by Larry Kramer
Leaving Madras to retire home, Elisha burned down the House of Zvi and sent the women—and men—home. Yes, Elisha Yaddah had placed his possible harm’s way out of harm’s way, right next door. He had enjoyed going out at night occasionally for a visit with one of the beautiful young Indian men he’d placed there. It was said this is why his wife had her breakdown.
As noted, Elisha Yaddah is hardly mentioned in all those earlier books about Yaddah’s history. He disappears from sight or further fame after his death and after all of his valuable estate was disposed of. But the name, if not the man, remains, along with the slogan perpetrated on banners all over New Godding to this day. “When better men are made Yaddah men will make them.”
AN IMPORANT PUBLICATION IS LAUNCHED
The New England Journal of Spots claims it was the first medical journal in America. It continues to this day. It is indestructible. No criticisms or lawsuits can dent its mighty armor. Why is it so named? Because all illnesses were originally known, seen, viewed, identified, as spots, of one kind or another. NEJS was published in Boston. Its founding editor was Dr. Ralph Measlee. The first copies were written in longhand. It was the first of what will be many New England journals, whether they originated in New England or not. There was great trust in all things New England. To this day these journals are routinely cited first and foremost in all discussions and dissertations and disseminations of medical and scientific “knowledge.”
The first issue of NEJS comes out when spots are spots and spots are all there is: you find a way to remove them by rubbing them away, by cutting them out, by somehow making them leave you. When they don’t go away you are considered sick. And you usually die. “He died from the spots” is a familiar statement in the annals of early America. Had it originated anywhere else in the country, the publication would have updated its name when the scourge of spots subsided, but NEJS it remains, to remind us with each issue, its masthead blazing that it has been serving the well-being of the world through the dissemination of the most accurate available medical knowledge since 1713, that it has seen a lot of spots.
If it’s in an NEJ it must be so, and if it isn’t it mustn’t. Dr. Measlee, whoever he was, set the rules, the parameters. These rules for acceptance and inclusion are strict and they will stay intact, these rigid, biblical rules set down by an otherwise unknown doctor and at a time when next to nothing about anything it writes about is known.
The words and worlds of all the NEJs continue, to this day, with their corruptible incorruptibility. This is science. This is life. This is The American People. We know better than you do. We’re from New England.
Does this sound like a police-state publication?
It is meant to.
Perhaps this is too harsh.
Perhaps it isn’t.
It isn’t.
A MOST IMPORTANT STATEMENT FOR OUR HISTORY
We are overdue in trying to pin down some definitions of some words and terms, indeed principles. The word gay has been used. The word homosexual has been used. Neither of these words will exist for a great many years to come.
No, there was no right word for it that you wanted to use for it if you were doing it. Buggery and sodomy connoted anal penetration and were in many places punishable by death.
Death.
Death.
DEATH.
So you have to be careful what you call it, if you call it anything, which—not doing so—is probably the safest bet of all.
So men learn how not to talk about our very own hearts of mankind.
That does not mean that men did not know that they were gay, to use today’s word, did not know what to do with their cocks, did not know when they were smitten with other men, did not know where to go to find them, did not know what it meant to be violently rejected, or the reverse—in other words, the whole gestalt, to use another of today’s terms. A penis has never been something that anyone picks up and puts down and puts away idly without consideration. This has been noted earlier. It bears constant repeating. Men knew what they were and what they wanted and what their penis was. It may not have made much sense to them, if they thought about it, and if they thought about it they knew it would cause them heartache and trouble as well as occasional joy. Yes, it was complicated (a word by the way not yet in general use). But so were so many other things.
Do you know that same-sex love does not require the sexual act to qualify as homosexual? The American Heritage Unabridged Dictionary lists two definitions for homosexuality: the first, “sexual orientation to persons of the same sex”; and the second, “sexual activity with another of the same sex.”
In other words, it is not necessary, nor should it be, for a person to have sex with another of the same sex in order to be a homosexual.
