Larry Kramer Is Writing A Play That Deals With The COVID-19 Crisis

The playwright is writing a new play that deals in part with the coronavirus pandemic…

Activist, author, and playwright Larry Kramer is writing a new play, titled An Army of Lovers Must Not Die, about “gay people having to live through three plagues.”

According to the New York Times: “The three plagues are H.I.V./AIDS, Covid-19 and the decline of the human body — specifically, a broken leg that Mr. Kramer, 84, suffered last April, when he fell in his apartment and lay on the floor until his home attendant arrived hours later. … He did not find that his experience during the AIDS crisis gave him perspective on the coronavirus pandemic, he said. Rather, the two eras merge into each other.”

“The government has been awful in both cases,” Kramer told the Times. “They were terrible with AIDS and they’re terrible with this thing. One wonders what will become of us.”

Kramer was an outspoken critic of the Reagan White House’s inaction on the plague in the early 1980s. Although the disease was identified in 1981, Reagan refused to mention it publicly until a news conference in 1985 and then in speeches in 1987. By then, thousands already had died and preventable transmissions spread like wildfire.

Kramer is best known for his novel Faggots about queer culture in the 1970s and for writing The Normal Heart, a 1985 play that focuses on the rise of the HIV/AIDS crisis in New York.

Kramer added that he is weathering the coronavirus pandemic by isolating himself in his Greenwich Village apartment.