by Larry Kramer
Another gay president! Two in a row! Pierce’s successor, James Buchanan (1857–1861), is a bungling, unattractive Pennsylvanian also too fond of slavery for the country’s good. What did he and Pierce before him do in Washington for eight years? How does a country piss away eight long and entire years? Where is everyone and anyone?
Three homosexual presidents, Jackson, Pierce, Buchanan, almost in a row. (Our fourth is on the way.) What is happening and why is it happening now? Even today, there is not a major piece of historical work about these three gay presidents that makes mention of the foregoing revelations. And here is YRH, hurling them at you one-two-three, and upsetting our chronology.
What all these revelations should tell us about The American People during these years is that many male citizens from every segment of society are now engaging in sexual relations with other men. Because they know that their nation’s leaders are hushmarkeds (hushmarkeds recognize their own), they feel in some small way sanctioned. Washington, and by extension other large centers on the East Coast, is becoming the center of more than government.
Where is the cadre of historians this true history of early America requires? Nowhere, with the early and honorable exception of a small volume published in Athens, Ohio, in 1929, Garish Grandstanding: The Role of Faggotry in 19th Century America, by Mae Blossom Yangtzee, purported to be a wrinkled old lady in a tiny Midwestern town. It is a pretty racy book to come out of Ohio during any era. Mae Blossom Yangtzee was evidently a man, Howard Akins Kree, a lawyer and drag queen who performed in Oriental garb at private functions. The world he so briefly describes flourishes only in an occasional miasma of rumor and whispers, visited by few and those few frightened by their adventurousness.
Oh, also by the way, although known since the beginning of the seventeenth century, the hollow needle and syringe for injection of fluids into the body makes its appearance in its first convenient handy model, constructed by Dr. Charles Pravaz, in France in 1853. By the end of the year it is being used everywhere for a faster introduction into the body of opium. Indeed, it becomes a necessary bit of paraphernalia for parties among a certain and ever-widening set. It will also prove an invaluable tool in medicine.
There are some historians who maintain that de Tocqueville did not really “get” America. Not even having left New York, he writes to a dear friend that America was “a society without roots, without memories, without prejudices, without routines, without common ideas, without a national character.” He’d made up his mind that this was what he would see and write about. In the opening lines of his finished work he declares, “Among the new objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, not one struck me more vividly than the equality of the conditions.”
And as said, lovers they were, Alex and Gustave. Nobody has “got” that, either.
WANDERERS
Voiceless and I wandered for several years after we got free from Fruit Island. I had noticed him there, and the more he clung to me, the more he broke my heart. First we headed south. Then we tried north but every place we went we got tired of what was there. What was there was us, Lucid and Voiceless. We thought if we should go far enough away from all we had known, we might find another us. It was as if we couldn’t shake the horror of what we had lived through and escaped from. Somehow we had to kill off our old selves before we could become new, but we didn’t know how.
Oh, we tried various things. Once we jumped into a river and left a note goodbye. I signed it Lucid Hooker III and Voiceless indicated he wanted a new name, so we gave him one, Messie. He chose it himself. “I is in one big mess.” He was learning how to spell his thoughts in letters. I had taught him the alphabet and he was a quick study. But we didn’t drown and no one found the note so far as we could tell when we camped out farther up the bank and spied back. At least now we had a name to call him.
Then we went to Maine and then across to New Hampshire and Vermont. We must have cleared many dozens of acres here and there and built some thirteen cabins here and there. But no peace arrived. Still I heard in my head the screams of Fruit Island and felt in my groin the mingled pain and pleasure of what the Punics had mixed and what I’d helped them mix and what we had sniffed. Still I felt the agony in my penis of how long and fierce we had fucked there, Maurice and I. It was not a feeling to be rid of so fast.
And Messie still had nightmares of how Dr. Punic Jr. made a hole in his throat to drop in a cure that never came. I know he is fearful that because he will never talk again, no one will ever know all that happened to him except himself inside his head. He was all of fourteen years old when that happened to him forever.
