The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Men and women simply do not know how to love each other. However would they or could they learn? How do they really know what love is, and means? We are told that they did, in the many paraphrasings of their lives that continue to be manufactured for us. But there were no great romances for them to emulate, no TV or movies or even bodice-ripping volumes to point the way. There is only some peculiar God who is harsh and punishing and exceedingly ungrateful for all the devotion offered to Him. No one, it would appear, knows any other way. Where is the historian of all of this truth, the continuing lovelessness of America?

  FRED SUMMONS T. HEWLING DUPPERS

  Fred has generously invited me on board for a change of tone. I am a professor of American history who writes about the boring stuff. I am often called in when a course instructor isn’t up to it because whatever it is is so boring. Kids got to be taught a lot of stuff that’s boring. It turns out I’m your man. If I didn’t have tenure I doubt I’d still be here (on my retirement pension). I’m one of the few fairies Yaddah didn’t axe back in those ’60s when Mendenhall and Griswold ruled the roost and hated fairies, fiercely. My pal Newton Arvin, who courageously wrote about the homosexual subtexts in Herman Melville, committed a certain kind of treason up at Smith, of all places, and Joel Dorius, with whom Fred studied, damn near did so because charges by the Northampton police ruined his career, too. And he was only visiting Newton. They and a few others were accused of looking at pictures of men in bathing suits. That’s all that male porn amounted to in those days. Bathing suits. Not even with erections bulging out of a crotch. Some police in Northampton without any legal permission broke into Newton’s home and located a bunch of pictures of men in bathing suits. Bathing suits. Boxer-style. Not even Speedo. Anyway, my name is Trenton Hewling Duppers. That’s a good boring name. I hope you won’t say it too loudly. You can call me Hugh. The walls in this place still have ears. It’s really like Soviet Russia here. To this day, you can only teach so much stuff at Yaddah and go so far. Like I say, I got my pension and I guess they can’t take that away from me; but I wouldn’t push even that too far at this place. Fred says it’s like Soviet Russia, too. I guess he said it first, at least out loud.

  In the case of these two particular important boring men Fred wants me to fill you in on, James Abram Garfield and Anthony Comstock, he says it is their sexual lives that got them into all their trouble. Well, that’s certainly a treat for me. Academics aren’t usually allowed to tackle sex lives. I hope you realize that Fred is going way out on a limb to include all this in his book. What fun! Although I think these two clinkers are getting in under the wire and rather it is the hypocrisy surrounding their lives that is the issue. It is not easy to teach kids (or the world!) about hypocrisy. Or irony. (I call them the yin and yang of history so at least a few kids can identify.) Both hypocrisy and irony are more and more prominent among the underlying conditions (if I may borrow this name that I know Fred favors so much for another human uncertainty) with which history must increasingly deal. Comstock only jerked off all the time and Garfield got assassinated by a crazy man because he was gay, neither of which is especially sexy, hypocritical, or ironic, in and of itself.

  Mind you, the crazy assassin certainly had a peculiar sexual history as well. But then, everybody has a peculiar sexual history, in the sense that it is special to him, though if the person is boring, as these two are, then their peculiar sex lives tend to be boring too. C’est la vie. And if that’s the bottom line for Fred, he’s going to churn out a book longer than Gibbon and Herodotus and Thucydides combined. Perhaps that’s what he wants. I know size is all to many gay guys but I hadn’t thought Fred was like that. All those guys are a bitch to teach to kids today, especially, I find, Thucydides. Very cold bugger. Let’s get started. The quicker we start, you’ll see what I mean and you can take it or leave it, I’ll understand. I’m not certain who comes after my two guys. I’m an easy act to follow. Anybody is more interesting. I think it’s Sam Clemens. Now, I could make him boring for you too when I point out that I don’t know why everyone loves him so much. He wasn’t very lovable. But then, most people aren’t.

  JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD (1831–1881)

  James Garfield might have been a decent-enough president if he hadn’t been murdered. Mind you, the competition for most useless leader during these late-nineteenth-century years is great (Rutherford Hayes in office before, Chester Arthur to follow Garfield).

  He always worries that he is not man enough. His ambition for himself is compulsive and never-ending. After many a tussle looking for salvation, through God, through educating youth and then administering their schools, he becomes a lawyer, a decent one, if overly and intentionally concerned (because it is less controversial; it is safe) with issues of little interest to the masses, such as monetary policy, which make him appear more boring than perhaps he is and I can make him. He believes it wrong to hold slaves and wrong to free them. His fellow Republicans said not to meddle with slavery, and he will go along with that.

  He is righteous, that’s to be sure. He is some 200 pounds, and quite tall, six feet, but with short legs, which give his massive torso an off-balance presence, which goes well with his objective of tilting himself slightly forward not to miss important things, when he knew what they might be. This aggressive personality is sometimes overpowering, often rude, always proud. He discovers that all this makes people look at you. At last. You’ve got to keep them on their toes.

  He, too, was born in a log cabin. He, too, had a strong mother and a father who died young and a stepfather who was unkind to her and him; so all his growing up was nothing but unhappiness, not, as mentioned, unusual in growing America, even in Ohio. That he is constantly drawn as a teenager to the wharves of Cleveland, where he listens intently to the exciting tales of the seamen, does begin to indicate a certain interest in their half-naked bodies displayed so vigorously and unselfconsciously before him.

  He attends a tiny Christian biblical college, the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, in the tiny town of Hiram, where, like Lincoln, he begins his difficulties with the opposite sex, courting them, then retreating, not fully understanding why he does so, nor, it would appear, even wondering about it. Like Lincoln, he will finally find one, Lucretia, and marry her; she is decently well-born and patient and supportive and all-suffering (she will bear him seven children), and she is there for her Jamie until his end, not all that very far away.

  After Hiram he will study at Williams College in the East, which will polish his rough edges enormously. Like a growing number of other institutions of learning, it is on its way to becoming more materialistic and less spiritual. He gets invited back to Hiram to be head of his former school, and he accepts.

  At both Hiram and Williams and back again at Hiram appears one James Harrison Rhodes (1836–1890). Harry is a short, attractive, neat young man who, like Garfield before him, was a student and instructor at Hiram and a student at Williams and then a fellow professor at Hiram. It is hard to pinpoint just when this similar trajectory becomes a joint journey and they become inseparable and begin to live with each other, sharing sleeping quarters, writing each other letters, calling each other “My Love.” “Dear Harry,” Garfield writes him in 1858, only four months after his marriage to Lucretia, “I would that we might lie in each other’s arms for one long wakeful night and talk not in the thoughts or words of the grand old masters, nor from the Bards sublime, but in that language whose tone gushes from the heart.”

  You may well ask, where oh where oh where does a man learn how to love another man? There were certainly no great American romances of this kind for them to emulate. Whatever the inherent turmoils, they do not appear to trouble the lives of either Jamie or Harry. Each leaves diaries with evidence of their love and no mention of their difficulties in owning up to it. Harry will be at Garfield’s side for the remaining years of his life. He, too, will marry and father children (one of whom, obviously homosexual, will become a prolifically successful playwrigh
t). Sound business practices, good contacts, and timely investments will make Harry a very wealthy man.

  One wonders why Charles Guiteau (1841–1882) feels compelled to murder James Garfield, thus committing the second of our presidential assassinations. There is no doubt that he is a crazy person. He, too, is the product of a loveless marriage between a father who believed in a vengeful God and a frail mother whose own sanity was not secure and who, two deceased infants later, took her leave from her unhappy life when Charles was only seven.

