The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Domna mourns her brother and her father, both dead in the war. She did not know either of them. Her mother had not wanted another child and murders the man who raped her, a mulatto foreman on the grape vineyards. As he was an unsatisfactory foreman and she was an excellent worker, the owner allows her to stay. He has designs on baby Domna, which her mother recognizes as troubling; she sees him finger-fucking the baby’s vagina.

  Domna is adopted by a traveling theater group. By eighteen she is one of their leading ladies. These companies tour the West quite regularly. Theater is popular so far away from the larger centers, and Domna Radiance is popular, too. Being a Negro actress makes her particularly exotic. Audiences respond to her startling appearance: she is very beautiful, tall and well formed, with skin as mellow as her voice. Her talent was recognized and encouraged by their leader, Adele Menton Pfizerfield, a German woman of Amazonian proportions and a great tragedienne of her time. Her Lady Macbeth was said to be so terrifying that men everywhere were terrified of her in real life, thus allowing her and her actors to journey safely.

  Acting offers one of the few opportunities for a woman to leave home and still eat without selling her body, but it requires a specific talent, the ability to pretend. Many women believe they have this talent, but they don’t. Domna does. She couldn’t tell you how or why, but she does. She had watched Adele. That had evidently been enough. “The performances of Domna Radiance in the Shakespearean tragedies are imbued with a particular mournful passion to which her audiences, many of them grieving themselves, rapturously respond,” writes Joseph Morgandorf Mendell, a critic for The Wabash and Spokane Bellwether, in June 1880. Interestingly, women run a number of these touring companies. Charlotte Cushman, Ada Dwyer Russell (a Disciple of Lovejoy “married” to the poet Amy Lowell), the great Eleanore Duse, Adah Isaacs Menken, and the great Sarah Bernhardt are just a few who trek endlessly and in the face of dangers across the western portions of our growing land, where for some reason the audiences are huge and responsive, and hence the profits immense, even when the language they are hearing isn’t English. By her early twenties Domna becomes so popular that she is able to run her own company. Here she meets her first lover, Dolly Maar, a Russian Jewess who has also spent her life running away from murdering white men, from tsars, from pogroms (a pogrom is when tsars and their armies march in and murder everyone they don’t like, which is usually Jewish people). Neither Domna nor Dolly has been in love before. For both of them it feels right and good and they don’t talk about it much.

  Domna notices that more and more onlookers seem to disapprove of her lolling with Dolly, and other women Domna has around. These girlfriends are not actresses. They are what today would be called her fan club. They are in love with Domna and she has been known to love one or the other of them back, playing her favorites off against each other, depending on her mood. No one said this star is not fickle.

  In Cardo, in the southern Dakota Territory, a band of ugly women wearing kitchen aprons and brandishing rolling pins stand directly in front of her and Dolly to block the audience’s view of the stage during a performance of Othello, in which they are playing mistress and maid. Just before Cardo, in Tempest, Arizona, Domna has to set afire a bunch of men intent on molesting her. She lights their beards with a torch from her current production of Burnt Up Love, which is being performed out of doors at an encampment of Baptist ministers holding their annual retreat in an abandoned mining camp; they had witnessed said lolling during an afternoon rehearsal.

  Domna is smart enough to see that it’s time to fight. Her civil war is not over. It looks to her that her civil war is just beginning. She recognizes the look of hate in other eyes when she sees it.

  She has been looking around for something different and more challenging to do. What does she think she can do that is different and more challenging? Certainly it is challenging enough to perform Shakespeare. She has in all her life only been an actress. She only knows how to act. She can act in her sleep.

  She realizes she is bored with pretending to be someone else.

