Fauci on Larry Kramer
The following editorial piece appeared in the New York Times this morning, a reflection by Dr. Fauci on the late AIDS activist Larry Kramer, who died in 2020 after a “series of chronic illnesses,” including liver failure so severe he received a transplant in 2001. (Liver failure is one of the most common adverse effects of anti-HIV drugs, anlthough it of course has other causes.) Kramer was a “playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist,” per Wikipedia. He was also the co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), and was an early model of aggressive AIDS activism. His impassioned, seminal essay on the early days of AIDS, 1,112 and Counting, appeared in the New York Native in 1983, before the “probable cause of AIDS” had been announced.
Kramer’s relationship with Dr. Fauci began in an adversarial fashion, as this reflection about Kramer indicates, but evolved over time into a friendship of sorts.
Mr. Kramer and his fellow activists chained themselves to the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange and screamed about the high cost of AZT, the experimental AIDS drug. They wrote, in 1995, that Dr. Fauci “should be put before a firing squad.”
But time (and money?) heals all wounds, it seems. Here is Fauci’s reflection:
An excerpt:
The date is June 26, 1988. A one-way conversation from Larry Kramer to Tony Fauci via the written word, in The San Francisco Examiner, reflecting a booming voice before I even knew him: “I Call You Murderers,” the headline read. “An open letter to an incompetent idiot, Dr. Anthony Fauci,” it continued. Fast-forward 32 years to May 2020: A brief two-way telephone conversation ending in a simple phrase. Larry, in a voice halting and weakened by years of a series of chronic illnesses, whispering, “I love you, Tony.” Tony holding back the tears, replying, “I love you, too, Larry.”
What happened during those 32 years that brought us to that last encounter was truly historic, since Larry was the initial driving force that changed forever the relationship between the advocacy community and the scientific and regulatory establishment. Larry was the battering ram who not only opened the door for his younger acolytes to participate in the formulation and implementation of the scientific and regulatory agenda of H.I.V./AIDS; he crashed it down. Along the way, Larry and I developed, as he often described it, a “complex relationship.”
I would become all too familiar with the tactics that he had mastered to an art form: confrontation, outrageous behavior, anger and insults followed by insight, rationality, sensitivity, vulnerability, empathy and even humor. I began to appreciate that it was pure passion related to his concern for the plight of what he called “my people,” the gay community, which drove him to outrageous behavior in order to gain the attention of the government and the general public concerning the disaster of the AIDS epidemic.
What do you think of Fauci’s reflection? What do you think of Larry Kramer? Was he a hero, a villain, or someone entirely misled? What do you think of the model he provided for the AIDS activists of today?
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Fauci’s comments are shamelessly self-serving, as usual. Kramer shared with Fauci a pathological need for publicity and attention -- by any means.
The editorial asks us to believe that these two narcissists came to “love” one another, but they were both speaking to a mirror, in love with their own murderous, controlling rage, in my opinion.
Wow, what a disingenuous comment by Fauci, who no doubt was perfectly well aware back in the late '80's that Kramer and ACT UP were being used as tools of Big Pharma to promote the fast-tracking of toxic and lucrative HIV drugs. In other words, Fauci and Kramer became partners in crime very early on, while showcasing treacherous theatrical skills. John Lauritsen (may he rest in power) wrote a lot about this.