The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  DAME LADY HERMIA REACTS TRUE TO FORM

  Why do you constantly do that? Why do you take a perfectly well-meaning experiment in social progress and manipulate and corrupt it into such vibrant hues of hate and horror? The Oneida Colony was, in essence, a lovely thing. Or it wanted to be. It lasted many decades, nigh unto the end of the century. So far as I have been able to discover, New Bliss, Ohio, ceases to exist, so far as extant records are concerned, by 1860. I have no idea what happened to it. One day it’s there in the records and the next day it is not. If you are trying to intimate that New Bliss ceases its existence because of its failed attempt to emulate what obviously had only been heard about but not witnessed firsthand, i.e., an attempt at communal living with, yes, if you must call it that, “free” love, then that is one thing. But I am beginning to take note, and exception, to the way that you focus the entries in your history, which more and more strikes me as perverse and leaves very little to the benefit of any doubt. It is either perfection or nothing. No, I take that back. It is either homosexual or nothing, and by nothing I mean exclusion from your history. I know what you are trying to say—that we are where we are because of what we did once. It is just that you are so, well, heartlessly specific about this. No shades of gray for you! Perhaps that is your point, too. Indeed, perhaps I am coming to agree with you. And I do not like myself for it! Yet.

  But rather than belabor my point, or your efforts, which despite my remarks I find riveting and extraordinarily illuminating, I will shut up once again, take a deep breath once again, and prepare myself for my next appearance, be it as narrator or as pain-in-your-arse, probably both.

  My dearest Fred, carry on.

  WESTWARD HO THE WAGONS!

  Preceding and concurrent with the activities and disappearance of New Bliss is the journey across America and settling-in of Ezra Furst and his growing band of followers. We shall come to it soon enough; it is a hoary, hairy story, filled with holes and hopes, with much enmity and jealousies and vyings for control (seven Lovejoy brothers will wind up killing an eighth to obtain Tom’s place at the head of God’s line, only to be checkmated by Ezra). The mythologizing needs this respite before it commences its hardening into belief.

  When Ezra comes to allow the release and sale of Tom Lovejoy’s Bible to the public, it will be seen to include Tom’s story of America’s Indians as the remnant of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. When Milton Prance’s Indian bones are eventually exhumed, ancient Hebrew phylacteries (or tefillin) will be found buried with them. Crucifixes were found as well, giving rise to the legend still believed by many that Christ Himself had come to the New World.

  * * *

  Everything you are about to learn concerning your most revered president is true and you are not going to believe it, or me when I say I was there.

  Yes, I was there. I watched very carefully.

  No, I could not get myself into Abe. My problem is that he was not consistent. He spurted furiously forward in his younger days, and then he would back off when he was too busy and then he would do nothing before starting up a bit here and there. I need consistency. By now I have discovered that to be the most important thing. The very essence of my existence is the consistency of yours.

  “AND THE WAR CAME…”: THE HOMOSEXUALITY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  As a youth Abraham Lincoln had sexual encounters with a number of boys, young men, and mentors. He went through puberty quite young. He was uninhibited in his sexuality with other males. He saw someone he wanted and he got him. It was no big deal to him, or to the others in these small Illinois frontier towns of New Salem and Springfield. Such actions were not unexpected among young men, or even younger lads; there were no other sexual outlets, certainly not with women. Men were much more likely to have emotional attachments and sexual experiences with other men, though they kept quiet about it, perhaps because it was so commonplace that it did not have to be discussed. In any event, Abe was not interested in women, and never would be.

  His first partner was young Billy Greene, who was fifteen, and then Abner Ellis, seventeen. Both of them worked with eighteen-year-old Abe in a New Salem store. New Salem was a very tiny outpost and would fold up shortly after Abe moved to Springfield in 1837. He and Billy shared a cot and made good use of it. “When one turned over the other had to do likewise,” Billy, who initiated the sex, would write. Billy was particularly enamored of Abe’s thighs, which “were as perfect as a human being could be. He was well and firmly built.” He particularly liked to stick his penis between those thighs. Abe had other encounters, with Horace White, Trunker Awll, Thurgood Franks, who was a slave, Michael Botter, Noble Vernoose, Cat Nottinks, Nat Grigsby, and Tom Simpson. These were all country kids and wouldn’t count as important encounters if Billy and Abner and others hadn’t followed. Abe and his law teacher, John Todd Stuart, perhaps the person most responsible for Abe’s choice of law as a career, often polished off their studies with a sexual encounter. Similarly, Abe and one of his early law associates in Springfield, Henry C. Whitney, with whom he traveled on the local court circuit, often bunked together. “He slept in a short home-made yellow flannel undershirt and had nothing else on. I don’t know certain if that was a constant habit or not, but that is what he slept in with me and I could see what he had to offer and we enjoyed each other. He didn’t care where he slept or who he slept with. None of us did. If the bedmate was young and didn’t smell too much for need of a bathe, we often fucked with each other before we went to sleep. It helps you sleep better. I would say something like ‘I cannot sleep,’ and Abe would say, ‘Want to give me a poke?’” John G. Soto’s tabulation of historical sources in The Physical Lincoln Sourcebook shows that Abe slept with at least eleven boys and men during his youth and adulthood.

