by Larry Kramer
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I must tell you that America is boring me. I have more energy than you let me use. I do better in other places like Arabia. Talk about people who kill each other! They are always going after something they call the yellow-bellied heathen hordes. The men fuck other men a lot. They also rip each other’s guts out. Arabs are not so much fun as you guys. Just scarier. But they’re not looking for me or going after me, thank goodness. They hate hushmarkeds even though they fuck each other a lot.
Much to learn still. Much to learn.
Trying to keep an open mind.
Some doctor lady in America is going to tell you soon enough that she figures the transfer of me from chimps to humans occurs between 1590 and 1760, with 1675 the most likely date. Boy, is she late for the party. Her name is Dr. Gudrun Organo and she is at that Southern Jewry place. Funny they study me with Jews. I have a hard time infecting Jews. Don’t know why. Ask Gudrun if she knows why. Go on, ask her. Dr. Gudrun, is there something UC is not doing correctly when it comes to Jews? Let me know.
They have these cut-off penises, Jews do. I wonder if that’s it. Makes me slither. Can’t grab ahold. You got a lot of them hanging around? I wonder if I can come up with a work-around for them. Hope so. That is, if you got a lot of them.
That Jesus fellow had a cut-off penis. Was he a Jew? Or an Arab? Those Arab fellows are circumcised, too. Does this mean they’re related? Jesus and his buddies fooled around a lot. Got to check my record book which ones I got.
I wonder what I look like in 1675? Cute and desirable?
You keep going on about hushmarkeds being hanged for fucking each other. Am I missing something? Hard for me to keep accurate records of me.
And this Dr. Gudrun lady doctor is crazy. I crossed over much longer ago than she says. I thought you knew this.
You certainly are spending a lot of time on me, guy. Why don’t you listen when I tell you it’s a waste of your time? I will be what I will be which will be me. Call me a microbe. Call me a gene. Call me a cell. All one and the same. Zillions of me in each of you.
Tell your guys to please get to work and mingle more. Living dangerously can be fun!
AN IMPORTANT DATE
Dr. Gudrun Organo at the University of Southern Jewry will pin down 1675 as the likely date that The Underlying Condition crossed over from monkey to man. She will not accomplish this until 2009. It is said to be an amazing bit of scientific detective work and not possible without the equipment that by then had come into use.
No one will remark that, even knowing a date for this, how much does one know?
It’s too bad Bosco won’t be alive when this happens. I hear him saying, “I don’t want to say I told you so but I told you so. I knew my stuff and I was right. Gudrun was another one of those women who hated me.”
YRH TELLS US THE HISTORY OF YADDAH, FRED’S ALMA MATER
OK, I went to this place, and I tried to knock myself off at this place, and I tried to change this place Big-Time, which of course they wouldn’t let me do. So I’ve had perverse pleasure piecing its revelatory history together for the delectation of all.
Yaddah College (to become Yaddah University in 1702) is founded in 1512 or 1634 or 1701. It’s not as if they couldn’t make up their minds, but there are official histories by the shelf of Yaddah College and Yaddah University, and of Yaddah Medical School, and there is a lot of major disagreement. There are the old histories and the mid-century histories and the centennial histories and the bi- and tricentennial histories and of course countless revisionist histories. They agree on little. Yaddah’s history may never be fully unraveled. “Founder fathers” come and go, ordaining him and him and proscribing this and that. They do not appear to have got on with each other very well. Presidents and chairs and fellows are always being pushed out or leaving of their own volition, some with unexplained hastiness. They are all men of God, of course. God is what is taught. Religion depends on an educated ministry for its perpetuation. Educated is perhaps too generous a word, and this last sentence should be fashioned thus: “Education depends on a devout and God-fearing ministry for its perpetuation.” In any case, twelve books written by these founder fathers laid everything down. Or were there thirteen? Or only ten? Is there a lost book? It is said there is a lost book. And is the handwriting in the “original” mission statement really the work of one hand? What could be so complicated about starting a school to teach religion that leaves no history, to this day, quite agreeing with any other?
