Video: Friends and Colleagues Gather To Salute Larry Kramer, Pioneering Activist, Playwright, and Author

Family, friends, fellow activists, and theatrical colleagues gathered on June 26, 2023 to celebrate the life and legacy of playwright and activist Larry Kramer. 

The program, held at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, included appearances from Tonya Pinkins, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner, John Cameron Mitchell, George C. Wolfe and many more. See the full event below. 

Kramer passed away from complications from pneumonia at his Manhattan home in 2020. He was 84 years old.

Larry Kramer was an award-winning playwright and author, and a celebrated public health and gay rights advocate. He wrote the Academy Award-nominated screenplay adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love and rose to further prominence with his bestselling novel Faggots. A pioneering AIDS activist, he cofounded the Gay Men's Health Crisis in 1982 and founded ACT UP in 1987. Kramer has won numerous awards for his plays and received the 2013 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist.

Kramer received an Oscar nomination and won two Obie Awards, the American Academy of Arts Award in Literature, and is a Pulitzer Award finalist. As one of the most dynamic and influential forces for political activism, gay rights, public health policy, and AIDS awareness, Larry became a widely-recognizable and remarkable speaker on these crucial issues.

At the root of both is his life-long commitment to criticizing and correcting gay apathy and government and social indifference to AIDS. He is a founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis, an AIDS service organization, and ACT UP, a widely effective direct action AIDS advocacy group. Larry's most acclaimed plays include The Normal Heart and the Pulitzer Prize-finalist The Destiny of Me. His screenplay for Women in Love was nominated for an Academy Award in 1969. He is also well-known for his influential novel Faggots, a confrontational portrayal of gay culture, and his critical essay about the AIDS crisis, "1,112 and Counting."

Kramer also wrote the plays Sissie's Scrapbook, A Minor Dark Age, and Just Say No, A Play about Farce. His other books are The Tragedy of Today's Gays and Reports From the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist.

The recent Broadway revival of The Normal Heart was nominated for five Tonys and won three, including Best Play. The film version stars Mark Ruffalo and Julia Roberts and premiered in May 2014.

Kramer earned his B.A. in English from Yale University. For the past three decades he researched American history and the cause of AIDS/HIVS for his novel The American People-the first volume was released in April 2015.