The New York Times fucks up, but that’s not news
AIDS activist and playwright Larry Kramer, co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP, passed this morning of pneumonia. Journalists on Twitter are furious about the New York Times’s on-brand tone-deaf language on his obituary, which initially called his approach “often abusive” before it was changed, but—fuck it. A juggernaut in the movement to end the AIDS crisis is gone, during another pandemic, when his voice is needed most. In March, Kramer was working on a play that looked to incorporate the current covid-19 crisis into the experience of “three plagues.”
Set aside the Times for now and read his 1983 essay sounding the alarm back when there were 1,112 cases of AIDS, which helped to drum up the kind of anger that sent people marching into the streets. “If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble,” Kramer wrote. “If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth.” NPR’s obit is more balanced.
