Larry Kramer
January 10th, 2010 at 7:26 pm ETJesse Green’s extended feature about Larry Kramer in New York magazine last month is very much worth taking the time to read — especially if you’re young enough that Kramer (if you know of him at all) feels to you like a historical figure rather than someone from your lived experience.
Larry Kramer is probably more directly responsible than any other person, living or dead, for the (belated) response of the U.S. government, and of American society generally, to the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s. To those who came of age after anti-retroviral medications made it possible to imagine living a somewhat normal life with the HIV virus (albeit a normality distorted and weighed down by complication and risk), it may be hard to imagine how terrifying AIDS was when it first appeared. It inspired a fear-driven cultural backlash against the gay community just as that community was starting to come into its own — and a culturally powerful impulse, in an entire generation, to stand together and fight.
The generation in question was the one immediately preceding my own. I was young enough not to know many people personally who died from AIDS-related infections in the early years, but I did know some — and I knew many, many people just a few years older than myself whose entire social networks had been devastated. (I was about to write “decimated,” but for some of the people I’m thinking of, the implication that only one in ten lost his life is vastly inadequate to the pain and dislocation they lived through.)
It’s important that young people remember that the comforts they know — their confidence in their differentness, the medical treatments available to them, their legal protection against discrimination — did not come without a fight. And in the very first days, fighters like Larry Kramer were the ones setting the example.
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Rich Mintz blogs on online fundraising and social media, American history and culture, bicycling and urbanism, food, technology, and other topics. Professionally, he's an expert in fundraising, constituency development, and social media for nonprofits, cultural organizations, cause-related marketers, and corporations. He is based in New York, where he serves as Vice President, Strategy, for 