  His great awakening to the power of other male bodies to arouse him occurred when he and Billy Greene went off and joined the army to fight the uprising of the Black Hawk Indians in 1832. It was a short war and a small battalion. (Jefferson Davis was also one of the soldiers.) Abe was elected captain by acclamation, the first time such popular recognition came to him. It was also the first time such a wide variety of so many naked young men was visible around the clock. He was twenty-four years old. He was six feet four and weighed 214 pounds. He was still immature and unsure of his place in the world and his career. He was beginning to sense that his social graces were primitive and not sufficient for what might be out there for him. Joshua Speed, a rich man’s son from Kentucky, would come along shortly and educate him mightily in these and other areas.

  Joshua Speed will be the great love of Abe’s younger years, indeed of his entire lifetime.

  A man knows when the sight of another man interests, no, excites him. He may not understand it, or why it is occurring, or what to do about it, but he usually knows what he is looking at and how it makes him feel. True, nudity among men in our young country was a more natural thing then, but body parts, their sizes, their erotic content, are of little interest unless you know what it is you find yourself staring at too often. Of course men don’t talk much about all this, but they know when they really want to see another man.

  A hushmarket is what today would be called a gay area, a cruising area for meeting other men. The word itself, along with hushmarked for a gay person, disappeared very quickly after the arrival of homosexual in the late nineteenth century, perhaps because it was an unpopular word among those to whom it applied, just as homosexual itself would later become an uncomfortable word. Today these areas would include bars and beaches, hotels, streets, or entire neighborhoods. In the earliest years they were less visible—under certain trees or at distant farms or in remote fields or parks, often only at preordained nights on waterfronts; they were always in less fashionable areas where the more prominent would be less likely to be recognized.

  But they were there. From the beginning of time, they were there. From the beginning of time, of people-in-groups and people-in-crowds, there are such places. Why, oh why, has it
been impossible for us to accept such an obvious fact? That there is so little record of them is a testament to what must have been a nonstop effort bordering on the superhuman to eradicate all traces of their existence on the part of city fathers, and of course historians, and sadly, no doubt on the part of the hushmarkeds themselves. No town, or family, or hushmarked, wishes such information to be known.

  There is an interesting local guide to male nudity by one “Adam Adornment” that is “published private” in 1830, “by the banks of the Wabash,” and written by a man with a remarkable eye for observation of his fellow man. Adam Adornment writes, “men work together and when it is hot they work together naked as their births. There are traveling groups of men who ride to view such sights, going down the back roads where white men work the farms, or down other roads where Negro men are the preferred objects of inspection.” Amazingly, these groups of gazetteers often travel under the banners of such organizations as temperance groups or various Christian alliances that are conducting studies along the lines of “God and the Working Man.” Often these traveling men converse with the Working Man. Often they offer words, as it were, each to each, after the visitors stand for some time on the edge of the field noting who is who and who is noting whom back. Then arrangements are made for further discourse, usually at a campsite where the travelers are, well, camping out. Larger groups of men camp in the wilderness to be with each other exclusively and without interruption.

  Men travel in groups for safety. A few of them are certainly armed. One thing that is abundantly clear is that there exists a network, haphazard and not particularly organized, but a network nevertheless, of the like-minded. There is little now that was not done then, determined though so many historians are to deny this. It is not much different today but for the numbers. And these fewer who are venturing forth with thumping nervous hearts into a relatively unknown field of public social activity are indeed courageous pioneers. There are laws for their arrest and even extinction on the books of many localities. No doubt they know this; for some no doubt it is part of the adventure. As year after year goes by, men are learning, somehow, to live with constant danger.

  Men are not yet generally for sale to other men. They may own other men back home as slaves, but that is another matter. That hushies are not yet paying for each other could mean a number of things, the most important of which is that the sense of “wrong” is not controlling any sort of barter for choice, wrong usually connoting that one of the parties, or both, hates himself for what he’s doing. Does this mean there was no sense of sinning, or fear of being blackmailed? Can the times be so innocent? Or so advanced? Answers to these questions remain, sadly, incomplete. This area of our social history joins the others we are enumerating on our journey as lacking their own decent historians.

  Here is a circular letter from the spring of 1832:

  “Dear Fellow Traveler,

  “The summer is near upon us and your correspondent in Freshwater Depot, Kansas, is once again writing to enquire your interest in joining our group of friends for our annual holiday journey, this year by the back roads into our neighbor, Illinois. So popular was our tripping last year in our neighbor Missouri that this year we are prepared to accept several dozen gentlemen of manners and concern and also hardy-ness to camp outdoors for a week from August 23d. Please let the undersigned know by the mid-of-May whether you wish a place reserved among these gents, and biographical particulars you wish to share. Costs for all expenses will be equally divided. Last year they amounted only to some $4.00 total each.”

  The letter is signed “Dapper Dan.”