  News of the increasing number of murders of homosexuals has reached her ears. The victims have all been men. Domna wonders how long it will be before women get the axe. She knows that several of the murdered men were women in men’s clothing. They wrongly believed that as men they would be safe. She also knows of various male homosexuals who are becoming more confrontational. “There are fights to be fought and it is time for us to fight them,” she tells her girlfriends, echoing the words she heard Virgil Vindicator speak when he marched alone through the mining camp a few weeks ago, holding forth to the Baptist ministers on his feelings for “my brothers.” She heard Virgil Vindicator intone, inspirationally, that he and his brothers were the same as anyone. “Our existence is just as God-given.” Her girls do not want to hear any of this, and of course neither do the Baptists who roughly escort Virgil out and away.

  She tries to tell Dolly that it is time for their lives to be different. None of her companions want to discuss the dangers of their lives. They have been with Domna through other enthusiasms that waned.

  Indeed, what if she were a man?

  This is still a new country. They belong here as much as anyone. They must build for themselves as other people build this country for themselves. There is a word now coming into use. She likes this word. Lesbian. It is a beautiful word that rings with magic in her ears. She and Dolly, and Dewla and Perla, and Bessie and Mary are lesbians. The world does not want lesbians. Can Dolly not sense this? There are fights to be fought and it is time to join in fighting them. Virgil Vindicator has spoken passionately about how to deal with those against them, those who live with deep-seated prejudice. Combating this prejudice is the great task that must become their life’s work. He says it requires the patience of Job, an unceasing campaign to educate the entire populace about the essential and fundamental naturalness of homosexuals. They must advance this passionate claim for all their years to come.

  Yes, Domna has heard Virgil speak, and she follows him to several of his speaking “engagements” to hear him speak some more. She becomes transfixed by his words and his courage. She talks to him and they begin a friendship. She misses several performances and Dolly goes on for her. While she is away Dolly and the smashers are abducted. They will not be seen or heard from again. They are taken to Oklahoma, to Nantoo, “farther than hell itself,” as the masked abductors of Americans Against Niggers and Nigger Lovers, a cell in the Ku Klux Klan, boast. Oklahoma is not yet a state. Renegade organizations can find safe haven there to do most anything.

  Peter Power stands alone. On the evening of Domna’s return to her company he is announced as her understudy and performs in her stead. Before the audience applauding Peter’s success, Domna can see they are much more comfortable when Othello is played by a man. So be it. She believes it is her duty to make the world better. A woman has never changed the world. It must be a man who can find and protect the Dollys of this world. She sees her beloved and much-missed Dolly in every line of the Moor’s that she intones, now more brilliantly than ever. She will be that man.

  Domna Radiance is no more.

  The change in her is quite remarkable. She has shaved her head. High boots extend her height. Leather chaps and jerkin encase her. Always a master of voice control, she lowers her register and increases her timbre. Her man’s voice is convincing. She has learned to cultivate consistent mellow tones.

  Domna Radiance is gone.

  Peter Power stalks the earth convincingly. Even Virgil, who had met Domna, does not recognize this person.

  In some ways she has lived her life as a man. She has made her own decisions. She has played many a man for many an audience.

  She may as well be one.

  She tries to look into Virgil Vindicator’s black eyes. They shine like agates.

  Peter is suddenly concerned that if he stares too deeply into the eyes of this towering white man he will be drawn into the man’s soul and
will never be able to walk away. As with all challenges, he confronts this one head-on. He seeks this man’s attention with fervor. They become exceptionally close.

  Virgil Vindicator is quite taken with this man before him, who has come to join him, he says.

  “It would be a cold heart that did not respond to your warmth. It is an amazing handsomeness that is displayed along with it. Your voice is of a soothing yet firm nature such as is rarely heard from a man. It is a voice that might seduce people into believing. With my own booming voice, so appropriate to addressing vast crowds, and this new voice of yours, I feel that a useful bond is being forged.”

  “I want us to make a journey together,” Peter tells him. “There is a concentration camp for Negro lesbians in northern Oklahoma. I want to go there and set them free.”

  THE LEGEND GROWS

  It takes Virgil and Peter two years to locate Nantoo. They arrive too late. There is nothing there.

