During his time as mayor, Ed Koch squared off fiercely with the LGBT community in a series of struggles — chief among them the AIDS crisis.
The former mayor’s three terms were marked by skyrocketing numbers of AIDS and HIV patients, and he was criticized for responding too slowly to the crisis and failing to educate the public about the disease.
He was repeatedly targeted by gay activists for not doing enough to combat the spread of the virus, which infected nearly 30,000 New Yorkers in the 1980s.
One of his fiercest critics, activist and playwright Larry Kramer, called Koch a “murderer of his own people” — a dig at the widely accepted assumption that Koch was in the closet.