But we comforted each other well enough in the middle of the night when we woke up frightened. He held me in his arms most dear. Soon it was that I hugged him back as he held me. We did not partake in sex but I knew that what came upon us now was love. I am not ashamed to say that for the first time in my life I felt the feeling of true love.
No, neither one of us wants sex anymore. I do not know how long this will last, but for right now we just work our energy off by clearing land and building cabins and marching on, trying to be as brave as we can be. He is a strong lad, growing already past my height, muscled now from our labors, and blond hair on both of us from the sun. I find I am noticing his body more and more, so perhaps my penis will want to work again. We sell the cabins when we leave them, and I have money from Maurice. Too, I have the formula that Maurice said would make us rich, though I do not know how to bring this feat about, or even if I want to. It seems I am always sitting on a bag of questions and a keg of powder. It is enough to keep us moving on and on.
BLISSFULNESS
Upon an ever-widening horizon, stage, panorama, platform, whatever do we call this landscape for our ever-growing dreams as The American People push out and forward with hope into our ever-expanding universe?
Ethel Prance is a large-boned woman of short stature, approaching forty. She is not unattractive. She has black hair and black eyes. She stands on sturdy legs. Her bosom is generous and would appear welcoming but for her intensity and forthrightness, which tend to make onlookers nervous and keep them at arm’s length. Her ever-present smile does not hide her firm sense of determination, because this smile also informs you that it’s her way or no way. Ethel is a resolute woman, far ahead of her time.
Such a stance and demeanor are difficult for a woman interested in men. Men simply do not like her kind of woman. They are unfamiliar with her sort, for a start, and they have too much else on their minds. So the men of New Bliss, Ohio, pay Ethel little mind or heed.
Even though she is voraciously interested in men, she does not possess the self-awareness to change. Few people do. Self-awareness is still at least seventy-five years away. She contents herself with the knowledge that her father adores her, utterly, and that this father, Milton, is not only the mayor of New Bliss, the small and hopeful town in central Ohio where they live, but also an amateur archaeologist who studied at the Copenhagen Museum with the great C. J. Thomsen and J.J.A. Worsaae, and is convinced that New Bliss is resting upon a fortune. These are truly great men, Thomsen and Worsaae, who did groundbreaking work in the Danish peat bogs and funerary mounds, and New Bliss would have heard of them if it cared a whit about archaeology, which it doesn’t at this moment of concentrating on its future, not its past. In the nineteenth century, ruins were turning up everywhere, vestiges of everything.
Milton Prance owns much of New Bliss for the simple reason that, courtesy of C.J. and J.J.A., he knows his ruins and runes and believes that New Bliss sits on top of a Hopewell Indian mass burial ground, and courtesy of his wife’s money he has bought it. The Hopewells, who will one day be discovered to have lived and roamed throughout the central American plains from the Gulf to the Michigan peninsula, will also be found to trace their ancestry to the time of Christ. Here is one American man who is both interested in our past and rich. Dame Lady Hermia would be thrilled to know that such a smart
American man ever existed in Ohio. “I am not very keen on the possibility that the American male brain is as inclusive and capacious as they constantly maintain,” she has written in one of her own early great works, which should have been cited previously, The Rose and the Ruin. Milton is a partner of Mr. Charles Goodyear and they are very involved in making wheels from rubber. Great riches are not only underfoot but just around the corner.
Ethel is the first lady of New Bliss. How her father thinks ancient Hopewell bones can be worth money he has not confided in her, which is just as well because Ethel finds bones all very boring. For Ethel, today is today. New Bliss is now, not then. She is a modern woman. All those Indians knew was how to kill and eat each other. They did not know bliss. Ethel will know bliss. Ethel is accustomed to getting what she wants.
