Diary Prequel Package — page 445

Early in his career, Mr. Kramer wanted to write comedy. After graduating from Yale, he worked in the film industry, and was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay adaptation of the D. H. Lawrence novel "Women in Love" (1969). In 1978 he published a controversial novel, "Faggots," a satire of rampant drug use and promiscuity among gays in New York. "It's meant to be a comic novel -- it made me laugh," he said. His mission changed in the early 1980s, when H.I.V. and AIDS began spreading rapidly among gays and claimed the lives of two friends. He was a founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, a nonprofit support organization for those affected by the disease, and later started Act Up, a protest group that brought attention to the AIDS crisis. His activism spilled into his writing, with plays like "The Normal Heart" and "The Destiny of Me," which center on gay characters confronting the AIDS epidemic and take aim at indifferent politicians and institutions. Mr. Kramer's activism was closely and messily intertwined with his personal life. In 1989, he learned he was H.I.V. positive and suffering from liver damage, the result of hepatitis B. He credits Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for being among a handful of doctors who saved him by giving him experimental drugs. Mr. Kramer once vilified Dr. Fauci in print, calling him "an incompetent idiot" and a murderer, for his early approach to fighting the spread of AIDS. "The man who I criticize for allowing the virus to spread is the man who saved my life," Mr. Kramer said. Mr. Kramer's acerbic and belligerent style has often alienated friends and supporters. He and the playwright Tony Kushner had a blowout over Mr. Kushner's screenplay for the Steven Spielberg movie "Lincoln" (2012), because Mr. Kramer felt that Mr. Kushner should have depicted Lincoln as a gay man. "He and I had a major falling out over this," Mr. Kramer said. "I so wanted him to put that in the movie." (In "The American People," Mr. Kramer strikes back with his own fictional Lincoln, who has a male lover and often lustily utters "mighty fine" after their encounters.) These days, Mr. Kramer seems much less bellicose, though no less passionate. He speaks in a tremulous near-whisper and relies on a hearing aid and a cane. He spent much of last year in hospitals being treated for abdominal infections and almost died twice, he said. He was bedridden in 2013 when he and his longtime partner, the architect David Webster, were finally married in the intensive care unit of NYU Langone Medical Center. Mr. Kramer's writing has taken on a greater urgency lately. He has been writing for five or six hours every day, seven days a week. His progress is visible in the towering stacks of manuscript pages that cover a large table in his living room, which doubles as a work space. He is also working on a screenplay for a sequel to "The Normal Heart" and is the subject of an HBO documentary, "Larry Kramer: In Love and Anger," which will be shown in June, just after his 80th birthday.