  Much has happened to them. They have ridden many miles and been ridiculed in many places. They have looked for people like themselves, homosexual men and lesbians. Sometimes they find them, but only a few at a time. And no sooner are they met than they disperse, no doubt from nervousness at what is said to them.

  Virgil sadly laments, “Now we are here, but where are we?”

  “We must not despair,” Peter says, bolstering his friend.

  They try a few larger places, like Dallas and St. Louis and Kansas City. Here they encounter more of their people, but with the same result.

  “We are here. I know we are here,” Virgil says, trying to keep both their spirits up.

  They patrol the streets day and night, but it is difficult to put two and two together. They put up posters that are ripped down; they hand out flyers, which are thrown away immediately.

  “Movements are not built like this,” Virgil says and Peter must agree. “We don’t even know where to hand out our information safely.”

  They reach the far part of the West Coast. Washington has recently become a state. The men and women they meet here are even more embarrassed by these soapbox orators.

  Yes, it is homosexuals themselves who protest against them. A group of men dressed in extravagant costumes for a party circle the two and taunt them. “We do not want to hear from you! You make us ashamed! Leave us alone! We want to stay indoors. Who are you to preach to us how to live our lives!”

  “Oh, my brothers and sisters, how can you cast us aside!” Virgil cries out to the few men and women who have remained.

  And so it goes.

  Yes, much happens to them. For one thing, they face death many times at the hands of the unfriendly. They always manage to escape.

  For another, they have fallen in love. But neither of them wants to go down this avenue. Yes, by now they have each seen the other naked. Have they arrived here too late as well?

  We hear no more about them.

  They say that she came out of the West and he disappeared back into it.

  THE DRIDGE AMPULE

  Clarence Meekly wrote Horatio Dridge’s life immediately after his death. We do not know how much of it is fact and how much of it is love. While not as highly regarded as Jane Addams’s My Twenty Years at Hull House and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, other classic works by strong individualists bent on establishing a new status quo after publicly condemning a wretched old one, it is nevertheless of interest to any historian of American disease. Unraveling the history of how the Dridge Ampule, of which Meekly writes so proprietarily, changed history, is one mission of this history of The American People. And at least he is honest about his love, which Jane Addams is not in her own book, which fails to mention her “outlaw marriage” with Mary Rozet Smith.

  Yes, Clarence and Horatio found each other at the end of that march of the wandering children in Washington, and not a moment too soon. Many of those kids were rounded up and incarcerated, if not quite imprisoned, in huge institutions for homeless youth. Institution was a word coming into vogue, a number of such establishments financed by a new group of The American People who were exceptionally rich and bent on “doing good.” The march of the wanderers, as it came to be called, was a red flag inviting the roundup of thousands, young and old, with no beds to sleep in. Put ’em in an institution. Keep ’em off the streets. Don’t want to see ’em. Whoever was president? Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley, oh, it is a faceless, feckless, feeble, unmemorable hodge-podgy lot that run our country for the last twenty-five years of this nineteenth century. Quick! Name one important thing any of them did.

  Here are some portions of Clarence Meekly’s book:

  I write this, my beloved’s story, just after he has died at only thirty-five years of age. I am overcome with grief and loss. I call my book The Biography of a Great Man, because that is what he was. Originally I subtitled it “Only Earth Is Left Alive,” because I am so bereft without him, but I then judged this too melodramatic. While I miss him more than I wish to stay alive, there is much for me to do for many years to come. His memory and his gift must be extolled and enshrined.

  The world did not want to know about him during his lifetime, which, short though it may have been, was filled with great achievement. After all he accomplished, to be so overlooked! Other rich men, tycoons of other industries, are written of without surcease. It is imperative that I overcome this manifest unfairness. I have had to publish the book myself. No established publisher would do so. I shall now have to go out and sell the book as well, as I once went out and sold Dridge Flakes, making them an international success.