  For James Garfield was a compulsion for Charles Guiteau. He stalked and followed and notated as many movements of Garfield as he could. He felt fated to rid the world of this man; it was a “political necessity.” For he knew that Jamie Garfield and Harry Rhodes were “unnatural” lovers. He had been a janitor at Hiram. He would hide in adjoining rooms when they covertly met to kiss and embrace and “hold each other, to last us till tonight,” as he often heard Jamie say to Harry as he lowered his trousers to get his hand around his lover’s penis. “I had a muss in my pants from watching them and I did not like this at all,” Charles wrote in one of his endless diaries. He was fired for making advances toward a young maid (he, too, had a history of being rejected by women) who cleaned Garfield’s rooms. “I was only trying to gain entrance and learn more about this nasty man,” he also wrote in his confession, which, at several hundred handwritten pages, was so long that no one ever read it, certainly no lawyer defending him, or judge who condemned him to die.

  Undeterred, Charles Guiteau, his obsession with Garfield unrelenting, now becomes Garfield’s biggest booster. He will become such a big booster, and make so many unsought speeches on Garfield’s behalf as he runs for various political offices, that he becomes convinced he is entitled to a counselor position at (preferably) the United States missions in Vienna, Paris, or Liverpool. Garfield must give him this, if only to shut him up.

  Years earlier, Guiteau’s father had heard about the Oneida Colony, not for its “celebration” of free love but for its heavy emphasis on Bible study. His son, he thought, must go there. That would put him right in his own head. Charles finally agrees when he learns they practice this “free love.” He cannot believe his good fortune when he discovers all its aspects, not only with women but with men, only to discover they are not so free for all and certainly not for him. Rejections abound. He is thrown out, not once but twice. John Noyes, the founder, bases Guiteau’s final expulsion on the young man’s losing battle with masturbation, a forbidden activity at Oneida, indeed at every God-fearing habitation in America. Charles is to write, “Men are not allowed to touch their things. What am I now to do with it?”

  Somehow he had managed to eke out six years of attendance at Oneida. He then tries to sue Noyes for a $9,000 reimbursement. Noyes lets loose with the masturbation charge and Charles returns fire with the charge that Noyes was manipulating all the Oneida women to do his personal naughty wiles. “All the girls that were born in the Community were forced to cohabit with Noyes at such an early period it dwarfed them. The result is that most of the Oneida women were small and thin and homely.” His vehicle for this exposure is a newspaper that he himself writes and gives out on the streets of New York, where “even before my eyes they are sent to the gutter.” His father, refusing to notice that his son is going insane, or is already there, or always had been there, prefers to believe that what is destroying him is “the free exercise of his unbridled lust.”

  Somehow the son manages to find a woman who marries him. They move to Chicago, and he tries a few cases badly, calling himself a lawyer. He beats his wife up and escapes many creditors as he goes back east, now calling himself “a man of God now called by God,” and conceives of the tactic to bring Garfield into his ken, his orbit, to win the undying gratitude that can only grant him his embassy appointment abroad. He writes a speech pointing out that Garfield must be elected the next president: otherwise a return to the Democrats can only bring a resumption of the Civil War.

  Somehow it works. He is asked to deliver it again and again at various gatherings as the forthcoming elections hover closer. He prints it up in broadsides that he distributes in New York and now in Washington, to which he moves so he can further press his case after Garfield is elected. His message has hit home. Whether or not it elected Garfield, as Charles is convinced it did, Charles is on the spot to demand his due. In those days you could actually get into the White House itself. He’d go there, crazy Charles Guiteau would, looking for anyone who would listen to him. He becomes quite adept at siphoning out Garfield’s staff and collaring them, and even the president. Everyone by now knows the guy is nuts. His own father is to write, after his son’s hanging, “I have no doubt that masturbation and self-abuse is at the bottom of his mental imbecility.”

  Of course, the job abroad never arrives. He writes an “Address to The American People”: “I conceived of the idea of removing the President … I conceived of the idea myself … gradually the conviction settled on me that the President’s removal was a political necessity, because he proved a traitor to the men who made him, and thereby imperiled the life of the Republic … This is not murder. It is a political necessity … The President’s removal is an act of God.”