  It is known that Abraham Lincoln as a young man worked as a surveyor, traveling the back roads constantly, as did young George Washington. (It is a misnomer to call them “back roads.” Few were the roads at all, back or forward.) No doubt he often came upon such groups of traveling men. And no doubt he came upon groups of the men they were observing.

  From August 23 to 30, 1832, Dapper Dan and a group of twelve gentlemen of manners and concern and of course “hardy-ness” make their excursion to Illinois. The list includes “Abraham L.” from New Salem. Abe has lost his first run for public office. He also for the first time has some cash in his pocket ($124.00) from his army enlistment in the Black Hawk War. He writes the following when he is nineteen and before he turns seriously to the study of the law.

  * * *

  I responded to “Dapper Dan” that I desired to journey with him.

  He was not so old as I anticipated, not so much more than thirty years, with huge mustaches that almost covered the bottom half of his face. He laughed a great deal, which was agreeable at first. But after I heard him guffaw for several hours it seemed too hearty to be genuine. For myself, I found less to laugh about. It is uncomfortable laughing when one is learning so much about oneself.

  The others appeared to be older, and men for whom the several dollars were not so arduous to part from. I think I was allowed to come for one dollar only because I am young. Many a hand I felt on my shoulder, clapping me a hello, and then falling down my back to my waist and then ending on my backside. I had to step away from many a hand. Although I was happy to talk to these fellows, one of whom came all the way from a northern Michigan territory I desired to hear about, —he says it is most growing fast there in northern Michigan—, talking is one thing and going off into the trees is another. And many are so lacking in experience of the world as to make what they have to say of little interest to me; I have enough of little interest about myself as it is!

  By day all went well. We traveled and saw many a worker. I found it not so interesting as my companions claimed. To watch others work so hard is not a pleasure, be they naked or not. Slaves particularly are difficult to witness because they are not free. But until I am more certain of myself in my own mind, I have learned not to express an opinion as radical as this!

  Nighttime was more troublesome. Then the liquor came out to coerce the wants of lonely men into fulfillments of which not all wished to partake. It was known almost immediately that I was “not an easy lad.” I might have been more so for one or two of them but for the raw hunger visible on their faces. Surely it must be possible to maintain balance and equilibrium as one seeks companionship. I think that what I see there was naught more than I have seen everywhere: life is hard and painful and for two people to find each other in some sort of harmony and comfort and, yes, passion is not easily achieved. This makes me worry for myself, whatever my hungers settle down to be.

  The last night out was “banquet night,” which sounded safe enough.

  Our group was joined by other groups of similar travelers, as if by pre-arrangement with other Dapper Dans. There must have been near a hundred of us, a formidable lot. It was a pitch-black night with rain approaching when our wagons deposited us by a roaring bonfire in some unfamiliar woods. Liquor and food and farting and belching were the order of the early evening hours. I had to smile at some of the couplings sneaking off: for example, mister six foot six with mister five foot naught. Some several guests played on banjos and sang songs of lost loves found and found loves lost, and occasionally something more spirited about new days coming. The moon did appear, and more and more hungry fellows withdrew further into the forest.

  After a long while, during which time the rest of us stared more at the ground than at each other, our thoughts for conversation having long since petered out, a long table came into our midst carried by four naked muscled Negroes. Drumbeats from somewhere announced them so that many of the fellows returned from behind the bushes and trees. Everyone rushed to gather round the table, as if they knew in advance what I was now to witness.

  A young Negro boy, no older than I when Billy Greene and I first partook of each other, was led out from the woods and placed upon this table. Then the four Negro men proceeded to perform on him. I find it difficult to detail more than this. It was both repellent and exciting for me to watch. I knew what those men’s hands upon my bottom we
re feeling for, but now I could see in detail what use hungry human equipment can be put to. I have known for some time that my own member is well suited for competition. Playing around with Billy and Abner showed me that. But here was a competition that most men would lose. It was compelling to watch, no matter the size. I could not take my eyes from the entire event. Indeed it brought to mind the several times I begged Old Joe Watkins to let me watch his stud stallion perform upon a mare. I could not take my eyes off that either, and when it was over wished to witness it again.

  Yet I also felt my heart go out to that young lad. His pleasure did not seem as great as that of his audience. I wondered if he had choice in this matter. If he had been forced to perform, that would be a painful fact to know. Later I asked Dapper Dan and he guffawed yet again and said, “Oh Mr. Abraham L., do not concern yourself with the petty problems of our black-skinned slaves.”

  During that week we slept outdoors and swam naked in a lake. We bathed in front of each other. We were all even more visible to each other than even in my Army encampment. I have seen many men naked. But to see many men washing their genitals with soap and water, or doing the same to others, and the rest of the crowd looking on with great interest, and noting as well the many erections, including my own, was educational for me in ways I had suspected but not considered. I did not know how to integrate this information about myself as well as about this world, for it was indeed another world. I even noted penises shorn of their foreskins. I assumed their possessors were Hebrew. I had not met Hebrews before, in any company. The young man from northern Michigan must have been one. How did a Hebrew get to northern Michigan? I would have asked him had he not been so eager for my friendship.