Why, then, do most academics—indeed, why does everyone who isn’t gay—insist on the second definition over the first? This definition makes it all but impossible in many cases to say that a person is gay. Thus is gay history eliminated, as if it never existed. Perhaps that’s why this second definition rules.
What does orientation mean?
“… a tendency of thought; a general inclination.”
OK. This historian can go along with that.
Just because academic research has not uncovered smoking cocks, that doesn’t mean that loving male friendships weren’t shooting themselves off all over “pristine” America and the thirteen colonies and into the Louisiana Purchase soon to come. It seems reasonable to assume this, no?
Reason and assumption are dangerous words.
How does any historian know the intimate male friendships he or she uncovers in early America were sexually chaste? There is no more evidence to prove it than there is of orgies in colonial beds. The argument goes both ways. If one side cannot wave Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress, neither can the other side wave immaculate bedsheets.
Your present historian believes that homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history, whether it was called homosexuality or sodomy or buggery, or had no name at all. “What’s in a name?” old Will Shakespeare, who certainly knew what it was, has Juliet ask us. “That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”
That few other historians agree elicits from this one, after many years of his own struggles to fight such stupidity, a simple response. Tough shit.
No “established,” “famous,” “heterosexual” historian, scientist, academic, journal, no mainstream anything will be caught dead agreeing.
This will prove enormously, tragically, destructively evil, as we shall see.
YRH is sorry he’s waited so long to say this. I should have put it way up front.
But I wasn’t a historian then.
IANTHE ADAMS STRODE ATTEMPTS HER OWN GENEALOGY
There are sloppy records (that any records from those days can be found at all is luck) indicating that she owned property under many names, Marjie Destog and Nuncie Bledd, for two. The name she used when she arrived in New York was Vitalia Strode. Different families fought to claim her when they learned after her death that she was so rich. The Dutch Destogs and the British Bledds fought so ambitiously that by the time her estate was settled, well into the nineteenth century, there wasn’t anything left to divvy up. But no one knew she’d seen to it that most of her wealth had long ago been directed where she wanted it to go.
Most lives are based on incomplete information, mine own certainly. You will meet me soon enough and I’m speaking out of turn because I was an Adams. We used to be all over the place. But I was born too late to pal around with the big ones, and I was stuck during my peak years with a Strode, nice enough, and with a certain power, but not nearly strong enough for this smarty-pants.
That original Strode was a strong and effective woman. And indeed she strode into the New World and never looked back.
There is no place in London, or anywhere over there that she can see, for an ambitious woman to achieve on her own t
erms and in her own right. She arrives in 1737 with a bit of money. She says her husband died and she had to get away. He was older, she says, she was his second wife, and she’s still young and vital, spunkie is the word used by interested gentlemen, of whom there are plenty when they hear her husband was not only old but had died. She loved him and she was faithful to him and she feels betrayed when he leaves almost everything to his two sons by his first wife. Worse, they make it clear they will fight to keep her from getting what little he does leave her, certainly much less than her due.
She dresses too well and she wears a valuable jewel or two. Everyone knows London is dangerous, and she travels with a bodyguard armed with a hidden blade. The bodyguard looks to be a man but isn’t. Her name is Leakey. She dresses like a man and has a low and threatening voice. She is over six feet tall. Strode is five feet six or so, a strong height for a woman, a height that can stand up to most men, look them in the eye, and say, “Get out of my way, buster.” Buster is a word in use already. To bust is an action fully understood.
There was a large Strode family in England then, of sufficient wealth and enviable position. There was a Sir Henry Strode who died in 1735, and he was older indeed. He died at eighty-six. He left a young wife, one Dinitia Ianthe Bledd Strode, of a good family evidently.
