Larry Kramer

At 84 years old, Larry Kramer physical status not available right now. We will update Larry Kramer's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Larry Kramer (born June 25, 1935) is an American playwright, screenwriter, public health advocate, and LGBT rights activist.

While at Columbia Pictures, he began rewriting scripts, which led him to his move to London, where he worked with United Artists.

He wrote the screenplay for the 1969 film Women in Love (1969), and received an Academy Award nomination for his work.

Kramer's book Faggots (1978), which received mixed praise and empathetic condemnation from some within the gay community for Kramer's one-sided representation of shallow, promiscuous gay relationships in the 1970s, was a controversial and confrontational style. In 1980, Kramer witnessed the outbreak of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) among his fellows.

He co-founded Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), the country's largest private charity assisting people living with AIDS.

Kramer became dissatisfied with bureaucratic apathy and the apathy of gay men to the HIV epidemic, and he wanted to take further action than the GMHC's social care services.

He expressed his dissatisfaction by writing The Normal Heart, which was produced at The Public Theater in New York City in 1985.

His political activism grew with the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a leading direct action protest group with the intention of gaining more public interest in combating the AIDS crisis.

ACT UP has been credited with changing public health services and the image of people living with AIDS (PWAs), as well as raising the possibility of HIV and AIDS-related diseases.

Kramer has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his role "The Destiny of Me (1992), and he has been a two-time winner of the Obie Award.

Early life

Laurence David Kramer was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with the younger of two children. Rea (née Wishengrad) was a shoe store employee, lecturer, and social worker for Red Cross. George Kramer, his father, served as a public prosecutors. Arthur Kramer, his older brother, was born in 1927. The family was Jewish.

Kramer's parents, who had trouble finding jobs during the American Great Depression, viewed him as a "unwanted child." When the family arrived in Maryland, they discovered themselves in a much lower socioeconomic bracket than those of Kramer's high school peers. Kramer had been sexually involved with a male friend in junior high school. His father wanted him to marry a woman with money and compelled him to join Pi Tau Pi, a Jewish fraternity.

Arthur Kramer, Arthur Kramer's older brother, and two uncles were Yale University alumni. In 1953, Kramer first enrolled at Yale College, where he had a difficult time adjusting. He was lonely and earned lower grades than those to which he was accustomed. He attempted suicide by overdose of aspirin because he felt like he was the "only gay student on campus." After the experience, he was determined to explore his sexuality and set him on a collision course against "for gay people." He had an affair with his German professor next semester, his first craven romantic relationship with a man. During his remaining time at Yale, Kramer loved the Varsity Glee Club, earning a degree in English in 1957. Prior to beginning his film writing and film career, he served in the United States Army Reserve.

Personal life

Larry Kramer and Arthur Kramer were eight years apart. Arthur was the founding partner of the law firm Kramer Levin. In Kramer's The Normal Heart (1984), their relationship was depicted. Arthur (as Ben Weeks) is more concerned about constructing his $2 million house in Connecticut than helping his brother's cause in the film. Calvin Trillin, a friend of Larry and Arthur, had once dubbed The Normal Heart "the play about the construction of [Arthur's] house." "Their story came to define an era for hundreds of thousands of theatergoers," Anemona Hartocollis said in The New York Times. Arthur, who had shielded his younger brother from the parents they both hated, was unable to condemn Larry nor accept his homosexuality. Years of arguing and stretches of silence between them culminated. Arthur refused Larry's request for Kramer Levin to represent the fledgling Gay Men's Health Crisis in the 1980s, blaming the unwillingness of clearing it with his company's intake committee. Arthur, a well-known Kramer Levin client, was furious when Larry called for a boycott of MCI. Larry, who endorsed Amendment 2, an anti-gay rights referendum in Colorado, supported a state boycott, but Arthur refused to cancel a ski trip to Aspen in 1992, after Colorado voters approved Amendment 2, an anti-gay rights referendum.

The two couples remained close throughout their differences. Larry wrote in The Normal Heart: "The brothers love each other a great deal; [Arthur's] permission is absolutely vital to [Larry]."

Arthur gave Yale University a $1 million grant to establish the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies, which was a program focusing on gay history.

