by Larry Kramer
“I have just been informed by an old law partner of my most-missed Abe that he saw my talent right on, and would read aloud from my Leaves of Grass to people in his office, and told many that great things were to come from me. He took my book home, only to return with it next day saying if he left it home the womenfolk would burn it.
“My heart cries. It never stops.”
HOMOSEXUALITY
In 1869 the word is first used by Karl Maria Kertbeny, a German-Hungarian doctor campaigning against the criminalization of sex between men in Prussia, which is about to adopt the infamous Paragraph 75, which Hitler himself will continue to invoke. In 1871 the Reichstag will officially pass the Imperial Criminal Code, which includes a law prohibiting sexual penetration of one man by another. Kertbeny writes a letter to the German minister of justice arguing that the state has no business entering people’s bedrooms. Prior to his coinage of the word homosexual, gay people were called Uranians or the intermediate sex. Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing usually get the credit for first using homosexual a little later in the century (the latter’s hugely influential Psychopathia Sexualis comes out in 1886). No doubt earlier examples will be found, but Kertbeny is the earliest uprooted thus far. The word travels around the world with speed. There is much hunger for it. In Chicago, another Hungarian-German doctor, Grody von Eyssen, writes a letter to a minister of justice in Pennsylvania literally copying Kertbeny’s wording. This act is taken by some gay historians as the beginning of gay activism in America. Von Eyssen is never heard of again and homosexual acts, in Pennsylvania and state by state across most of America, have already been declared a crime.
But now hushmarkeds have a name! We are are here officially, although an article in The Journal of Modern History, “The German Invention of Modern Homosexuality,” gives one pause; it maintains that modern conceptions of homosexuality began, ironically, with this 1871 German antisodomy law.
A CELEBRATORY WALT!
When I heard at the close of the day how my name
had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol,
still it was not a happy night for me that
follow’d;
And else, when I carous’d, or when my plans were
accomplish’d, still I was not happy;
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of
perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the
ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and
disappear in the morning light,
When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing,
bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and
saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend, my lover,
was on his way coming, O then I was happy;
O then each breath tasted sweeter—and all that day
my food nourish’d me more—and the beautiful
day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy—and with the next,
at evening, came my friend;
And that night, while all was still, I heard the waters
roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands, as
directed to me, whispering, to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the
same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face
was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that
night I was happy.
LESBIAN
The year 1870 seems to be when the word lesbian is first used to differentiate a female homosexual. There does not appear to be as much etymological history available for the actual first use of this word. As with Germans, we have not been paying “lesbians” sufficient attention. They were not considered as dangerous as their male counterparts. However, one of those Cottons, John, tried to get them punished, and Thomas Jefferson, of all people, in 1779 tried to pass a law stipulating that a woman, if caught in such activity, would be punished “by cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least.” Havelock Ellis (British) and Richard von Krafft-Ebing (German) seem, again, to be the first two doctors to officially discuss this activity of female same-sexuality, and perhaps they are the ones who named it after Sappho, the great poet who lived in 600 B.C. on the ancient Greek island of Lesbos surrounded by many women; but one hesitates to give these chaps that much credit for worldly knowledge, particularly when Krafft-Ebing has already bracketed homosexuality with insanity.
MEDICAL REACTION TO THE OFFICIAL IDENTIFICATION OF HOMOSEXUALITY
How does this new nomenclature and the pursuant visibility of this new “class” of people affect the medical establishment?
This is a topic that will form a good deal of the remainder of this history. Without the ability of the world to identify homosexuals, or their ability to identify each other, there would be … what? A different world? No Underlying Condition?
DR. PAULUS PEWKIN IS ASKED HIS OPINION OF EARLY HOMOSEXUALS
Over the decades, nay the centuries, the attitudes of the medical establishment (and all other establishments) remain remarkably consistent. In the early 1980s, when Dr. Pewkin is asked his opinion of early homosexuals, he has this to say:
“I am chief at the U.S. Center of Disease. The appearance of homosexuals is always a kettle of smelly fish. I have my Ph.D. in Communicable Diseases from Yaddah. I am an expert on syphilis and every other kind of claptrap humans can give to each other. I’m a scientist. I’m an expert in public health. I don’t understand literature or history, both of which imagine all sorts of things and pass them off as fact. In science none of this is fact. I have at my disposal at NITS the Admiral Mason Iron Vaultum Library, the entire record of this country and its medicine and its hospitals and its illnesses and diseases, and I tell you that in all these books and volumes and records—and I know because I have asked that this matter be researched thoroughly in light of the current hoopla by a few people over all these homosexuals dying today—there was only heterosexuality until the twentieth century, when something dire went wrong in the gene pool or some kind of pool and homosexuality oozed out. Nobody in their right mind did it before then. How could they? They’d be dead. People would murder them. Quite rightly. It’s obviously happening all over again. They got too big for their britches and they’re dying again. It’s got nothing to do with bigotry. It’s got to do with pragmatic practicality. We have to breed! Breeders don’t like their breeding interfered with. Otherwise there’d still be Indians. Damn, we’d probably be the Indians.”