If it is 1512 or 1634 or 1701 from which all blessings flow, does it matter much? Does it matter much if there are three first students or a dozen, or if it is Harknettle who is the first minister to teach God, or Seymour the first founder from Old Nestor Township who moves his class and small library from there to settle in New Godding, to seed America’s first—what? School? Academy? But is it really our first? What about the University of Southern Jewry? What about Elizabeth and George? What about Tradumpha? What about Harvard, which was our first college? Why and how does Yaddah always manage to usurp such pride of place? Yaddah has a proprietary and presumptuous way of proclaiming itself the oldest and/or best of everything and getting away with it. There are no arguments, no counterclaims; there is no one to dispute Yaddah’s primogeniture, preeminence, and impertinence. Yaddah has always been able to claim a “history” that covers all bases, and no one ever cries foul to this day.
Our new country wants so much to have schools, as evidenced by a circular distributed in the early Massachusetts Bay colonies, “Please Eddicate Our Children.” We don’t want to bow down to England or to import a way of thinking that most men have sailed away from. The Founding Fathers want everyone to be educated, but in a new way. What is this new way? Well, it will be different from the old way. A grand desire, this, to forge a country’s education, as ambitious a scheme as creating the country itself, without knowing how in the name of God to do it.
Unfortunately, our country had no great early thinkers doing our “new” thinking. They were solid, stolid, boring, and intensely conservative, with limited imaginations and curiosities. They were more conservative, as we have already seen, than those who were left behind in England. How could anything new come of that? Elisha Yaddah reads books, true. He has made money, though none of the histories is certain how, which is always a suspicious shortfall. Accumulations of capital in those days tend to go unnoticed because they are usually kept secret by their accumulators. Money is a very secretive thing. Elisha has books sent to him from all over the world. He pays scribes to copy anything new and interesting. He accumulates a lot of books. It is his library that forms the basis of the first Yaddah, and Elisha’s name is bestowed upon it in exchange for this gift of his books.
Elisha mentions in his diary the Brothers in Zvi, that elusive organization said to have been responsible, back in the snows of yesteryear, for the establishment of a worldwide network of Jewish whorehouses in accordance with the sacred Zordah, which wanted Jewish men to fuck only Jewish women when they were out on the road. “I read books before and after I fucke,” Elisha writes (thank goodness so many diaries are kept by so many people). “I fucke men because the business of brothels is distasteful. It has besmirched womanhood forever. To touch a Jewish woman’s private parts knowing men all over the world are paying money to Zvi to do the same is enough to make me glorye in the touch of a man who I know touches only other men, and for free, and reads books.” What an unusual excuse for homosexual behavior. No wonder there is a missing book or two in Yaddah’s history.
To think that Yaddah was founded by a homosexual! This will be news to all the legions of Yaddites!
This diary entry is particularly upsetting to Semplish et al. because it is the one piece of written evidence that Elisha Yaddah was a homosexual, and by inference a Jew. Reynard Fasswuss of Cambridge has written, in his own History of Yaddah (1998), that Elisha Yaddah left no diaries, and the one that has been found is fake. “This whole queer business is very hard to
swallow.” That’s pretty strong language from an academic. “There is always a historian or two or twenty who cry out at some point, fake!” cries out in response a rival camp headed by Dr. Endicott Klemm of Oxford, in his Encyclopedia of Whorehouses (1999).
Fasswuss does not dwell on Elisha’s private life, only on “his animal interests.” Indeed, there is no sidestepping that part of Yaddah’s “history” which records that it began life as Deacon & Caplan in 1589. Or 1673. Or 1702. “Documents” of incorporation can be produced to support each date. Mr. Caplan’s heirs consistently maintain that he most certainly wasn’t Jewish, and that “Elisha Yaddah” is a misreading of “Yalish Caplan” and hence really not that person, i.e., Elisha Yaddah, at all, and that somehow various genealogies became inadvertently intertwined, from bad handwriting perhaps. Caplan, by whichever name, was what we today would call a veterinarian, but one specializing in monkeys. He came to America a rich man. He had spent much of his life in India. “Deacon” was what America’s early settlers called the organ grinders whose monkeys danced for peanuts. In one of the Twelve Books of Yaddah there is mention of D&C as “an institution of knowledge important to all humanity’s welle-being.” Fasswuss concedes the founder’s “animal interests” but leaves out any details.