Kramer Levin LLP would later serve as a vocal supporter of the gay rights campaign, assisting the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in cases such as Lawrence v. Texas before the United States Supreme Court and Hernandez vs. Robles before the New York Court of Appeals. Arthur Kramer retired from the company in 1996 and died as a result of a stroke in 2008.

Kramer was forced into the hospital after it aggravated a congenital hernia in 1988. Doctors found liver disease in liver transplantation as a result of hepatitis B, causing Kramer to discover that he was HIV positive. Kramer, who was in dire need of a liver transplant at the age of 66, was turned down by Mount Sinai Hospital's organ transplant list in 2001. People living with HIV were often deemed ineffective candidates for organ transplantation due to HIV infections and apparent short lives. Only 11 percent of the 4,954 liver transplants performed in the United States were for HIV-positive individuals. Newsweek announced Kramer's death in June 2001; the Associated Press in December of the same year announced Kramer's death. Kramer became a symbol of infected people who had new leases on life as a result of medical advances. In a conversation, he said, "We shouldn't face a death sentence because of who we are or what we love." Kramer was accepted as a potential transplant recipient by the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, which had more transplants for HIV positive patients than any other hospital in the country. On December 21, 2001, Kramer received a new liver. He broke his leg in April 2019.

From 1991 to Kramer's death, Kramer and his partner, architectural designer David Webster, worked together. Kramer's reminiscing of his friendship with Kramer in the 1970s prompted Kramer to write Faggots (1978). When asked about their reunion decades later, Webster replied, "I'd grown up, not grown up." Kramer and Webster married in the intensive care unit of NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City on July 24, 2013, while Kramer recovered from surgery.

Kramer divided his time between a Manhattan residence and Greenwich Village, Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, Connecticut. Ed Koch, Kramer's longtime rival who had been mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989, was another resident of Kramer's Manhattan residential complex. Since they lived in separate towers, the two people met each other very seldom. Kramer reportedly told Kramer that "Don't go in here" when Kramer saw Koch staring at the apartment in 1989.

There are people here who hate you!"

Koch attempted to pet Kramer's Wheaten Terrier dog, Molly, in the building's mail area, but Kramer yelled that Koch was "the man who murdered all of Daddy's relatives."

Kramer died of pneumonia on May 27, 2020 at the age of 84, less than a month before his 85th birthday.

Source

Career

Every drama he wrote stems from a desire to know love's origins and its challenges, according to Kramer. Kramer began to work at Columbia Pictures as a Teletype operator, gaining the privilege only because the machine was across the hall from the president's office. He eventually earned a job in the story department rewriting scripts. His first writing work was as a dialogue writer for Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, a teen sex comedy. He followed it with the award-nominated screenplay Women in Love, which was a nomination for the Academy Award in 1969. He then wrote what Kramer later described as (the only thing I'm really ashamed of), Frank Capra's Lost Horizon's 1973 film adaptation, a widespread critical and commercial failure with a screenplay based largely on Capra's film. Kramer later said that his well-negotiated fee for this service, which he had skillfully invested by his brother, made him financially secure during the 1980s and 1990s.

Kramer continued to weave homosexual themes into his writing and attempted to write for the stage. In 1973, Sissies' Scrapbook (later rewritten and renamed as Four Friends), a dramatic play about four friends, one of whom is gay, and their dysfunctional marriages. Kramer called it a "cowardice and inability of some men to develop, leave the emotional bonds of male collegiate camaraderie, and assume adult responsibilities." The play was first performed in a theater set up in an old YMCA gymnasium on 53rd Street and Eighth Avenue called the Playwrights Horizons. He came to the conclusion that writing for the stage was what he wanted to do. Although The New York Times gave the play a somewhat favorable review, the producer and Kramer were so distraught that he decided not to write for the stage again, and a sadist must perform on the stage.

Kramer wrote A Minor Dark Age, which was never published. In the foreword to a Grove Press collection of Kramer's lesser known works, Frank Rich said that the "dreamlike quality of the writing is haunting" in Dark Age, and that "the discovery of the difference between sex and passion are keystones of his entire output" that would portend his future work, as shown by his 1978 novel Faggots.