  He buys a revolver, he practices with it on the banks of the Potomac, he goes to the railroad station from which Garfield is to depart for a vacation, he has his shoes shined there, he even hires a hack for transfer to the District Prison after his arrest. He fully expects that his country will be grateful to him and that he will be pardoned. He fires two shots at President Garfield. President Garfield takes two and a half months to die. His tenure has been two hundred days.

  It is now believed that he died not from Guiteau’s bullets but from the wretched medical care he received, the doctors turning tiny rips into major excavations in their efforts to retrieve the bullets. These became infected.

  Charles Guiteau believed that too. He thought he should have been acquitted, and was planning a lecture tour of Europe. After all, the president died from malpractice. But Charles was hanged. He had written a poem that he delivered in a loud and clear voice. “I am going to the Lordy. I am so glad. I am going to the Lordy. I am so glad.” Etc. In that long prison confession that not even his lawyer had read, he’d written: “Tell my Pappy I masturbated muchly because it let me think of Jamie loving me instead of Harry whilst doing it.”

  ANTHONY COMSTOCK AND HIS COMSTOCK ACT (1873)

  “Be it enacted … That whoever, within the District of Columbia or any of the Territories of the United States … shall sell … or shall offer to sell, or to lend, or to give away, or in any manner to exhibit, or shall otherwise publish or offer to publish in any manner, or shall have in his possession, for any such purpose or purposes, an obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing or other representation, figure, or image on or of paper of other material, or any cast instrument, or other article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion, or shall advertise the same for sale, or shall write or print, or cause to be written or printed, any card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind, stating when, where, how, or of whom, or by what means, any of the articles in this section … can be purchased or obtained, or shall manufacture, draw, or print, or in any wise make any of such articles, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof in any court of the United States … he shall be imprisoned at hard labor in the penitentiary for not less than six months nor more than five years for each offense, or fined not less than one hundred dollars nor more than two thousand dollars, with costs of court.”

  Whence cometh such fervor?

  Those words and this act changed the lives of The American People forever.

  This Comstock Act of 1875 was brought into being, rather amazingly, since he was such a nerd, by Anthony Comstock, and nobody liked him and many made fun
of him as he rushed into premises all over New York to “catch you in the act” of whatever he’d been tipped off about, including sticking a condom on your dick in the privacy of your own home.

  He jerked off a great deal. It bothered him a great deal. He knew he was a sinner. He just couldn’t stop. No matter how much church he went to. Just couldn’t keep his hands off himself. We know this because the chap kept a private diary every day of his life. “This morning was severely tempted by Satan and after some time in my own weakness I failed.” There were a lot of days he did it more than once. “Again tempted and found wanting. Sin, sin. Oh how much peace and happiness is sacrificed on thy altar. Seemed as though Devil had full sway over me today, went right into temptation, and then, Oh such love, Jesus snatched it away out of my reach. How good is He, how sinful am I. I am the chief of sinners, but I should be so miserable and wretched, were it not that God is merciful and I may be forgiven. Glory be to God in the highest. O I deplore my sinful weak nature so much. If I could but live without sin, I should be the happiest soul living: but Sin, that foe is ever lurking, stealing happiness from me.” His penis must have been sore as all hell. He must have located some decent goo to protect it. Wish he’d written about that.

  In one way or another the law or portions of the law or updated versions of this act that Anthony got passed are still in healthy working order all over America. That it is a clear act of censorship, a clear violation of privacy and freedom of speech, only makes a lot of people feel safer. Really, it’s not so far removed from what Jonathan Edwards had been raging about a hundred years before. Keep it in your pants, fellow Americans, and don’t send anything through the mails. (Well, Edwards didn’t say anything about those mails.) A lot of The American People actually want to be censored and protected against anything “dirty.”