He had to fight an even more archaic bureaucracy at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 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. “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.įauci became an ally and friend-a good friend-but even his support was not enough. “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. “He was not the best for us in the beginning,” Kramer said, blunt as always. “I haven’t left my apartment since early March,” he said.

The prospect of dying from COVID-19 scared him. 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. He put down the receiver, and I could hear a wheelchair rolling away it was a long minute, maybe two.

Kramer sighed again, and told me to wait. Gently, I said I thought there might be more. When I asked him for his thoughts on the devastating impact of the new virus, he sighed audibly. The legendary AIDS activist picked up the phone himself, with some effort, as if the receiver was too heavy to hold. 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.” In April, I called Larry Kramer to see if he had any thoughts on how one plague compared to another: COVID-19 to AIDS.

The normal heart by larry kramer