I grew up thinking of Larry Kramer as something of a cross between the boogeyman and the Messiah. My father, a New Yorker writer who wrote a major profile of Kramer in 2002, would return from trips to interview Kramer in Connecticut looking utterly exhausted and ultimately referred to Kramer in the story as “a weird mixture of Jerry Rubin and Mahatma Gandhi: three parts obnoxiousness and one part righteous indignation.”
Frustrations aside, I never heard my dad utter Kramer’s name without a certain measure of esteem in his voice. I was nine then, too young to connect Kramer’s decades of gay activism to my own nascent sexuality, but just knowing that my dad—the person I respected most in the world and not someone who was profligate with his approval—respected Kramer so utterly told me everything I needed to know about the man.
As I grew up and came out, I came to know a different Kramer: not the one who fought my father at every turn during the duration of their work together but one who fought Reagan’s AIDS-ignoring administration with every ounce of prodigious fury in his body, the one who founded ACT UP and forever changed how the medical establishment treats disenfranchised groups.
While Reagan charmed the masses with his politesse, Kramer repelled them with his rage, wrapping Senator Jesse Helms’s home in a giant condom and calling Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a killer and “an incompetent idiot.” (The two eventually found common ground; Fauci said upon his death that Kramer “had a heart of gold.”)
To mistake Kramer’s anger for a distraction from his activism, though—as an early version of a New York Times obituary did on Wednesday, claiming that Kramer’s “often abusive approach could overshadow his achievements”—misses the point of Kramer’s work entirely. Anyone who’s engaged in even a cursory study of Kramer’s career knows that his anger was his activism, and a generation of queer people owes him everything for it.
My own queer existence—as remarkably privileged as it is in almost every respect—has contained no small share of institutionalized homophobia and internalized shame, but the real lesson I learned from studying Kramer’s life and work was, to borrow a phrase from the Bernie Sanders campaign, to “fight for someone you don’t know.” Kramer taught me that my anger—about everything from anti-trans discrimination in the Trump administration to COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on the LGBTQ+ community—is not a liability but a vital and infinitely renewable resource, one with which I must familiarize myself if I want to help fight for a world where all queer people’s lives are deemed valuable.