright Larry Kramer died this week. Kramer started ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in 1987 to fight hard for both gay rights and action against AIDS. His uncompromising activism and fight reinvented civil disobedience in the 1980s and 1990s, giving birth to tactics that have come to define democratic activism. As Daniel Lewis writes:

An author, essayist and playwright — notably hailed for his autobiographical 1985 play, “The Normal Heart” — Mr. Kramer had feet in both the world of letters and the public sphere. In 1981 he was a founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first service organization for H.I.V.-positive people, though his fellow directors effectively kicked him out a year later for his aggressive approach. (He returned the compliment by calling them “a sad organization of sissies.”)

He was then a founder of a more militant group, Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), whose street actions demanding a speedup in AIDS drugs research and an end to discrimination against gay men and lesbians severely disrupted the operations of government offices, Wall Street and the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

“One of America’s most valuable troublemakers,” Susan Sontag called him.
Even some of the officials Mr. Kramer accused of “murder” and “genocide” recognized that his outbursts were part of a strategy to shock the country into dealing with AIDS as a public-health emergency.

In the early 1980s, he was among the first activists to foresee that what had at first caused alarm as a rare form of cancer among gay men would spread worldwide, like any other sexually transmitted disease, and kill millions of people without regard to sexual orientation. Under the circumstances, he said, “If you write a calm letter and fax it to nobody, it sinks like a brick in the Hudson.”