Tony's Diary Package — page 193

"How did I meet Larry? He called me a murderer and an incompetent idiot on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner magazine." Speaking as he passed though a fever check on his way into the White House, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recalled some of his fondest memories of his friend Larry Kramer, who died early Wednesday morning. Nearly every anecdote in our brief interview had the same plot: the country's best-known AIDS activist publicly abusing the country's best-known AIDS doctor -- and then privately apologizing afterward, saying he hadn't meant it, that it was just how to get things done. "It was an extraordinary 33-year relationship," Dr. Fauci said. "We loved each other. We would have dinner. I would go see him in the West Village, he would come down to Washington. "But even recently, when he got pissed at me about something, he said to some paper, 'Fauci's gone over to the dark side again.' I called him up and said, 'Larry? What the....' And he'd say, 'Oh, I didn't really mean it. I just wanted to get some attention.'" Nobody stirred up attention for a cause quite like Mr. Kramer did. An open letter to the San Francisco Examiner in 1988, Dr. Fauci said, was the first time he'd heard of Mr. Kramer, a playwright who had founded two activist groups: the Gay Men's Health Crisis; and Act Up, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Addressing Dr. Fauci in the letter, Mr. Kramer wrote: "Your refusal to hear the screams of AIDS activists early in the crisis resulted in the deaths of thousands of Queers. Your present inaction is causing today's increase in HIV infection outside of the Queer community." "I thought, 'This guy, I need to reach out to him,'" Dr. Fauci recalled. "So I did, and we started talking. We realized we had things in common." Mr. Kramer's name-calling wasn't personal, Dr. Fauci explained. "I was the face of the federal government. I was the one out there trying to warn the public, and he was, too. That was his way of saying, 'Hello? Wake up!' That was his style. He was iconoclastic, he was theatrical -- he wanted to make his point."