The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Stuartgene is charged with turning Partekla into a camp for the confinement of “the ill and diseased,” where it is legally in his power not only to admit patients but to keep them incarcerated. These patients can be given various drugs, under provisions established by the Department of Food and Drug Supervision (FADS) that allow for “the testing of treatments which in the estimation of the Director and his staff might lead to the betterment of the health of The American People.” There are also still in existence various provisions of the Wartime Powers Act that Truman had been advised by Winesap to keep in operation, which empower almost anything.

  In addition to being in charge and the administrator for the growing Partekla complex, Stuartgene is in charge of that specific program which is “treating” hundreds of (early UC?) patients. Are he, and it, intentionally infecting young men with what he, or it, knows to be a lethal new disease? Yes, he is. But he will claim that he’s seeking certain historic breakthroughs in virology, still a subject little understood. So whether it’s intentional or not that he’s also going to kill a lot of young men in this research that’s the effect of what he’s doing. He’s using questionable “potions”—for want of a better description of all the pills and infusions and lavages and enemas and unguents and nostrums being stuffed and injected and coerced into all his charges—provided to him by Brinestalker, Levy, Coro, Kokoh, Feltrin, Sasauer, Grodzo, and yes, Dr. Sister Grace Hooker, and of course Doc Rebbish, many names David might recall as among Philip’s and Amos’s visitors in pre-Mungel Germany, except that David was too young then to remember any of these. As noted, German scientists from the German pharmaceutical industry are becoming the American scientists of the American pharmaceutical industry. Partekla is a godsend for them and for all the potions in their suitcases that they’ve been working on, some for many years.

  On the other side of the wall, still here at Partekla, are the laboratories Dr. Dye has established “to harness some of the best scientific minds our century has given birth to,” as he says to Hoover, who has arranged for them to be legally invited and absorbed.

  On one side you have the guinea pigs in residence and on the other side you have those who are experimenting on them. All this is in one compound, Partekla. In a more orderly, dare we say civilized and democratic, world, much of this should have fallen to a place like NITS, but then NITS itself is still somewhat of a joke, a few more directors having come and gone.

  In other buildings, still here at, yes, Partekla, we have Brinestalker and his Ferdinand Kursie Institute of Greek Warriors and we have the hard-labor boys, the American soldiers Aalvaar Heidrich punishes for being homosexual. He punishes most of them so strenuously that they die. Their next of kin will be sent letters announcing that they died performing “magnificent service to their country.” There are, of course, no records of these U.S. soldiers, or of these Greek Warriors, of how many there were, of even their names.

  Yes, it is a busy place indeed.

  Why should there not have been a concentration camp (or camps) in the United States? There is a substantial group of people here, not exclusively Germans, who believe that Germany will win the war. There is a smaller group of people here, again not only Germans, who know that concentration camps have been in operation in Germany for some time. There’s an even smaller group of people here who have memories of earlier deadly incarcerations in America, of Negroes and of gay men and lesbians, at such places as Nantoo and Abbator, and Tuskegee.

  Another reason Idaho is chosen is that Canada is just over there for fast escape. FDR and Truman are not the first presidents to worry about invasion via Canada, an unprotected border. Get some soldiers up there fast, any kind of soldiers. Even if some of them are sentenced to solitary confinement or hard labor, others are not. The verdict of how exacting the punishment was left to the sentencing officer, from whatever “theater of war,” and might be punitive or lenient depending on whether he hated homos or just wanted the fairy out of the way on a battlefield.

  Aalvaar Heidrich. Do you remember him? He was Mercy Hooker’s chauffeur, the keeper of the spiked dildos. He was also a cousin of that Reinhard Heydrich who created Hitler’s Final Solution. Just prior to the war Mr. Hoover summons Aalvaar to discuss this question of what to do with homosexuals. Aalvaar has already made a name for himself as warden at St. Purdah’s in Anacostia after he was hired by the D.C. penal system. It is Hoover who charges him with turning part of Partekla into a place of extreme punishment for homosexuals “in our fighting forces.” Aalvaar is given the rank of major general in the U.S. Army and assigned several armed platoons. Partekla resembles a regular army post except for that underground mine, now converted into cells for various confinements of “a scientific nature.” Aalvaar is not a man filled with love for his fellow men, particularly if they are homosexual. He most certainly hates himself for being one.

  Aalvaar is familiar with the Nazi belief that homosexuality can be cured. At Partekla he designs methods to do just that, mostly involving ridicule, humiliation, flagellation, and hard labor, all after Nazi models. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, believes that homosexuals should be segregated to prevent their “disease” from spreading to other inmates and guards. Naturally, Aalvaar and Hoover follow suit.

  But Dr. Dye is fervent in his belief that people can be made to disappear via chemical means.

  Much in the history of The American People is accomplished with few questions asked.

  Heidrich’s armed forces, Brinestalker’s hairy-chested sissies, and Grodzo’s sacks of infected potatoes are administered various drugs, all under the supervision of Dr. Dye. Doctors at NITS and elsewhere are invited to provide whatever they are working on for testing. Heidrich, Dye, and Grodzo also lend their “patients” as guinea pigs. Prisoners to this day are still utilized in this way. There are always doctors and hospitals and laboratories and drug companies needing guinea pigs. There can never be enough guinea pigs. Or else how would we ever learn anything?

