The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  The end of this century finds houses of man and boy prostitutes proliferating in every major city: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, and San Francisco providing food for same-sex appetites. Manhattan has a dozen of these. In all brothels there are also women for other women. Western mining towns are similarly equipped, including ones in Utah. The Disciples of Lovejoy’s Princely Bountiful Pearl of the World Trust is also landlord to a number of these houses. It should be noted that by this time tens of thousands of teenagers had attended and were attending all-male boarding schools; at the other end of the scale, hobos are becoming an increasingly visible population (there would be two million of them by 1920) across the landscape; they often traveled in pairs, one often younger than the other and in obvious thrall to him. “I didn’t do no harm. I minded my own business. I didn’t steal or beg. It is an easy way to get by,” one of these youngsters told one Edna Squats, an early version of a social worker attempting to study “nocturnal social habits of the single young male.” “We take care of each other, we do. In New York, I had to charge fifty cents for my mouth and one dollar for my ass just to eat.” Edna’s sister, Hedda Squats Berryman, has written a landmark study of the sexual activities of young Disciples of Lovejoy women, which is filled with startling statistics of how much nonmarital sex was going on in Utah and the general unwillingness to acknowledge it, much less punish it. (A third Squats sister, Gretchen, was the seventeenth wife of Brigham Furst, Ezra’s successor, Ezra Jr. again having failed at promotion.) When a Disciples of Lovejoy academic, D. Michael Quinn, revealed much of this in the late twentieth century, he was excommunicated.

  In 1893, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a physician working in Berlin, travels the world giving lectures and visits Chicago. Indeed, he is to use descriptions of the city’s homosexual community in his groundbreaking book, Homosexuality in Men and Women.

  His appearance in Chicago inspires the establishment of the American Humanitarian Society, an energetic group of voluble young men that grows to include seventeen members who, in the small room where they meet, die of poisoning after eating food “donated by a caring and supportive mother” of one of them.

  Also in 1897, following Hirschfeld’s courageous lead, which he had learned about on a trip to Berlin, Dr. Trump File starts a homophile (where did this wretched word come from?) organization in Vidalia, Illinois. He names it the Abraham Society, for even then word has got around about that original Abe loving men. His intention for this society is for like-minded men to meet regularly in a social setting, no more than that. Dr. File, who is a man with a wife, four children, and a practice in family medicine in this small town, takes his idea to Chicago, takes it to Boston, takes it to Richmond, takes it to Philadelphia, always seeing to it that he’s left one or two men in each place to carry on. He’s managed, by word of mouth alone, to see his groups grow past the dozens and upward. He decides to take the Abraham Society to Washington, where he stays to set up a “national headquarters.” All along the way, he’s been accompanied by his best and oldest friend, an important Quaker historian by the name of Reeves Revenue, who has already made a name for himself by writing about what he calls his “clotted theory of historical inevitability.” Dr. File and the Abraham Society come to the attention of Eagen Odemptor and Turpa Diamond (who’d cleaned out Nantoo), who attend a meeting with a number of policemen as well as Foster Purview, a leading journalist who delights in performing duties for brother Lovejoys. All is exposed in The Washington Monument. Purview details “a perverted orgy” and Dr. File and Reeves Revenue kill themselves that evening. They are found naked in each other’s arms by a hotel maid, and it is this photo that makes its way around the world with various headlines along the lines of “Perverted Love Nest Poisons Itself to Death in DC.” Purview is given a “heroic behavior” award at the White House by Grover Cleveland, for many years a bachelor but now married for political convenience to a young woman twenty-eight years his junior. The Tally Office is recognized publicly by the president: this very acknowledgment, the first official one it’s had, puts it on the map, at least in Washington. It is now all right, officially, to go after perverts. Now we know what they look like. At least a couple of them. On the Fourth of July, the Tally Office marches down Pennsylvania Avenue with hundreds of other patriotic groups, Eagen and Turpa and scattered others from their growing office. Yes, thanks to Foster Purview, Washington now knows what the Tally Office is. They are cheered. “They” are Lovejoys. They are increasingly virulent in their hatred of homosexuals. Why? Like the Catholics, they must increase their membership and eliminate all obstacles.

  Back in Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld had formed the Scientific Humanitarian Society in Berlin and publishes what may have been the first gay periodical, Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types). The work of his SHS will continue until May 1933, when Nazis and Lovejoy missionaries loot Hirschfeld’s institute and burn the extensive collection of books and manuscripts delineating the history of “my people” that he and his followers arduously assembled over many years. This bonfire will be the start of the next chapter of Germany’s own hate, leading to Hitler’s determined purge of homosexuals, wherein it will be said a million homosexuals are sent to death camps. As we have seen, long before that time and place, such activities are further advanced in America.

