Now, with his still-unfinished epic about America's hidden gay past (George Washington, Alexander Hamilton ...), he's furiously rewriting history again.

Jesse Green
New York Magazine

The Associated Press was at least half-right when it ran a headline, in 2001, saying Larry Kramer was dead. He was awfully close. Because he'd been sick for several years, many people who didn't know him thought he had died already, presumably from AIDS. But AIDS, for so long his cause, was not Kramer's problem. His long-standing HIV infection had never progressed, the virus perhaps having found that rare human host more ornery than itself.

Rather, he had end-stage liver disease, the result of a hepatitis B infection contracted decades earlier. His partner, David Webster, an architect and designer, kept him as comfortable and hopeful as possible in their Greenwich Village apartment and Connecticut country house. Still, at only 66, Kramer knew it was time to close up shop. He appointed a literary executor: Will Schwalbe, a young family friend who was then the editor-in-chief at Hyperion. Among the properties that would eventually fall under Schwalbe's purview were plays including The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me, the novel Faggots, the screenplay (from his Hollywood days) of Women in Love, and a raft of journalism, blog posts, op-eds, and historically important letters and e-mails. These were works that marked the world: that prompted, in a way rarely accomplished by words on paper, social action. He might have died proud of that alone.

Read more: How Larry Kramer's Boundless Outrage Has Changed the Course of AIDS -- New York Magazine
http://nymag.com/news/features/62887/#ixzz0b2gzebSl

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