To think that Yaddah was founded by a homosexual veterinarian. A monkey man! This will be juicy news to Yaddites near and far.
Not only a homosexual veterinarian but one who collected and peddled monkey blood. Now, which story of which founding of Yaddah do we like more? There are others.
Fasswuss devotes little space to the private life of “our founding father,” whom he does name as Elisha Yaddah. “Elisha Yaddah was rich. That he was a single gentleman is not much cause for interest. He came and went quite often. He traveled from his house to other houses. He journeyed from one town to another, indeed from this world across oceans to others. He desired no outsider to pierce his nature.” Like all heterosexual biographers of homosexuals, Fasswuss does not go anywhere near the heart of his subject. He does not, as it were, go the whole nine yards. Elisha did write in his diary about his very long penis.
A point that has eluded all historians of Yaddah’s beginnings is that Elisha Yaddah did not make a secret of his life. He did what he did and if he was seen, so be it. The men who came and went from his house also came and went from his bed. This is a strong statement, that the founder of Yaddah, vet or not, was a practicing and open homosexual. It will not be verified until 2001, with the attempted establishment of the Frederick Lemish Initiative for Lesbian and Gay History at Yaddah, when one of its visiting scholars, while rummaging in the Globb Memorial Library, is led by a gay librarian to Elisha Yaddah’s diary, lying there on a shelf, all those centuries later, just waiting to be discovered and read. Shortly after this discovery and its release to the world Yaddah abruptly shuts down the Frederick Lemish Initiative for Lesbian and Gay History at Yaddah. No legions of even gay Yaddites come to rescue it, or me.
New Godding is on the Connecticut-Massachusetts border, and at one time or another each state—much as Maryland and Virginia still claim credit for Washington, D.C., as carved materially from their flesh—has tried since Yaddah’s establishment to usurp it. It is “halfe a horse” to Boston due north, and “halfe a horse” to New Haven due south.
New Godding has a tough time in the history of early population centers. Perhaps because it is equidistant from so many places but still on its lonely own, sexual offenses outnumber all other categories of criminality handled in its courts. There are many convictions for “drawing out his yard.” There are many flaps over “obscene conversation” and public behavior perpetrated quite deliberately to embarrass and shock pious neighbors. Men masturbate (“self-immolate,” in the act of “self-pollution”) in public, even unto seminal emissions while praying. Indeed, ejaculations at prayer by some groups are commonly considered as offerings to God. Other men just do it to show off. Quite evidently, life is boring in New Godding without a lark or two.
For all its fame as a center of education, which is certainly one of man’s higher callings, New Godding comes to represent as well another side of man’s increasingly complex nature. As ministers and magistrates agree that each decade sees more numerous offenses, Yaddah draws to its ivied courtyards more and more men of God. Morrissey, Goldnerstas, Davenity, Winthrop (even here), Adams (there is always an Adams), Edwards, Elliott, Davenport, Silliman, Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards, the list of theologians is endless. These men of the cloth rush to “bring” respected young students into Yaddah’s mix, and the students pay for this privilege. As with Socrates and Plato, instruction in the search for perfection encourages youngsters to go out and search for it on their own. And so Yaddah is from its earliest years, whichever ones you choose, a most ungodly Godly place. Education in the use of genital organs is certainly constantly denounced and a Mather pulpit is never far away, but Yaddah boys will be Yaddah boys.