On Fire Island and in Manhattan, Kramer wrote the final of four drafts of a book about the gay guys' quick life. The main character in Faggots was based on himself, a man who is unable to find love after experiencing the drugs and emotionless sex in the trendy bars and discos. "I wanted to be in love," he wrote about the book. Almost every person I knew felt the same way. Most people, at any level, wanted what they wanted, whether they pooh-poor it or said that we can't live like the straight people or whatever excuses were given." Kramer wrote the book after speaking with several men and visiting several shops. "Are you writing a negative book?" As he interviewed people, he asked a common question: "Is it true that you're writing a negative book?"

Are you going to make it positive?

... 'My God, people must be really unhappy about the lifestyles they're leading,' I began to feel.' And it was true. I suspect everyone was guilty of all the promiscuity and all the partying."The novel sparked riot in the community it represented; it was taken off the shelves of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, which was located in New York City's only gay bookstore, and Kramer was barred from entering the supermarket near his house on Fire Island. Reviewers found it difficult to believe that Kramer's homosexual experiences were accurate; both the gay and mainstream press criticized the book. "The straight world feared me, and the homosexual world treated me like a traitor," Kramer said at the book's reception. As I passed by, people would essentially turn their backs.

You know what my real crime was?

In writing, I spoke truth. That's what I do: I've told everybody I've ever met the fucking truth. However, Faggots became one of the best-selling gay books of all time.

Reynolds Price said in 2000 that "anyone who checks out current-day responses on the Internet will soon find that the wounds inflicted by Faggots are still burning." Although Kramer's words had been chastised, the book has never been out of print and is often taught in gay studies classes. "It exuded a sense that gay men could do better if they understood themselves as fully human," Andrew Sullivan said.

Kramer had no intention of participating in political activism while living on Fire Island in the 1970s. While there were politically active organizations in New York City, Kramer said that Fire Island's atmosphere was so different that they would often mock political activists: "It wasn't trendy." It was not something you could brag about with your friends... Guys marching down Fifth Avenue was a whole new world. Fire Island's whole design was about beauty, appearances, and golden men.

Kramer, who was unaware of Fire Island's illness in 1980, became involved in gay activism. Kramer invited a gay man from the New York City area to listen to a doctor in 1981, although he had not been involved with gay activism previously. More study must be done, according to Kramer. They formed the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) in the New York area last year and became the first group to raise funds for and provide services to people stricken with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Though Kramer served on the company's first board of directors, his opinion of how it should be run was sharply opposed to that of the majority of the board. Kramer continued to press for government assistance from New York City as GMHC began to concentrate on social care for men who were dying. Before the specifics of how the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was transmitted was determined, Mayor Ed Koch became a special target for Kramer, as well as the homosexual behavior of gay people.

Kramer was determined by doctors that men should not have sex. Kramer wrote an essay entitled "1,112 and Counting" in the New York Native, a gay newspaper, when they refused. The essay explored the transmission of the disease, the lack of government intervention, and the gay community's sympathy. The essay was designed to frighten gay men and incite them to protest government indifference. "It was a five-word screed that accused virtually every individual connected with health-care in America," Michael Specter of inciting the nascent AIDS epidemic in Atlanta, researchers at the National Institutes of Health, in Washington, D.C., doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in Washington, D.C., and local politicians (particularly Mayor Ed Koch) of failing to acknowledge the dangers of the nascent AIDS epidemic. The article's harshest condemnation was directed at gay men who appeared to believe that if they did not know the condition, it would simply go away. Larry Gushner, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Angels in America about the effects of AIDS in the United States, wrote the essay "Lover changed my world." He made the world a better place for all of us."

Kramer's confrontational style earned the issue of AIDS the media's attention that no other individual could grasp. When he learned that his own image was "completely that of a crazy man," he found it a disgrace. Kramer was particularly chastised by bureaucratic stalemate that erupted in situations where gay but not closeted men were the ones in charge of departments that seemed to avoid AIDS. He told the head of a National Institutes of Health in a private sector that he was told not to devote more time and effort into AIDS research because he was furious. During a party, he threw a drink at Republican fundraiser Terry Dolan, who screamed at him for having affairs with men but raised funds for conservative causes owing to the fear of homosexuality. Ed Koch and the media and government departments in New York City are "equal to murderers," he said. Even Kramer's personal life was affected when he and his companion – also a GMHC board member – split over Kramer's condemnation of GMHC's political allegiance.

