There is almost never only one protagonist (or two, or three, or four) — and protagonists are rarely only one thing

As journalists, we can be drawn to the idea of a focusing on a single main character in a story — even when that potential main character is one of the people saying that they’re not a leader or that they’re part of a group. Unfortunately, focusing on a single main character can lead to coverage that flattens the complexities of lives and movehiv/aidsments.

Let’s use an example here from the United States. In May 2020, well-known writer and activist Larry Kramer died at the age of 84[1]. As one of the founders of the AIDS activist groups Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), he was a towering figure in the fight to end AIDS.

 
As we address later in this section, what was eventually named HIV/AIDS was seen in the early days of the epidemic as a disease of gay men and three other groups of people, and those groups were not considered part of “the public,” meaning HIV/AIDS was generally not viewed as a serious threat to public health. Activists like Kramer often felt as if they were fighting a battle on two fronts: with the medical, scientific, and political establishment on the one hand, and with their own communities, who feared the very real consequences of speaking out.

Kramer’s strategy to deal with all this was to get loudly, frequently and publicly angry, in as many ways and as many venues as he knew how. A frequent target of Kramer’s anger was the person leading US President Ronald Reagan administration’s lacklustre response to the AIDS crisis, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) (see People of interest).

But over time, although Kramer and Fauci continued to disagree, the two became strong allies, and, finally, friends. At the time of Kramer’s death, Fauci was often in the news due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so it was natural that media outlets would reach out to him for comment on Kramer. However, to get to what was actually controversial about Kramer, I had to leave the mainstream press and look at the Los Angeles Blade, a gay newspaper. The Blade’s obituary of Kramer also quoted Fauci, but it also featured remembrances from other activists. According to Phill Wilson, formerly the executive director of the Black AIDS Institute, Kramer was

• very powerful and very passionate and his contribution was immense [but]… he had huge blind spot when it came to race, and when it came to women and when it came to poor people.[2]

As well, Peter Staley, a founding member of ACT UP and Treatment Activist Group, is quoted as saying that there was one Larry who “deserves every statue that gets built in his honor” and another Larry “whose finger-wagging, like all finger-wagging, brought adulation from other moralists, but had no effect on the rest of us.”[3]

 
In Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987 to 1993, Sarah Schulman writes that, when she urged Kramer to tell reporters to interview women and people of colour from ACT UP, he responded, “But, Sarah, shouldn’t we use our best people?”[4]

In sum, Kramer was a complicated and controversial person with many sides, only some of which Fauci could address. Kramer was a key figure in the fight against AIDS and, for a time, one of the world’s foremost advocates for gay people. But he did not do the work of the movement alone — and never claimed to have done so. Its victories should not be attributed solely to him, and journalists should question such framings when discussing the work of movements. And returning to the same sources for comment again and again, hitting the same notes, produces a narrative of a life and a movement that fails to do justice to the complexities of either.[5]