  Horatio Dridge was probably from Ohio, as am I probably from Ohio, since we always instinctively knew our way around this state and he chose to accomplish his important acts here, including choosing me, Clarence Meekly, with whom he shared some twenty years of his life. Indeed, for most of our life together, and we met when we were both wandering children, both probably some fifteen years of age, he felt uncomfortable leaving the boundaries of this state. Ohio is the home of many famous Americans and their great contributions. Dridge Flakes, like the cash register and the rubber tire, and Horatio’s joining with me, “my soul mate, my inspiration,” as he perpetually named me, certainly his goad—all of these have their home in Ohio. Firestone, Goodyear, Goodrich, Tushner, Hanna, Rockefeller, Kroger, Dukavic, Perk, Duvall, Fester, Allamontano, each lived a history in Ohio. I now add Horatio Dridge to this impressive list.

  It is shocking that there exists no full-scale biography of this great man, Horatio Dridge, as lengthy and scholarly as the many volumes on heterosexual American tycoons. There has been no major biography of any homosexual capitalist, to this writer’s knowledge. Yes, I use this word heterosexual with the same contempt that I have learned of late the world uses the word homosexual to discount us. I am new to these terms. They do not fall comfortably from my tongue and from my pen onto this page. But all of us are one or the other, and the latter is what he was, and what I am, and it is why we have been so ignominiously discarded. It is doubly unjust because our fortune has contributed much to enrich this country.

  My dear man concocted the breakfast cereal that mercifully brought regularity to a legion of the constipated. He then housed many of the worst sufferers in the chain of homes we established to attend even more specifically to their disorder. Here this emetic was fine-tuned into their principal diet. These achievements were then wed to our growing network of increasingly sophisticated spas that mushroomed to take care of the bowels of an expanding population of the dyspeptic.

  But as important as all of this, my history will also reveal for the first time the fortuitous albeit accidental discovery of the mutation of this cereal from flake to pellet to liquid to fermented liquid, and into the true foundation of our enormous fortune, the Dridge Ampule, which is Horatio’s greatest gift to the world. The Dridge Ampule is a great discovery, as great as the rubber tire, the cash register, and oil.

  Despite the fact that Ohio is farm country and
the soil sufficiently providential, he never stopped talking, and movingly so, about his hateful childhood of poverty, a father who abandoned a mother who then sought solace in whatever liquor she could imbibe at whatever homes required a laundress, which, because of her drinking, became fewer and fewer, dwindling to none, after which she too disappeared, during all of which time her only child went hungry and of course unloved. It was not an uncommon childhood, then or now.

  He wrote, in his own unpublished “The Struggles of My Life,” which I shall also publish and which I am convinced will establish itself as a classic in a new category which I here name “orphan literature”: “Very few are aware of how many parentless children roamed the countryside in those days. We were a race of orphans. If we were seen, we weren’t cared about, and if we were cared about, it was usually in such brutal fashion as to make us run away to become, in preference, wanderers once again. I sometimes think that more men and women than we know must have met each other as children in dark corners all over America. There we coupled and parted, and if any evidence of pleasure came from those brief moments of release, such evidence, too, had to be denied and put out on the stoop of unhappy memory, like last week’s garbage or an unwanted cat. Those children who came to be called ‘illegitimate,’ I would wager mightily, are the true roots of much from whom this country sprouted. Crime, theft, and larceny, even murder—what separates any of these from the illegitimacy of abandonment? It is all the same package, is it not?”

  Horatio writes of eating leaves and branches, bark and acorns and grass. In the winter, he chopped chunks of dirt out of the ground and ate them sprinkled over with sugar he stole when he plunked down a few lonely pennies for a cup of coffee somewhere: “I allowed the earth to warm itself softer in my palms, and the sugar grains to impress their sweetness into it, and I closed my eyes in order to pretend it was something different I was tasting, and swallowing. It was. It was the soil of the whole world, the nurturing sustenance of Nature itself. It made me grow. It made me strong. If I am strong today, and healthy, which I obviously am, then it is because of American dirt.”