Kramer's experience damaged his message, as many men who had been turned off by Faggots saw Kramer's warnings as alarmist, indicating hostile attitudes against sex. "Read something by Kramer closely, and I think the subtext is always death: the wages of gay infidelity are death," playwright Robert Chesley said in Kramer's New York Native article. In 1983, the GMHC fired Kramer from the company. Kramer's preferred method of contact was deemed too militant for the group.

Kramer appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's award-winning film Positive in 1990 about the struggle of activists in New York City for AIDS-education and the rights of HIV-infected individuals.

Kramer, who was astonished and saddened by being forced out of GMHC, decided to fly to Europe for a long time. While visiting the Dachau concentration camp, he discovered that it had opened as early as 1933, but that no Germans nor other nations did anything to prevent it. Despite promising never to write for the theater again, he was inspired to chronicle the same reaction from the American government and the gay community to the AIDS epidemic by writing The Normal Heart.

The Normal Heart was a play set from 1981 to 1984. It refers to a writer named Ned Weeks as he cares for his lover, who is dying of an unidentified illness. His doctors are perplexed and stymied by the fact that they have no funds to study it. In the meantime, the anonymous group Weeks is angry by the bad publicity Week's activism, which eventually has him kicked out. "I tried to make Ned Week as obnoxious as I could," Kramer later explained. "I was trying to atone for my own behavior" at the time, and I was unsuccessful." Kramer was overwhelmingly emotional at the time, as he recalls actor Brad Davis playing his dying lover on stage with D. W. Moffett; Kramer went into the bathroom and sobbed, only to discover Davis holding him. The performance has been described as a literary masterpiece. It coincided with the AIDS crisis, when few would discuss the disease affecting gay men, including gays; it was the longest-running play at the Public Theater, running for a year starting in 1985. It has been produced more than 600 times in the United States, Europe, and South Africa (where it was televised in Poland), Israel, and South Africa. On May 4, 1989, the Polish television adaptation debuted on the TVP channel, just one month before the country's first free election since 1928.

Following Davis' portrayal of Kramer's alter ego during Ned Week include: Joel Grey, Richard Dreyfuss (in Los Angeles), Martin Sheen (at the Royal Court in London), Tom Hulce and then John Shea in the West End, Raul Esparza's highly acclaimed 2004 revival, and most recently Joe Mantello at the Golden Theater on Broadway. "No one on the left at that time... ever used the moral framework that is so much a part of Kramer's words," Naomi Wolf said after seeing the Normal Heart being produced. Conscience, responsibility, calling; truth and lies; clarity of intent or abandonment of one's moral calling; loyalty and betrayal..."

Frank Rich wrote an article for The New York Times, saying: 'In a review for The New York Times, Frank Rich said: "Itayan" has characterized the writer.

HBO released a film version directed by Ryan Murphy in 2014 with a screenplay by Kramer. It starred Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer (who received a Golden Globe Award for his work), Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons, Julia Roberts, Jonathan Groff, Jonathan Groff, and BD Wong.

Kramer was the catalyst in the establishment of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a nationwide advocacy group that selected government departments and corporations as the primary aim of publicizing a lack of care and support for people with AIDS. ACT UP was born in New York City's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Services Center. Kramer was invited to speak as part of a rotating speaker series, and his well-attended address centered on steps to combat AIDS. He began by making two-thirds of the room roar, and told them that they would be dead in five years. "If my speech tonight doesn't freak the shit out of you," Kramer wrote, "We're in serious danger." If what you're hearing doesn't inspire you to rage, indignation, and change, gay men will have no future on earth. How long will it take before you get angry and fight back? Kramer said of failing to provide critically needed medication for HIV-infected Americans.

