Larry Kramer in Love and Anger

By September 1991, 150,000 people had died of AIDS in America. They had been disappearing since the early 1980s, decimated by the inscrutable disease. Until the official name of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and its acronym AIDS came into use, the illness was referred to as gay related immune deficiency (GRID) and gay cancer. The sick were treated akin to leppers, refused care, evicted, burned out of their homes or left to die in agony. The struggle for the dignity and honor of AIDS patients led to the coalescence of a new LGBTQ movement as part of Act Up! Larry Kramer was the organization's most radical and unyielding activist. Jean Carlomusto's documentary is not a "nice" biography of one of the most important gay activists fighting for patient's right. At the outset of his writing career, Kramer opposed gay organizations. He was even treated like a traitor for his controversial novel Faggots, but the plague and popular acquiescence to the death of innocent citizens incited Kramer to rebellion. It's worthwhile treating Larry Kramer in Love & Anger as a chronicle of an epidemic that the media and society wanted to forget. Mike Hale of „The New York Times” writes, from the initial scene of a furious Mr. Kramer shouting "Plague! Plague!," to the haunting, seemingly antique images of emaciated AIDS patients, it's a stark reminder of how different things were just two decades ago.