The cause was pneumonia, according to his husband, David Webster, who confirmed the news with the New York Times. the full blooded description of this truth, the recognition and dramatisation of a political cycle of birth, death, rebirth, defeat, renewal - this is true tragedy, in which absolute loss and devastation, Nothing is arrived at, and from this Nothing, something new is born.Larry Kramer - the outspoken AIDS activist, playwright, author, and screenwriter - died on Wednesday at the age of 84. The fight for justice, for a better world, for civil rights or access to medicine, is a never-ending fight, at least as far as we have to see. No matter what any struggle accomplishes, time, life, death bring in their changes, and new oppressions are always forming from the ashes of the old. The mistake is to imagine otherwise, to believe that progress doesn't generate as many new problems as it generates blessings, to imagine, foolishly, that the struggle can be won decisively, finally, definitively.

Death waits for every living thing, no matter how vital or brilliant its accomplishment death waits for people and for their best and worst efforts as well.politics is a living thing, and living things die. Political movements, liberation movements, revolutions, are as subject to time, decline, mortality, tragedy, as any human enterprise, or any human being. Failure awaits any political movement, even a spectacularly successful movement such as the one Larry Kramer helped to spark and organise.

How else to dramatise revolution accurately, truthfully, politically, than by showing it to be tragic as well as triumphant? And on the other hand, if the medical, biological, political, and familial failures of 'Destiny' produce, by the play's end, despair again if we are plunged back into night, it cannot be different from the night with which 'Normal Heart' began, rife with despair and terror, and pregnant with an offstage potential for transformation, for hope. Larry Kramer isn't Sophocles and he isn't Shakespeare we don't have Sophocleses or Shakespeares, not these days, but we do have, on rare occasion, remarkable accomplishment, and Kramer's is remarkable, invaluable, and rare.

“Where else in dramatic literature is there such a treatment of the life-and-death cycle of people and political change? One needs to reach back to the chronicles of Shakespeare, back to the Greeks.

The normal heart and the destiny of me