Engaging in civil disobedience that would result in the detention of many people was a primary aim, as it would place the focus on the intended object. 17 people out of 250 others were arrested for blocking rush-hour traffic in front of the FDA's Wall Street headquarters on March 24, 1987. Kramer was detained hundreds of times while working with ACT UP, and the group has since expanded to hundreds of chapters in the United States and Europe. "There are two eras in American medicine," immunoologist Anthony Fauci said. Larry and Larry were the first two generations of Larry and Larry." "In a way, like a lot of Jewish men of Larry's generation, the Holocaust is a defining historical moment, and it was, in fact, holocauteny to Larry."

Kramer, a two-decades ago, continues to campaign for social and legal rights for homosexuals. "Our own country's democratic process has declared us to be unequal, implying that our enemy is you, as a democrat." "You treat us like crumbs." We hate us. We'll all be sorry."

Kramer also called for increased funding for HIV research in later decades, arguing that current therapies have discouraged the pharmaceutical industry from creating cures. "How can you fund a CURE and scale back the avarice of pharmaceutical companies," Kramer's final public statement on curing AIDS, in which he accused pharmaceutical companies of "profit[ing] irrationally from HIV-positive Americans who depend on the medications for life" and "as president," Kramer said.

Kramer continued his commentary on government indifference toward AIDS, writing Just Say No, A Play about a Farce in 1988. He argued in the enthralling criticism he portrayed in the Reagan and Koch administrations that AIDS spread to an epidemic; it concerns a First Lady, her gay son, and America's long-serving gay mayor. The few people who came to see it after the New York Times' critical review. "Larry Kramer is one of America's most influential troublemakers," social critic and writer Susan Sontag wrote about the piece. I'm hoping he never lowers his voice.

Reports from the Holocaust: Larry Kramer's Non-Fiction Writings ranged from 1989 to 1994, with letters to the editor and speeches describing his time with Gay Men's Health Crisis, ACT UP, and elsewhere, with the latest edition arranged chronologically from 1978 to 1993.

The book's central message is that gay men must take responsibility for their own lives and that those that are still living must give back to their families by campaigning for People With AIDS and LGBT rights, for which, as Kramer says, "I must bring something into this world for my own life." By not putting back, you are saying your lives are worthless and that we do deserve to die, and that all our relatives and lovers' deaths have amounted to nothing. I can't believe that you feel this way in your heart of hearts. I can't believe you want to die.

Do you?"

The first issue features a portrait of Kramer as a scholar, and the 1994 edition features commentary by him that focuses on his earlier work and provides insight into Larry Kramer as a writer.

AIDS is a holocaust, according to Kramer, who believes that the US government failed to respond quickly and expend the necessary funds to cure AIDS, mainly because gay men AIDS were infected with HIV, but shortly after, most poor and politically powerless minorities were predominantly poor and politically poor minorities. "One of the few unfortunate aspects of the Holocaust, without a doubt, will be the inability to imagine any other similar tragedies as tragic." Anthony Fauci, a journalist, and former New York City mayor Ed Koch, several New York Times reporters, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' director, all advocated for a more effective response to AIDS through speeches, editorials, and personal, often publicized, letters to activists, including politician Gary Bauer, former New York City mayor Ed Koch, several New York Times reporters, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, advocates for AIDS He encourages the government to perform experiments based on commonly accepted scientific principles and to allocate funds and staff to AIDS research. Kramer has argued that the reaction to AIDS in America must be described as a holocaust due to the sheer number of people who died as a result of the Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, and early Bill Clinton presidencies.

As he begins his journey against those who are complicit or will prevent the discovery of a cure for a disease that he suffers, Destiny of Me picks up where The Normal Heart dropped off following Ned Week. The play opened in October 1992 and ran for a year off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre by the Circle Repertory Company. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was the recipient of the Lortel Award for Outstanding Play of the Year. According to Frank Rich of The New York Times, John Cameron Mitchell, "a young actor who dominates the show with a performance that is both ethereal and magnetic," starred. Rich asked Kramer about himself, "Why was he of all people destined to scream bloody murder with the intention of changing the course of the human race?" In his introduction to the role, Kramer addresses the following:

Its 2002, Finborough Theatre performance was the No. One in London. In The Evening Standard, 1 Critics Choice is chosen.

