I only ever used the phrase “passed” once in my life, as an opening gambit in an interview with activist and playwright Larry Kramer back in 1993. I’d suggested the passing of actor Ken Cory from AIDS complications earlier that year was a tragedy. Big mistake. “Passed? Passed what? Gas? A shit? A service station? Nancy fucking Reagan? He fucking died. Dead.”

Sat there in his heroically chaotic New York studio, knee-deep in ACT UP banners, pamphlets, posters, he resembled nothing so much as a camp Jean-Paul Marat, eyes ablaze with revolution and revenge.

It was the height of the AIDS pandemic, post Reagan, pre AZT, a world of lost friends, hapless governments and very, very angry queers. I was one of them. Growing up in South Africa he’d been handed to me, literally, by a friend at Rhodes University in 1988, a copy of his autobiographical play The Normal Heart. “Use it for a soliloquy.” she said, knowingly, “I think it’ll resonate”, and walked away. Emotionally and politically closeted, it rocked my world. Angry, focused, beautifully written, unashamedly Out with a capital O, it accessed a wellspring I didn’t know was there, identified a tribe I didn’t know existed. Being gay in South Africa in 1988 was to be hidden, at least in liberation terms; many gay activists chose to fight the greater battle, hopeful that a broader social revolution would carry with it gay rights, as proved the case. But to a gay boy in Grahamstown that meant no context, no obvious community, certainly no outrage. The Normal Heart was an affirmation of existence.

I went to London to find Kramer’s proud tribe, joined his ACT UP revolutionaries, marched on Thatcher’s dismissive government, flew to New York to meet Kramer himself. His hellfire attitude had by then shaped general politics, direct action groups everywhere, ACT UP and their offshoots causing Bush and his pharmaceutical cronies endless migraines with their sit-ins, invasions, kiss-ins and death marches.

It’s hard to explain what those years were like and the effect he had – on me, on us. Like witblitz after buttermilk, Johnny Rotten after Liberace, Kramer was a fork in the eye, a snotklap from a Number 8. Disco was dead, fuck someone on the streets instead. Living in a brownstone with a bunch of superstar drag queens, including a young Ru Paul, I got to know him. AIDS had galvanised gay New York, the various factions united in outrage at the heartless, clueless Republicans. And at the centre of it all, Kramer, Fifth Avenue’s pencil-thin Valkyrie, out front, fuck you Reagan and Bush. He took no prisoners, gay or straight. Ever the controversialist (he was schooled in the theatre after all), he loved causing shit. Invited back after the Cory incident, painting banners, he stopped traffic in the room. “AIDS made the queers. Give a person a reason to fight, there’s life. Otherwise it’s all fist-fucking, matching pillows and mood lighting.”

The button-down khaki gays hated him from day one, girls and boys both, and as gay commodification went into hyperdrive, he raged again what he called the sellout homos. Kramer, resurgent after the release of AZT in 1994, mourned the osmosis of a community into suburbia, the loss of commonwealth his leitmotif. He never stopped goading, challenging, questioning, raging against big business, capitalist queens and the White House fascists most of all. Angry but layered too, with a razor sharp mind and a poet’s soul. Like all true heroes he’ll be missed but never really gone; the Normal Heart sits on my bookshelf today, the street fighter in the queer trilogy of Alan Bennett’s Writing Home and Edmund White’s Burning Library.

Susan Sontag called him one of America’s most valuable troublemakers – to a boy from Grahamstown, he was a saviour. Give ‘em hell Larry. DM/MC

Once an actor, dancer and arts writer, Peter Frost now concentrates on travel and motoring. He is currently editorial director of travel for Highbury Media.