While telling the story of an aggressive gay activist who is trying to nurse a dying lover through AIDS, he also sends out broadsides against the people and organizations who he felt conspired to keep the public from learning the truth about what was homophobically called “the gay plague.” So he took all those feelings and wrote a hand grenade of a play called The Normal Heart, which exploded on the N.Y. And, in fact, when, in 1983 Kramer wrote a frightening call to arms to the gay men of America in a piece he called “1,112 and Counting” about the number of men already dead due to the dread disease, he was found too abrasive and asked to leave the support group he had helped form. “To this day, I ask myself why didn’t every gay man in America come out to fight AIDS when it was so awful?”īut they didn’t.
When gay friends of his started mysteriously getting ill in 1980, then began dying the following year, he joined together with some friends to form the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, to raise funds and provide help for people afflicted by the still-unnamed disease. “I don’t know why I always have to be the one who keeps asking the questions, but that’s just the way it is,” says Kramer on the phone from his Manhattan home with a world-weary sigh that he’s certainly earned the right to.
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/entertainment/stage/2020/05/27/larry-kramer-playwright-and-aids-activist-dies-at-84/larry_kramer.jpg "the destiny of me larry kramer")
The 76-year-old Kramer is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter ( Women in Love) and Obie-winning playwright ( The Destiny of Me) whose various other works earned him an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but the title which clings to him more strongly is “AIDS activist.”
14 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, it could also be the mantra for the author’s life.
That isn’t just the opening line of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, which starts performances on Oct.
0 kommentar(er)