  In 1899, Dr. Albert John Ochsner (later to co-found the American College of Surgeons) advocates, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, for compulsory castration of prisoners to reduce the potential number of, among other awful things, “perverts.” Dr. Harry Clay Sharp, who has read the article, performs extralegal medical castrations to cure Indiana State Prison convicts of masturbating. That he does so attracts much notice. Other prisons follow suit. It is apparently not difficult to locate doctors willing to perform castrations.

  By 1890, almost 47 percent of adult men and 37 percent of adult women are single. “Mostly young, these men and women constituted a separate subculture that helped support institutions like dance halls, saloons, cafes, and the YMCA and YWCA…” (Mary Beth Norton et al., A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, vol. 2, 6th ed., 2001). On urban life in late-nineteenth-century America:

  Homosexual men and women began forming social networks: on the streets where they regularly met or at specific restaurants and clubs, which, to avoid controversy, sometimes passed themselves off as athletic associations or chess clubs. Such places could be found in New York City’s Bowery, around the Presidio military base in San Francisco, and at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C.

  (Davidson et al., Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic)

  It is at the various branches of the Young Men’s Christian Association around the country that young gay men found each other most readily. It can not be overestimated how important these Y’s were for almost a hundred years and continuing even to this day, for the safe harbor they offered gay men, in their gymnasiums, pools, steam rooms, and of course the rooms that could be rented inexpensively and served as hotels for travelers from everywhere.

  (Norbert and Noreen Curlue, A Handbook to America’s Most Welcoming Bathhouses, 1990)

  As an interesting example of spreading hate, Cardinal John Henry Newman dies in England in 1890 and by the terms of his will is buried in the same grave in Rednal, Worcestershire, with Father Ambrose St. John, with whom he lived as “husband and wife” for most of their late adult lives. Cardinal Newman wrote shortly before his death: “I wish with all my heart to be buried in Father Ambrose St. John’s grave—and I give this as my last, my imperative will.” On their gravestone is a Latin inscription, meaning “from shadows and images into the truth,” which some believe is a posthumous coming out. After more than a hundred years of their being buried together the Vatican exhumes Newman’s body to be buried on its own, upon his elevation to sainthood. Ecclesiastical hierarchies of every American religion, then and following, vehemently sup
port Rome’s determination not to allow this relationship to be viewed for what it was. A New York bishop, Altune Demarest, writes in The Daily Catholic Lesson, “The Holy Father has acted correctly, with dignity and Supreme Right on His side.”

  In 1900 the Census Bureau allowed unrelated persons who lived together, including those of the same sex, to describe themselves as “domestic partners.” It was eliminated immediately and not permitted on any following census.

  At the end of the waning century, the government distributes pieces of paper listing employment opportunities. There are many jobs and not enough men, still and yet, to do them. The war, you know. Some thirty-five years later and this country still is short of men. Vivo Marpo reads these circulars every time he’s handed one. Negro janitors hand them out on the street. Most of the jobs sound boring. He does not know what he wants to do or what he is capable of doing. He once thought he could do anything, but those days are gone. His body is not the same since the war. He wasn’t in the war, of course, but his father was, and he was killed at Shiloh, leaving his mother with him in her stomach and no money to nurture him. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with his body but he has never felt right, in his body or in his head. Doctors have told him he was “irreparably malnourished,” and it’s true his arms and legs are skinny and his bones break easily. It’s a good thing he lives in Washington, because there is now a department that looks after “veterans,” and though he’s only a son of one, he can go there and get his broken arms or legs reset. A desk job is what he needs, he’s advised. He gets angry and is apt to hit people suddenly. A fellow at the new Disciples of Lovejoy local mission tells him he must find some meaningful work “to take your mind off things.” The “veterans” doctor gives him some powders for it but he says they don’t really help. “Try to stay on top of yourself, son,” he advises.

  One day Vivo sees a mention of something called “the Tally Office.” There is no description of what the Tally Office does or is seeking.

  Who today knows that Hesiod Furst, one of the most important of the early Lovejoy more-or-less secret agents, founded the Tally Office? Certainly no one will confess to this, no one in the Sacred Environs of Our Holy Temple, or members of the Princely Bountiful Pearl of the World Trust, or indeed at the Prince of All Waters Central Administrative Headquarters, all of which are now located in Oxonia. But Hesiod Furst was the first person actually responsible for intentionally and consciously ordering legal “removals” of homosexuals on behalf of the United States Government. It was naturally a secret agreement, made by Chester Arthur or Grover Cleveland. (Those years of Cleveland’s in and outing—now he’s president; now he’s not—surely mussed up government records, making it difficult to investigate much with clarity.) And of course Chester Arthur’s preference for other men was not so much a secret as he wished it to be, so who knows what he ordered done or undone. In any event, the Tally Office is able to operate.

  In 1897 the Dridge Pharmaceutical Company is commissioned by the Tally Office, in an ordinance signed by this Hesiod Furst, to “create” a means by which homosexuals can be quietly and swiftly “put down,” as they say of animals. There had been certain conversations between one Furst or another. By now there are quite a few Fursts and quite a few Ezras and Hesiods soon to be joined by a bunch of Brighams running around Washington. Ezra will have eighty-five children by the time he can’t get up in the morning.