Tragedy was a talk and a call to arms delivered by Kramer five days after George W. Bush's re-election in 2004 and later published as a book. Bush was re-elected largely because of his opposition to same-sex marriage, according to Kramer, who found it unlikely that voters would respond so strongly to the issue when there were so many more pressing ones:

Kramer's moral vision of drive and self-worth for the LGBT community was far-reaching, and it was in the majority of the gay world once more.

"Does it surprise to you that we brought this epidemic of AIDS upon ourselves?" Kramer has continued to wonder. I know I'm getting into turbulent waters here, but it's time. It's time to bring the cabal breathing even deeper into our backs. And here's why you're still doing it. You are still killing each other."

Kramer had his supporters from the neighborhood once more. Richard Kim, a writer for Salon.com, found that Kramer personified the very object of his ridicule: homophobia.

Kramer started researching and writing The American People: A History in 1981, an innovative historical work that began in the Stone Age and continues into the present. For example, there is evidence pertaining to Kramer's assertion that Abraham Lincoln was gay. Will Schwalbe, editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books, and the only man to have read the entire manuscript to date, wrote, "He has set himself the most challenging jobs" in 2002, and he described it as "staggering, brilliant, funny, and harrowing." "It is] my own history of America and of HIV/AIDS causes," Kramer said of the research in 2006. The epidemic of HIV/AIDS has been deliberately encouraged to exist, as writing and researching this history has led me to believe that it has occurred.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux's book was published as a novel in 2015. "I wish I could say that The American People, Volume 1 had the power to match its scope," Dwight Garner said in the New York Times Book Review. It is not. It's a work of continuing passion. It is certainly modest as a work of art. The tone is both talky and digressive; no real characters have appeared; one suspects the lashing to the mast after only 50 pages or so." Kramer's book claims that homosexual people in addition to Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Benjamin Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Richard Nixon were gay. In 2020, the second volume, 880 pages, was published.

Kramer approached Yale University in 1997 to bequeath several million dollars "to endow a permanent, tenured professorship in gay studies and possibly to establish a gay and lesbian student center." Academics were skeptical of gender, ethnic, and race-related studies at the time. Alison Richard, the then Yale provost, said that gay and lesbian studies was too narrow for a permanentity-based program. "Yale is to use this money exclusively for 1) the study and/or instruction of gay male literature, by which I mean courses to research gay male writers throughout history or the teaching to gay male students of writing about their roots and their experiences.' Any of these fields of tenured courses should be maintained; and/or 2) the establishment of a Yale gay student center to ensure that students in these fields remain intact;

Both groups decided on establishing the Larry Kramer Institute for Lesbian and Gay Studies in 2001, which would include visiting scholars as well as a list of conferences, guest speakers, and other activities. Arthur Kramer endowed the Yale program with $1 million to finance a five-year trial. Kramer has agreed to leave his literary journals and those chronicling the AIDS movement, as well as the founding of GMHC and ACT UP to Yale's Beinecke Library. "A lot has changed since I first made my initial demands," Kramer said. "I was trying to cram stuff down their throat." I'd prefer that they made their own stuff rather than importing their own. It could lead to a much more comprehensive view of lesbian and gay studies" in the United States. In 2006, the five-year project came to an end.

Kramer began writing An Army of Lovers Must Not Die in 2020, in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Source

Awards and recognition

• 1970: Nominated for the Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for Women in Love for his screenplay adaptation of the novel by D. H. Lawrence
• 1993: Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Destiny of Me
• 1993: Winner of two Obie Awards for The Destiny of Me
• 1996: American Academy of Arts and Letters, Award in Literature
• 1996: Public Service Award from Common Cause
• 1999: The Normal Heart named as one of the Hundred Best Plays of the 20th Century by the National Theatre of Great Britain
• 2005: Elected to the American Philosophical Society
• 2006: Named by Equality Forum as one of their 31 Icons of the LGBT History Month.
• 2011: The Normal Heart won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play
• 2012: Montgomery Fellowship at Dartmouth College
• 2013: PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist
• 2014: Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special for the HBO movie adaptation of The Normal Heart
• 2015: Inaugural Larry Kramer Activism Award from Gay Men's Health Crisis
• 2020: In June 2020, Kramer was added among American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City's Stonewall Inn. The SNM is the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history.