Out in Film: Larry Kramer

"Larry Kramer is one of America's most valuable troublemakers. I hope he never lowers his voice." -- Susan Sontag.

Larry Kramer is predominantly known as an author and playwright, HIV/AIDS advocate, gay rights activist and founder of ACT UP. To call him controversial is putting it mildly. Throughout the early days of the AIDS crisis, he could always be counted on to say what others either would not say or did not want to hear. And he has continued to do so ever since.

Following his graduation from Yale in 1957, Kramer started his writing career while working at Columbia Pictures and then United Artists. His first credit was for the teen sex comedy titled Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. He could only go up from there, and he did, with his Oscar nominated screen adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, which he also produced. His screenwriting career ended, though, with his next project, the critically reviled musical remake of Lost Horizon, infamous for being one of the biggest flops in movie history. It was "the only thing in my life I'm ashamed of", Kramer would later say, understandably.

Kramer turned to the page, with books like Faggots (one of the best-selling gay novels of all time), and the stage. His play, The Normal Heart, was the first artistic work to tackle the subject of AIDS. Barbra Streisand was to direct a film version that, alas, never happened, but Kramer did pen a sequel to it several years later, the Obie Award-winning The Destiny of Me.

Due to his high profile involvement in the gay rights movement, Kramer has appeared in many documentaries on related subjects, including Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, After Stonewall, When Ocean Meets Sky and Gay Sex in the 70s. Kramer was also name-dropped in the title of David Drake's one-man play, The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, which was later filmed and released as a feature. Kramer is currently working on his grand opus, The American People, an ambitious historical piece that spans the entire existence of its title subject.

Links via Imdb.com and ActUpNY.org.