  The president (whichever one it was) and Nigel Rotfeld, the Tally’s chief administrator, desired an “end point,” which evidently was more fully discussed unfettered by any written word.

  Corporate records are still a Sometime Thing. Dridge makes a lot of stuff now, more and more of it each day. Stuff, in these days, usually means concoctions touted to do all sorts of miraculous things they don’t really do. “Patent medicines” they come to be called, although no one knows quite why. They certainly weren’t all patented. The United States Patent Office is an awful mess, although it was set up by the Constitution and George Washington himself signed the first patent, for an unguent for toothaches. You would think they would be in better shape by now. But people who said they worked for the government issued pieces of paper for all sorts of things, pieces of paper that held no meaning. You’d walk into one office and say, I want to make sure no one steals my cure for the blah blahs, and someone would write a piece of paper saying you were hereby protected for your “discovery.” Patents didn’t always have numbers on them either; the efficiency of the system depended on who was in charge and how much education, usually not nearly enough, that person had. Education through only a certain number of grades was all most people had. We did not have what could be called an educated working class, or maybe workforce is a more democratic way to say this. Workers are becoming more sensitive to their place in the world, or rather lack of it. If you really looked at the mess Washington and its government is in, you’d wonder how we got this far. Or maybe you’d realize just why we haven’t. No one knows that the Disciples of Lovejoy own and run it and that Hesiod Furst even managed to get the president (whoever it was) to secretly siphon some funds from The American People’s Treasury Department.

  Vivo Marpo applies for the job of “Master Circulator” of the Tally Office. He is hired by old Eagan himself, who senses the man is like him—that is, someone who genuinely hates homosexuals, or hushmarkeds as they still are called in certain places that do not keep up with the times, or are so behind them that they’ve just discovered the word hushmarked in the first place, and that he will be useful because of it. There is a certain quiet nobility about him, Egan and then Turpa also note.

  “Do you know what a hushmarked is?” Vivo is quizzed by Eagan.

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you know what a homosexual is?”

  “No, sir. It doesn’t sound like I like the sound of it, though.”

  “It is a man who partakes of sex with another man.”

  “Oh.”

  That is all he says, quietly.

  Turpa takes Vivo home to dinner where, for his final test to see if he is a homosexual, she tries to seduce him. Vivo is not seducible and calls her “Grandma.”

  “He has a lovely body,” she reports. “But he is very quiet. I do think he is quite noble. He was a virgin.” And then, after a long pause, she said, “He wants to marry me. He says he loved his grandmother more than anyone in the world.”

  Well, quiet nobility is always useful when sent forth to perform the unorthodox. Once again America will send forth a man, in this case Vivo Marpo, a poor, semistunted Italian orphan who doesn’t know what he is being sent forth to do. This is not the first time an American man’s essential innocence and desire to learn, to please, to fight for his country will be harnessed to the perverse.

  THE APPEARANCE OF SIR HENRY GREETING, THE UNION OF GREETING-DRIDGE, AND THE ARRIVAL OF THE DRIDGE AMPULE INTO THE WORLD BIG-TIME

  Henry Greeting is not a relative of the Sir John Greeting we met several hundred years ago in the Nearodell, Carolina, territories. But in certain quarters it is a known name, Greeting, and it arouses particular interest in this young man, also named Greeting, an ambitious lad from the Dakota Territory eager to present himself to the world as a pharmacist, a recent graduate of the well-regarded Pittsburgh Dispensary, into whose library and its few books about the history of medicine in this country he has dipped and seen it there, Greeting, why, almost from the very beginning of America’s history. He feels blessed, somehow by fate. He will be blessed.

  He is born to a missionary father and schoolteacher mother, both of whom have unsuccessfully attempted to help and teach the Dakota Indian tribes, a dangerous and uncaring and ungrateful lot that refuses to believe in God, which actually endears them to Henry, who doesn’t believe in Him either. He plays with these Indian boys and they with him. He becomes friendly with the Dakota medicine men, who greatly inspire him with their canny tricks to keep their people “in unity and harmony and bliss.” It is the Indian boys who teach him
what bliss is. It scares the shit out of him, what they do with their penises and want him to do with his, and theirs. They laugh at him. He does not like being laughed at. By the time he’s ready to leave this godforsaken place he’s pretty well instructed in a few necessary lessons for that outside world, most important, how frightening sexual excitement is and how he much prefers not to smile and not to be nice. For anyone who grew up anywhere on the plains of America, northern particularly, these are all familiar traits. Wilderness, long winter nights, exceptional cold, all contribute to this, along with more of those unsmiling and unloving parents we’ve met so often. Few American parents know how to be good parents. You can take this as a rule of thumb, across the board, without exception.