INTERVIEWS WITH AND ABOUT HOMOSEXUALS
The following appeared in The Louisville Advocate on October 21, 1870.
So that is what I am called. All my life I have had these feelings without a name. I cannot say I feel better with a name. The name is not pleasant to hear pronounced or see in print, especially here in Louisville, Kentucky. I do not know what good it is to have a word for me. A man came up to me in the market on Saturday where I shop for my weekly food. I cook for myself and live by myself and I think this other man does the same because I have seen him shopping here before. “So,” he asks me, “are you a homosexual too?” I pretend I don’t know what he’s talking about but I do know and he knows I know. When I don’t answer he is most impolite. “Don’t you think you might be a little more pleasant now that we are brothers?” he says. I hit him. “You are not my brother,” I yell loudly. People look at me and move away from me and I run into an alleyway a few stalls up from the vegetables. At the beginning of the fruit I start to cry. People passing by look even more strangely at me. “Why are you crying?” one old woman asks me. “You look like a strong man who should not have to cry.” I go to another market to buy my food now because I do not want to see that man or that woman.
Who is
going to read what you write in your newspaper? Please keep my name out, and any description of what I look like. I am sorry I agreed to this. Your paper wrote that anyone willing to come forward and talk about it would be paid two dollars. Now you tell me that you will not give me my two dollars unless I can prove I am one of them. How? You cannot tell me? I must prove it myself? I don’t know how. I’m going to cry again. The doctor who wrote your article asking for volunteers said this new name would make us all happy. He said it would make us feel like we have our place in the world at last. It doesn’t. It just makes me want to go home and lock my door and pull down my window shades. Perhaps I must move to another place. Cleveland or Detroit or Minneapolis. But they are all too cold. It’s cold enough here. Suddenly I want to be some place where I never have to be cold again. I wonder if there is such a place. Why won’t you give me my two dollars you promised me?
Around the same time, a diversity of homosexuals are interviewed in various publications around America: Carroll Cameron, a photographer, one of this country’s first professional ones (St. Louis Post); Natasha Kilbogen, a lab technician in a hospital laboratory (Seattle Post); Reynall Murphy, a haberdasher in Ohio (The Sandusky Post); Arthur Adelphi, an actor in Philadelphia (Actors’ Weekly Report); Horstus Schoensten, a dentist in Versteht, Wisconsin (Milwaukee Heimat); Ogunquit Chou, a medicine man of the Ogunquit tribe in Maine (Ogunquit Tribal Journal); Sarah Fidalmeh Toobin, a Brooklyn rabbi’s estranged wife (Jewish Forward); O’Ransky Triall, a ninety-year-old veteran of the Irish-Mashush Wars that destroyed a good part of Galway in 1825 (Four-Leaf Clover, Queens, N.Y.). There are interviews with some two hundred “former hushmarkeds” in the Mansion Clare Foundation archives, all appearing between 1869 and 1871. There is not a man or woman among them who likes the new nomenclature.
Stories about the deaths of homosexuals, particularly from suicide, also begin to appear in the press. “Now that they have a name for themselves, homosexuals can no longer hide, and they often cannot bear the light of day,” declares an editorial in the St. Louis Post in 1872. One particularly unpleasant paper, Raw Reports, in Baltimore, runs a regular tally of men (and women, too, although women are rarely included in any public discussion of this new topic) who commit suicide, or disappear, which Raw Reports believes amounts to the same thing. The tally runs every Monday. Weekends are evidently ripe for “disappearances.”
Suddenly many Pushnows are everywhere to round up these wayward lads. Some are even under contract to the Tally Office. One Pushnow broadcasts the instructions to his network, which sound kindly enough: “Try to catch them up before someone gets them.”
That Tally Office is rounding up and collecting as many names as it can. The Disciples of Lovejoy love to collect names. They want to collect the names of everyone who ever lived, anywhere and everywhere in the world. Their religion says they must consecrate all people who have died, because they do not believe anyone ever dies. They have determined that they will not consecrate homosexuals. But they will have all those names when the time comes for … what?
This is not the place to go into this remarkable activity, but when we do you should know that Homo sapiens sapiens, which is what we are, began to appear about a hundred thousand years ago; ten thousand years ago the world’s population was a little over 5 million; by the beginning of the Christian Era the population had risen to between 200 million and 400 million; by 1750 the world’s population can be estimated with 20 percent accuracy to have been around 800 million. (Thanks to Dame Lady Hermia, and The New Gotham and Alex Shoumatoff.) And these Lovejoy folks are going to collect all their names and all the info they can on each and every one of them. It is now enshrined as a cornerstone of their religion.
The first federal census was only taken in 1790, with new ones conducted every ten years. For whatever reason no president has ever allowed detailed information gathered from these censuses to be divulged. What is that all about? What did they reveal?