Ohio helps. Ohio is a hopeful place in general. Ohio is turning out to be one of those places where there is more right than wrong. If you were to ask anyone in Ohio, there isn’t much wrong with Ohio. From early on it is one of the first places where most of the people feel this way. They have pride of place, a quality sociologists will one day identify as particularly Ohioan. There are not too many states or territories where the people are quite so chauvinistic so early on. Yes, Ohio is a little pocket of state-love from the get-go, which is a good thing because it is deficient in attributes such as weather and topography compared with, say, Virginia, which is much more beautiful, or Massachusetts, which has more variety, scenically speaking. There’s not much to look at in Ohio. It’s more what you feel than what you see. The American People have already learned how to move around when they don’t like where they’ve landed, but when people land in Ohio they tend to stay put. That says something about something.
So whatever Ethel has in mind to do, it’s easier for her right now to do it in Ohio. Women and men may not be equal but they are more equal here. When you think well of yourself, and well of where you live, well, then the sky’s the limit, isn’t it?
But while the population of 5,400 in New Bliss is not a bad size, it’s been a bit stagnant of late. People have stopped stopping by and staying put. No one notices except Ethel, who worries that growth is being stunted and the place will fill up with old people. Her father founded New Bliss when he got lost looking for a lost lake, and Ethel is determined to see that the town will stay here forever, lake or no lake, as a monument to him, and to her mother, although she ran off with someone when Ethel was only three (her mother, too, was uninterested in lost lakes and old bones), and to herself, of course. Once she does something memorable. Which she will do soon. She knows she will.
There are old-timers here now, but not so many as in nearby Ashton Grove or Appleyard Corners. Their young people have been running off to towns that are becoming Toledo and Columbus and Akron and Cincinnati. When young people traveling around looking for a place to live stop here on their way to somewhere else, it is important that New Bliss look good, with lots of people their own age, so they’ll stay. That’s the ticket. More young people.
Most towns in America are born this way. Stopovers become stay-puts, and if you were to ask them years later why they stayed they would likely answer, “You know, I can’t remember, but it hasn’t been all that bad.” Not all that bad is about as good as it gets most anywhere. Ethel’s been pondering this very subject. About as good as it gets is not good enough for Ethel.
Nobody in Ohio and thus in New Bliss gets worked up about much of anything, so when Mrs. Sary Peyser opens her home no one gives it a second thought. In this, Ohio is different from almost everywhere else in our still new country where people are up in arms swiftly and loudly the minute anything unusual damps down the morning dew. In Ohio people shrug it off and wait another day to see if whatever is troublesome is still around. Usually by then it isn’t. How Ohioans come by their good sense is a mystery, but they are a patient lot.
Ethel Prance is not patient. She has come up with something, and she fears that what Mrs. Sary Peyser is doing will cast a pall on her idea.
Mrs. Sary Peyser could not care less what anyone else thinks. A dogged sense of get-up-and-go and can-do does not reside in Ohio exclusively within the bosom of Ethel Prance.
Mrs. Sary Peyser, a childless widow only thirty-five years of age, has opened her house in New Bliss to little boys.
There are a lot of little boys lost in the landscapes of our expanding country. It is a growing problem no one notices, and it will become much worse after the Civil War, fast approaching. Where their parents are and where they come from are questions most of them cannot answer. Oh, they probably knew once, but a few months in the harsh wilderness of running away erases memories, especially of parents who abandoned you. Then you want to pretend you never had them. There are adults who try to take the little boys in, but often these men and women are stern and unloving, even downright cruel, and if the boys are able they run off as fast as they can into the woods and forests. There they learn to live on berries and leaves and water from streams and fishes speared with sharpened poles and eaten raw. Most of all they learn how to evade emissaries of the law in the few places that worry about wandering children and try to capture them. Once in a while there’s a good meal, perhaps at a church dinner in a town they’re sneaking through, or in a farmhouse along the way, but too often the momma or poppa wants them to stay and gets too fervent in the determination to make them do so. There are lots of grown-ups who want kids of their own when they can’t make them. In some places runaway children can be forced by a local law enforcement person to stay if the adults claim them, saying the children are their own kin when they’re not.
