Larry Kramer used his anger to force elites to respond to the Aids crisis | Moira Donegan

It’s largely because of his advocacy that US authorities finally responded to the Aids crisis decimating the gay communityHe put a giant yellow condom over the house of the arch conservative Senator Jesse Helms, and he poured the ashes of Aids victims on the White House lawn. He interrupted live television broadcasts and shut down the New York Stock Exchange. It may be appropriate that Larry Kramer’s protest tactics with Act Up, the Aids activist group that he helped to found, were theatrical; after all, Kramer himself was a playwright. But the mood at the Act Up protests themselves was not so much mischievous as rageful and stricken. “Sure I have a temper, who doesn’t?” Kramer told Newsday in 1992. “It happens when you’ve seen so many friends die.”Kramer made an enemy of the elite and antagonized politicians, pharmaceutical executives and the medical bureaucracy who he thought were not responding with enough urgency to the Aids epidemic, accusing them in unflinching terms of genocide by inaction. He once wrote an open letter in the San Francisco Examiner calling Dr Anthony Fauci “a murderer” and “an incompetent idiot” for the inaction of the Reagan administration on Aids. His willingness to anger the powerful made him one of the most hated, most divisive and most effective activists of his generation.  Continue reading…
Via: Larry Kramer used his anger to force elites to respond to the Aids crisis | Moira Donegan