When I think about Larry Kramer, the AIDS activist who died last week at the age of 84, I can hear his voice: loud, urgent, filled with this righteous anger. Larry was tough and uncompromising. But that’s why, as New York magazine writer Mark Harris says, “You can’t make progress without people like Larry Kramer.” Larry’s life was shaped by pandemic and protest—and the way he effected change holds many lessons for today’s movements.

On Thursday’s episode of What Next, I spoke with Harris about the brash nature of Kramer’s activism, the wide-ranging impact he made, and what lessons he would have for today’s activists. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Larry Kramer burned through his life as if he didn’t expect to make it to 84. He was a relentlessly hard worker. As a writer and a satirist, he was nominated for both an Academy Award and a Pulitzer Prize. But AIDS activism was his calling.

Mark Harris: Larry Kramer was an artist and he was an activist. Most times, when you say that about someone, one of those things takes a back seat to the other. We have great artists who also contribute some activism to the world, and we have great activists who were also OK artists. But with Kramer, you’re talking about someone who was really important in both categories. As a novelist, he wrote Faggots, which was a really important step in in gay novels in the 1970s. And of course, The Normal Heart, which is a genuinely activist play and a genuine work of art, an unbelievably tough combination to pull off.

Faggots pissed a lot of people off.

Absolutely. Kramer didn’t write or do anything in the ’70s or ’80s without some gay people saying, “You’re not helping the cause, you’re hurting the cause.” The most famous essay he wrote was a piece called “1,112 and Counting” in the New York Native. It was the first major piece to a very, very loud alarm from a gay man to the gay community about the AIDS epidemic. It infuriated a lot of gay people when it was published.

What about it made people angry?

Everyone was OK with shaking a fist at the Republican government, the Reagan administration, the scientific community, the medical community, all of which were either ignoring this or demonizing people. “1,112 and Counting” was that. But it was also a piece that said we have to wake up: Our community is sleepwalking through this and we’re walking into our own graves. Kramer really took to task people in the gay community who he did not feel were taking the AIDS crisis sufficiently seriously. And he said, we have to change our behavior because it’s killing us.

So he got accused in the most strident terms of being a prude, of being sex-negative, of being someone who hates gay people, of being someone who hates gay sex, of being someone who was mad to be left out of the party and all the fun and who wanted everybody else’s fun destroyed. When you talk about his bravery as an activist, you have to talk about the bravery of being willing to take a stand that will alienate some of the people who should be on your side. Read more via Slate