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AIDS activist, playwright Larry Kramer dead at 84

NEW YORK — Larry Kramer, a playwright and activist whose aggressive and antagonistic campaign to elicit a response to the AIDS crisis helped shift national health policy during the 1980s and 1990s, died Wednesday in New York. He was 84.

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Kramer’s cause of death was pneumonia, his husband, David Webster, told The New York Times. Kramer battled several illnesses during his lifetime and was infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, the newspaper reported. Kramer also underwent a successful liver transplant.

Kramer’s 1985 drama, “The Normal Heart,” was an angry indictment of inaction by medical and government officials during the early years of the AIDS crisis, the Los Angeles Times reported.

"The Normal Heart” won three Tony Awards when it played on Broadway in 2011, and it was adapted into an HBO film in 2014, the newspaper reported.

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In 1981, he founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which was the first organization for HIV-positive people, the New York Times reported. When the organization’s directors expelled him the following year for his aggressive approach, Kramer chastised them by calling them “a sad organization of sissies,” the newspaper reported.

Kramer remained a controversial figure. In a 1983 editorial, he urged gay men to stop having sex until more information was known about the AIDS virus and how it spread, Variety reported.

Fellow activist Susan Sontag called Kramer “one of America’s most valuable troublemakers.”

Kramer was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His father was an attorney and his mother was a social worker, the newspaper reported.

His last major project was the novel “The American People,” which examined in the history of gays in the United States. After several delays, the first volume was published in April 2015, the Los Angeles Times reported.