I'm Eric Marcus and this is making gay history.

I'm Eric Marcus and this is making gay history.

It's now been 11 weeks since my partner Barney and I began

sheltering in place. And this past week the official death toll in the United States

from COVID-19 rose past 100,000. Mothers and fathers, children, grandparents, colleagues,

neighbors, and friends. People. Not numbers. People. people.

I've talked before in this series revisiting the archive about anger,

how it can fuel action,

how when anger is partnered with love it can produce a kind of righteous

rage that propels us.

Those of us who live through the AIDS crisis know about it.

Some of us learned it from Larry Kramer, who died this week week in Manhattan where he's lived for decades.

Larry was famous for being one of the first civilians to sound the alarm during that last epidemic,

the one that began 40 years ago. He was on the front lines even before AIDS was called AIDS

and became a global epidemic that swept away more than 30 million lives.

Before AIDS, Larry was best known for his work as a screenwriter and author, but the virus

that was claiming so many lives and the political indifference, political negligence that greeted it,

turned Larry into a very public activist.

His friends were dying, and he felt compelled to do something

more than to just bury the dead and mourn their loss.

In 1982, Larry co-founded a gay men's health crisis, now known as GMHC.

Five years later, he co-founded Act Up, the AIDS Coalition to Unleish Power.

...