I'm Eric Marcus and this is making gay history. If you've heard of Larry Kramer, then his reputation as a passionate activist with high expectations and a short fuse probably precedes him.

If you don't know him, Larry is famous for being one of the first civilians to sound the alarm

even before AIDS was called AIDS and became a catastrophic worldwide

epidemic that has swept away millions of lives. Back in the early 80s Larry

earned more than a few enemies because of his calls for gay men to cool it with their sex lives.

Even before the virus that causes AIDS was discovered,

it was clear to Larry and many others that it was a sexually transmitted disease.

Coming on the heels of 1970s gay liberation

and new found sexual freedom,

almost no one wanted to hear an angry middle-aged man

tell them that they had to stop having sex, that it was a matter of life and death.

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

He wrote the Oscar nominated 1969 Screenplay for Women in Love.

And he wrote the controversial 1978 novel, Faggots, which pulled back the curtain on a world of promiscuous sex and drug use in New York's post-stonewall gay

subculture.

It was AIDS that propelled Larry Kramer into the movement.

His friends were dying and he had to do something.

In 1982 he co-founded the gay men's health

crisis now known as GMHC. Five years later he co-founded along with Vido Russo

and others Act Up, the AIDS Coalition to Unleish Power. Act Up came to be known for its brilliant

use of public protests to bring attention to the epidemic.

By early 1989, when I first met Larry, AIDS had taken more than 60,000 lives, most of them gay men.

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