She is to write, “You won’t locate any news of me. When I saw that his two sons were not going to take care of their stepmother in the manner she wished to be cared for, I snatched all I could gather, converted it to cash, and boarded the first boat to this America place I’d been hearing of. It caused them to turn upon each other. They had a duel. Each killed the other. Then I got all that was left.”
Since there are still a lot of Dutch in New York she calls herself Marjie Destog. She gives herself a Dutch accent but refuses to speak Dutch. “I am in America, gentlemen!” She gets away with it. Should anyone be suspicious, Leakey steps forward and reveals a few inches of blade.
It is an interesting blade. More scythe than dagger or short sword. Slightly curved. With a sharp-edged hooked end that could rupture your insides to shreds. On the voyage over Leakey uses it several times. “His” mistress is an attractive woman still, about thirty-five years of age, and trim, and she is much leched over by captain and crew and passengers. The three murders are all executed at night; all three intruders into her Lady’s cabin are dispatched overboard. If they are later missed their absence is not questioned. Drunken sailors and officers, even passengers, are thrown overboard all the time. It is not an easy voyage to America. An inconvenient man can be lost on land with equal ease. There is no such thing as a detective or a missing persons bureau; there is hardly any such thing as law. Luck is the main reason people stay alive. New York is into its second century and it’s still its old cussedly rambunctious self. Boys are still being boys.
It is interesting that so little fear is visibly expressed. People go to bed early, with locked doors and windows and a lantern left burning to discourage outside interest. Guns are becoming less frequent as constant companions. But any sense of the danger of everyday life as a damper to the daily excitement of a new world aborning is seldom manifest. People keep their scaredyness inside of them. Perhaps old people are more fearful, but there are not so many of them. It is a young person’s world, this New World. And this settlement of Manhattan is nursery and playground and jungle gym to it all.
She loves it, Strode does. Or is it Destog? She buys a small house on Rector Street. She buys another small house on Divinity Street, around the corner. She wins a house, on Trinity Place, around the corner again, in a card game. Property is cheap, certainly compared with London, where the stifling lack of anything much for sale keeps prices soaring. Within six years she has sixteen small houses, all under rent and bringing in enough income to finance her continued forward march. She has no idea how much she wants to buy, or what she is buying it for or toward. It is like a game where the dice always come up winners. She and Leakey now travel with a third person, named Quadree, who carries a tiny firearm obtained from France. Quadree, too, is a large woman posing as a man. Again, no one seems to notice this. Perhaps Leakey and Quadree are that expert at their disguise. Or perhaps there are just so many unusual beings walking around Manhattan that no one takes much notice. I opt for the latter. It’s not that much different today.
Lower Manhattan is gradually moving north. So move north will she. She knows the British will be here for a while. And she knows them well enough to know they won’t last here. America will scare them half to death. She now starts buying property in the name of Lady Nuncie Bledd. It is not such a stretch for her to take this name. She claims her husband’s name was Sir Optley Bledd. The British, for all their vaunted superiority in colonial management, are sloppy record keepers, as sloppy as every other country at that time. Again, if paper proof is what you’re seeking, a certain caution regarding its worth, when “found,” must be uppermost in your mind. It has never been difficult to manufacture paper legality. The expression “not worth the paper it’s written on” has been around for a long time.
Strode’s English self loses its charming Dutch accent. Her metamorphosis happens gradually. By the time she is fully British again she owns some four dozen houses in lower Manhattan, just short of fifty, which she has determined will be her cutoff, after which she’ll do something else. She acquires two more houses. She’s hit her goal. Two more “ladies” bearing arms join her growing group for additional protection.
I guess one should pause to ponder where she found these women. As with your hushmarkeds, there is no proper word for lesbians, for it is no doubt this is what they all were, including Lady Nuncie Strode Bledd Whatever. It’s an early history not much written about, as I discovered when I came to write this paper for a course in My Family History when I was at Smith and still blushing when I heard words like pussy and clit. There have been many times throughout my life when I wished that women did excite me sexually. Men are simply not very good at it, and from many lesbian friends I’ve discovered we who aren’t are missing a great deal of pure and simple pleasure. Of course we can take care of ourselves getting more pleasure than any man’s second-rate fuck can give us. But one can do that for only so long before its essential component of being solitary dribbles into loneliness. As with gay men, they obviously found each other.
