But if you want to see Kramer at his peak—challenging the status quo and pointing a finger at an apathetic public—the archival Today show clip below is required viewing.

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Unearthed by MSNBC's Geoffrey Cowley, it dates from February 1983—two years after the New York Times reported on a "rare cancer" affecting gay men, and two years years before President Reagan would utter the word "AIDS" in public.

“Can you imagine what it would be like if you had lost 20 of your friends in the last 18 months?” Kramer asks Pauley.

“No,” she replies.

Kramer goes on to explain that there is “no cause. No cure. People in hospitals. It’s a very angry community.”

“Angry at whom?” Pauley asks.

“We're a very disenfranchised community. We can’t seem to get the government, the National Institute of Health, to accelerate the research that’s going on,” he responds, clearly exhausted and exasperated. “We can’t even get the mayor of New York City to acknowledge publicly that there’s a health emergency.”

Asked if the government’s inaction was because the disease seemed to only target gay men, Kramer is pointed in his response: “There’s no question in my mind, if this were happening to you and the white, straight middle-class community it would have been attended to a long time ago.”

More recently, Kramer has spoken up about Truvada and the pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) approach to combating the spread of HIV:  “Anybody who voluntarily takes an antiviral every day has got to have rocks in their heads," he told The New York Times in an interview last week. "There’s something to me cowardly about taking Truvada instead of using a condom. You’re taking a drug that is poison to you, and it has lessened your energy to fight, to get involved, to do anything.”

The 78-year-old is also not impressed with the strides the LGBT community has made, telling the Times:

“Considering how many of us there are, how much disposable income we have, how much brain power we have, we have achieved very little. We have no power in Washington, or anywhere else, and I say it over and over again, and it’s as if it falls on deaf ears. It doesn’t occur to people how to turn that around.”