New Godding’s infamy gets lost soon enough in the rush of Godly educators to join the band. There are more and more sinners than saved, but there are more and more people everywhere who claim they want to be saved. It is a growth industry. No one wants to get left out of whatever is all the spiritual rage. It is not long before Yaddah this and Yaddah that begin to grease up the intellectual circuits of The American People. To have Yaddah anywhere near your name means you’re a class act all the way. Yaddah will become America’s preeminent center of all learning. It will seed the world with its enormous and ever-expanding network of scholars and their publications, all those men sent out into the world like the missionaries they are, clutching their valuable tubes of rolled-up sheepskins.
If carnal exuberance or its squelching occasionally erupts in such an exalted center of learning, which is the worse for wear?
When institutions of learning are exclusively male, what higher good do they have to offer, when all is said and done, than the love of man for his fellow man?
It is only in 2014 that acceptable scholarly verification of Yaddah’s life and story appear in Elisha Yaddah: Merchant, Collector & Patron by Scarisbrick (Oxford) and Zucker (Harvard). Born in America, he went off with a well-to-do father, who was a merchant and attorney, to London at age three, and to Madras in southern India at sixteen to be a clerk for the South India Company. As Madras itself grew from a small fort when he arrived to a population of some 300,000, he became governor and then returned to the small country town in Wales where he retired and died in 1721, at age seventy.
New Godding had been too tame for the father and London too little for the son. He saw no available opportunities interesting enough. He wanted out, on his own, and saw the newspaper advertisement for the South India Company, a guild of merchants and stockholders that traded back and forth on their own fleet. From being a clerk, an office boy, a bookkepper, his excellent work slowly took him to the top. He married a widowed woman with a title who slowly went crazy in India and took herself back to England with their daughters. She never returns to India. The widow of his Jewish diamond expert became his mistress, more for her knowledge of her late husband’s contacts. There was some fuzzy stuff about a young man who started out as Elisha’s son and became his lover before he too left Madras and was shipped home.
No matter the wretched heat and foul sanitary conditions, Elisha obviously found it difficult to leave Madras because of two words: “tremendous profit.” He became many times a millionaire in various currencies. He accumulated a huge collection of very valuable items, diamonds (foremost), rubies, emeralds, gold, works by such as Rembrandt, Rubens, Breughel, Dürer. He returned to England with some seven thousand paintings. Trunks full of all kinds of fabrics, of course, for which Madras and India were famous. One hundred canes, five hundred rings, fifty-four tobacco boxes, all fashioned from one kind or another of something precious. Every kind of watch imaginable. Ivory. Pearls. Coins. Medals. Mathematical and surgeons’ instruments. Firearms. Swords. Cabinets of rare wood. There were mo
re than ten thousand articles that were shipped back. There were thirty-four days of auction sales, with the hope that no market would be wrecked by such a sudden and lavish infusion.
And books. Erudite, learned tomes about the natural world, the law, history, philosophy, the beautiful maps in the twelve volumes of Pitt’s Atlas. He gave 449 of them to the group from New Godding’s Collegiate School looking for funding. Mutual friends there put great pressure on him to contribute in accordance with his great wealth and to match, at least, gifts to other places of higher learning. So he added two trunks of Indian textiles and a portrait of George I. The books earned him his name over the front door of the no-longer Collegiate School. He never saw it and he never went to New Godding or indeed back to America to see it. He had promised more but died before the will had been legally approved. The total value of the gift amounted to something less than $30,000, about the same as John Harvard paid to get his name on everything half a horse away.
In the elaborate and embroidered clothing he wore, it was “too hot to partake too often” in comfort, his diary tells us, even though, as in Edinburgh, as in London, Bombay, Calcutta, there was a House of Zvi to welcome him in Madras. In fact, he owned its lease and wound up finding his generosity challenged by their bad business. There were not enough English, and too many poor Indians, and certainly hardly any Jews, to keep the place on its own two feet. “Besides, I am not interested in women,” he honestly and boldly states. And as will be with George Washington, Yaddah’s foppish attire, the clothing and jewelry he always wore, were a bit too much and spoke volumes to those who could read.