Mrs. Sary Peyser evidently has the touch, because little boys come to her house and ask to stay. Evidently her interest doesn’t threaten them and she’s a good cook. She has a large house with many bedrooms. Her late husband was a carpenter with hope. Both husband and wife planned for a very large family. Her husband died during her first pregnancy, which she miscarried.
She has noticed how the little runaway boys who show up at her local church suppers are painfully shy in their dealings with adults and with each other. They blush and turn away, as if caught out in a wrong. She is touched by their behavior. Why are they so nervous? How can I make them more comfortable? She knows that each has fared so harshly in journeying to New Bliss that trust is as grains of sand in their small hands. They do not know how to be friends with anyone. She will teach them how to be friends with each other.
She decides to ask some of them to stay with her. She is careful in her choices, seeking boys who seem kind and gentle. Before long she has a full house of some thirty boys, bunking three and four and five to a room. She can tell they are hungry for friendships and uncertain how to establish them. Once when one of her boys runs up to a new boy at the church supper and hugs and kisses him, the new boy is so surprised he cries out, “What am I to do!” And Mrs. Sary Peyser answers simply, “Why, hug and kiss him back.” Even her pastor, Rev. Tillman Tighe, smiles on this interaction. Mrs. Sary Peyser is one of his favorite parishioners and he would not mind moving in with her and all her boys himself.
She makes up stories she thinks will further her boys’ friendships and banish their blushing nervousness, stories about little Billy and little Bobby Bunting types, where little Billy and little Bobby wind up kissing and hugging each other and moving to their own little farm and raising their own little crops together for life. She is surprised to find a few books of this nature in the tiny town library that is just getting started. These little books are quite popular in the Midwest in the nineteenth century; it’s known that mommies and daddies have little enough time or imagination to make up stories, so it’s nice that someone (in this case a Mrs. Sidney Lovitt in Worcester, Massachusetts) has thought to compose these virtual self-help guides for what unfortunately will one day be regarded as “the natural sodomy of the womanless plains,” as Dierdre Hand puts it in A History of the Abnormal in Children’s Literature of the American Mid-West (Akron, 1
955). The boys love hearing Mrs. Sary Peyser read to them from these books by Mrs. Sidney Lovitt, and at the same time she is teaching them how to read, too.
Then all the little boys go to bed kissing each other and hugging each other and falling asleep in each other’s arms, just like Mrs. Sary Peyser tells them to do and Mrs. Sidney Lovitt tells them to do.
Mrs. Sary Peyser’s bountiful existence is exclaimed over by many a neighbor woman who is barren of such joy herself. Her charitableness is lauded. There are so many homeless children roaming the country that it is heartbreaking to many who possess maternal instincts. But Ethel Prance, who has yet to find herself a husband in a place where husbands are not as plentiful as straggly wandering ruffians, and who is coming closer to her own notion of how to put “her” town on the map, finds herself more and more annoyed. There is something unnatural to her about so many boys living together next door.
LUCID AND MESSIE IN NEW BLISS
One day Messie and I come upon a town somewhere in Ohio, with a white church and folk who invite us to take supper. A nice woman by the name of Mrs. Sary Peyser invites us to stay with her. She says she has not been well and she trusts our faces. Her house is filled with many young boys, all under the age of fifteen, and it is plain she needs help. I am older, she says, and so can be most useful to her. It is Messie who sees the good in this place first. The boys take to him so fast that in no time I see he will not soon leave. They do not care that he cannot speak. He shows them things, like how to make knots from pieces of rope and how to carve logs and stray branches of trees. His face reveals a smile I have never seen on it. How he sensed that the love here was so strong and firm I will never know, but he did, and what else had we now to do but stay?