Our Lady now fancies an enormous swatch of land that extends from river to river at Twenty-third Street. It is the Fallingsworth Farm and it is owned by Sterling Fallingsworth, a bachelor of some sixty years, tall and rugged still, and handsome. All these years he has avoided marriage so assiduously that lewd jokes are made about his solitude. How could a single man with so much land to farm and oversee have done it by himself, with only serfs and slaves? Men need wives. At least men who have wives say that men need wives, although there is not always unanimity from the wives themselves. A wife’s lot is little better than that of one of her husband’s slaves. Many a wife would just as soon not be one. Grace and Hermia have both remarked how annoying it is that so few women in distress down through the ages have written about it.
Sterling Fallingsworth is not interested in selling his extensive holdings. True, he is interested in passing these holdings on to some possible future generation of Fallingsworths, a point Lady Bledd, in her pitch to him, forces him to concede. Is she suggesting a marriage? he asks her. She is attractive to him and he is surprised he is so bold now, after so many years of shyness in the face of woman.
No, she is not suggesting that. She is suggesting a merger of sorts. She will place all her holdings into an equal partnership with him and his.
“To what end?” he inquires. Her mind amuses him. He has never met a woman so bold and so imaginative in the ways of business.
“To the end that if we join together we shall be among the largest landholders in New York.”
“And to what good?”
“Why, the good of having enough to bargain for yet more and more, much more than either on
e of us could fashion.”
She thinks him a trustworthy enough fellow. She and Leakey and Quadree and now Eleanot and Forbes have discussed his trustworthiness. There is little save looks and instinct to go on. No bankers or security men yet give assessments or writs of bond. Instinct is all.
He agrees to her arrangement. The papers are signed. In celebration he offers the neighborhood a mighty feasting afternoon and night, capped by his drunken attempted seduction of his new partner, in front of all the guests. He seems intent on proving that at last he’s found his woman. She will have none of it. He does not subside easily. Nor does she. His continuing importuning, accelerated by yet more hard spirits, becomes so obnoxious to her and so visibly upsetting to the guests that it can end only in the way that it ends. Quadree shoots Fallingsworth dead. There is no one present who would not agree that his dismemberment—for she shoots him in his groin as well as his head—is well deserved.
The law is swift and concise. The entirety of their joint landholdings now belongs to her. Whatever her name is.
Five additional large women in men’s clothing now are added to her service, for a total of nine. When she purchases more adjoining farmland, both north and south, this cadre grows to thirteen, a baker’s dozen. Thank goodness her diaries are kept up to date on matters that matter to her.
These women are exceptionally protective of their mistress. She has given each a freedom they have never known. Each has a story not dissimilar to another’s. Each had been in a vile marriage to an abusive man, from which there was no possible escape. But here is this remarkable woman of many names who somehow has found the nerve and pluck and luck to play the man’s game in this world and win. Of course they are all devoted to her, Leakey and Quadree, Eleanot and Forbes, and Georgius (who will change her name to Georgia) and Ishmaela and Nottie and Manila and Ruthhanns and Serenus and Nodotla and Achilla and Zenobee. They are all protective of her, and soon enough, of each other, too. Each knows a good thing. Each has endured enough unpleasantness in a former life to guard her present one with firm agility. They are a remarkable group. And they all know it and treasure it, and her. And no “gender studies” “historian” has yet to write about them or what they represent, this (so far as is yet known) first group of America’s lesbians. Mr. Lemish’s attempt at an excursion into this neighborhood at Yaddah is woefully indicative of the lay of this land. So I found it generations earlier at Smith, where my professor Newton Arvin was imprisoned for being gay.