Anyway, so it is that many American people now read about this new breed of American people called homosexuals. There is a flurry of newspaper interest in the new name and the newly named. This is a whole new category of news. Homosexuals. There are tens of thousands of newspapers in America. Hushmarkeds are no longer hush-hush. How do The American People react, if one could embrace them all in a generalization?
AN OFFICIAL MURDER OF SOMEONE DIFFERENT
The first arrest, detention, and conscious, intentional extermination of a homosexual by an employee of the United States Government (that is, the first that can be located as such in an official record) is that of Paul Evenrute, who is asphyxiated in a small cell in the Milwaukee County Jail on January 1, 1875. In the deceased’s records there is a “work order” for a “smothering to death.” George A. Ockton, a “behavior guard,” performs it. The records contain no indication of Evenrute’s behavior or misbehavior. Evenrute was twenty-four years old and worked for the Schlitz Brewery as a hops jumper, someone who throws bags of hops from wagon to vatside. He was well liked by his fellow workers. When his homosexuality was revealed in an interview Evenrute gave voluntarily to the Milwaukee Record Arbeiter for twenty-five dollars, there was no apparent communal displeasure, according to the town’s mayor, Helmut Wolfe, who professed surprise at Ockton’s action, which occurred shortly after the interview.
Although there is an “official request” in Evenrute’s file that he be killed, it is not signed with a recognizable signature, and when the whole matter becomes public Ockton is fired. Subsequently he is hired by Schlitz and remains there for the forty years left of his working life. He will never speak about the “smothering” beyond being heard to say that he could not find a woman to marry him because his two hands had been used to choke someone to death.
In June 1875, Ockton is sent a commendation by the Idaho Association of Healthy Men, one of several early fronts now financed by Hesiod Furstwasser I, according to research conducted by Hamilton Moyne-Lebber in his groundbreaking 1984 study, Emerging Hate: The Early Homosexual Revelations, 1869–1900. According to Moyne-Lebber’s important book there are 447 prison deaths nationally during those three decades, all following similar voluntary revelations of the victims’ homosexuality in the public press, and all accompanied by “official requests” that are unsigned or bear illegible signatures. It is almost as if someone or some group is going around the country following up on these newspaper confessions and stirring up activities inside the prisons. After Ockton leaves the jail, other “behavior guards” and indeed other prisoners take up killing homosexuals, now that they have a name and have been described more or less recognizably, an activity that is still a major problem in institutions of incarceration. So a certain pattern is being set. The IAHM becomes the National Association of Healthy Men, which, as we shall see, even as it changes its name again, and then again, and then many times more in its attempt to outrace any possible government or public outcry (which never materializes, anywhere), remains in the forefront of virulent hatred of homosexuals with, at last report, forty-three paid lobbyists in Washington and various state capitals, as well as innumerable and uncounted less-visible chapters, most of them underground. Its headquarters will move from Partekla, Idaho, to Trebla, Idaho, and then to Verstehen, Utah, and finally, in March 1912, to Washington, D.C., where the Tally Office, established and run by the Disciples, is up and running in the office next door.
As little by little the faceless Tally Office gains its grip on its “mandate,” there is growing terror in the land of the homosexual. While it is not difficult to sense when the forces of evil are abroad in your land, it is frightening when you cannot see your enemy face to face. Or perhaps you can, or could, if you were experienced in recognizing evil, which of course few are. No one understands there is also safety in numbers. Fear grows.
So far, there is only whispering and mumbling among homosexual men. It appears no one has suffered, appears being the operative word. There is only scuttlebutt about a friend of a friend who
…
AND ALSO …
In 1895, Teddy Roosevelt is put in charge of the New York Police Department and determines to clean up this “city that never sleeps,” this “island of vice.” The streets are so filled with offenders that they are virtually impassable to the clean-hearted. Why, on West Twenty-seventh Street alone there are whorehouses at numbers 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 119, 121, 123, and across the street at 104, 106, 108, 122, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134, 140, and 142. Between the Civil War and World War I, the city’s population just about quadrupled. There appears to be work, certainly something to do, for all. Many jobs and pastimes are of course against the law, but try to find enough law enforcers to monitor and punish it all. By 1897, Teddy gave up and went to Washington hoping to find something more rewarding for a career.
RUTHERFRAUD B. HAYES
There was a disputed election in 1876. By promising to remove the troops that were keeping order in the South, Rutherford Hayes defeated his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden. As a result of this removal of law and order, the hard-won rights of the black citizens proved worthless, blacks returned to their former servile state, and the civil rights revolution was stalled until the twentieth century. The Civil War might just as well not have been fought.
SEVERAL NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEN
So many have a similar profile: young men born into a growing and struggling country where people were still lucky just to stay alive. They might have large ideals but they have, as well, large experience of hardship and need and, most particularly, the lack of affection. Mothers, fathers sire too many offspring and then die young, or disappear, or are so ratcheted into God that freedoms—of expression, of emotion, of love, allowing oneself to be, without so many restrictions of right and wrong dictated by so many invisible forces to which one can’t talk back—are frowned upon and hence usually never taken.
