Best known for his Tony Award-winning play "The Normal Heart," the Oscar-nominated screenwriter, playwright, author, and legendary gay rights and AIDS activist Larry Kramer has died at 84.
An aggressive and fierce advocate for those in the gay community, Kramer himself was infected with HIV.
His husband, David Weber, told the New York Times Kramer succumbed to pneumonia at their home in Manhattan.
Kramer founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis, the first service organization for H.I.V.-positive people, in 1981 and fought tirelessly to speed the process of saving the lives of people with HIV and AIDS.
Ruthless when it came to fighting for the rights of the LGBTQ community and inspiring others to take up the fight. In the 1990 documentary "Positive," he told a group of gay men, "I am going to go out screaming so f****** rudely that you will hear this coarse, crude voice of mine in your nightmares! You are going to die, and you are going to die very very soon, unless you get up off your f****** tushies and fight back!"
He made himself known in Hollywood with the adaptation of the D.H. Lawrence novel into the film "Women in Love," and his first novel "Faggot," became a best-seller.
Kramer famously called infectious-disease expert Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a killer and "an incompetent idiot." Years later, the two would learn to respect one another.
"Once you got past the rhetoric," Dr. Fauci told the NYT in an interview for Kramer's obituary, "you found that Larry Kramer made a lot of sense, and that he had a heart of gold."