  Brinestalker, with his connections to German scientists in the pharmaceutical industry, is of enormous additional value to the entire enterprise. Using IBM as a cover, that is why he was in Germany. His father had many influential contacts with German drug companies. These contacts and this industry will thrive in America. A few are given labs at Partekla. The fruits of their labors—i.e., the suitcase of German patents and discoveries they’ve brought with them as house gifts—must be tested too. Dr. Grodzo brings with him many things from Mungel.

  “Protocols,” “controlled trials,” “peer review” are for some future time. Underground cells are perfect for the testing of the toxic on the tainted, so to speak. Hoover certainly believes that these men are tainted. Hoover, like Brinestalker, and as we’ll see, others like Vulcan Greeting and Sam Sport, doesn’t like effeminate men. Each in his own way attempts to contribute to their elimination. There probably aren’t enough psychoanalytic theories to dissect why they behave like this. If, as the head of the FBI, Hoover is America’s strongest of strongmen, then, also as a homosexual, does he not wish other homosexuals to be like him and Clyde? That sounds too simplistic—or, as Grace might say, a shitty pisspot. Hermia will try to get to this in due course. Much of what’s written in these paragraphs is stuff YRH has uncovered so far.

  None of “our side” has responded to my charges. They’re too overwhelming for an immediate response.

  FROM MY HISTORY OF EVIL

  A Dr. Grossvatter has brought over with him a trunkful from the German-Dutch-Belgian foray into “germ warfare.” It’s amazing how such disparate nations managed to collaborate so adroitly on such top-secret stuff, all of it unpleasant. Why, among a certain set it’s as if there’s no enemy, as if research is all. Even the Japanese wanted anything to do with germ warfare, and they found a way to get it, even if it meant actually collaborating with countries with which they were at war. There appear to be no enemies among such determined investigators into the life of poisons.

  Experienc
ed German scientists were worth a lot of money in certain American markets long before the war even started, and even more so when it did. You didn’t want to know about this then and you don’t want to know about it now. To be sure, there are books and exposés galore on the German infiltration of America before, during, and after the war, but they’re kiddie stuff compared to what’s actually going on.

  “Concentration camps are the laboratories where changes in human nature are tested” is a much-quoted statement from these times. As David told us, he heard it uttered by Grodzo. In this country it’s attributed to Aalvaar Heidrich, in what’s become a highly regarded textbook in his field, the study of prisons. “There is nothing wrong with concentration camps. They are very useful and perfectly logical. They do just what their name suggests: concentrate. Everyone’s life concentrates on one thing or another.” Aalvaar Heidrich was sent over to America in the 1920s to infiltrate. Sent by whom? How did he wind up looking after Mercy Hooker? Did his own sexual needs (or theirs? whose?) determine his attachment to her? “Homosexuals are useful because they can be infected and allowed to die. Since their sperm will never play any part in procreation, no one in fact is killed,” Heidrich also wrote. In fact, homosexuals are far more useful than Jews for wartime, and soon peacetime, activities. Actually, there will be money in dead homosexuals, or more precisely phrased, in homosexuals whose demise no one will care about. Partekla is actually catering to a potential market.

  Aalvaar Heidrich is one of those who believed Germany was going to win the war and take over the world, so why not get started here early, and secretly of course, with a staff of spies who speak perfect English, and with no small amount of American help from American companies working in and with Germany, including Greeting? And especially many are represented by that most “eminent” of law firms, Sullivan and Cromwell. J. Edgar Hoover, like Roosevelt, does not object to the participation of the private sector. Many talk of Hoover as if he were president, with so much power. He does have this much power. Over the years little by little he learns how to just … take it. Do these companies know what’s going on? Somewhere in their bowels can be located proof of concerted efforts. It is increasingly difficult not to wager that.

  And what about Project Paperclip, the effort by the Office of Stragetic Services (OSS) to recruit the scientists of Nazi Germany for employment by the United States? The Joint Intelligence Objective Agency (JIOA) worked independently to create false employment and political biographies for the scientists, expunging from the public record any Nazi memberships and affiliations. Once “bleached” of their Nazism, the scientists were granted security clearance by your government to work in the United States. America, of course, being the richest, gets its choice of the cream of the scientific crop.

  THE SON ALSO RISES

  Yes, it’s a play on words but a necessary one. It’s my turn up at bat now. I’ve read this novel by Hemingway about a man who doesn’t have a cock that’s in working order. Well, mine is, at last. And I’ve finally got a way to smite the old geezer, bite the hand that feeds me, and direct my feet to a sunnier side of the street. Jeshua’s said I can play in part of Partekla.

  I obtained funds to go full steam ahead. Old Ferdinand Kursie, whom the geezer put me in touch with, set up the South African gulag at the beginning of this century. Mengele’s teachers came from there, hell, Goering’s father ran the place, and I remembered Mengele telling me in Berlin about Kursie, the rich South African who financed it. There was a lot of money to be made from workers imprisoned in that gulag and Kursie made it. And old as he is he wants to make some more. “How much du you vant!” he spat out at me in his Afrikaans accent. “Tell me vat you do vid it.” He roared with laughter when I outlined my ideas. “I give you dubbel. You ask not enuf. Learn to think biggest! Build building and put my name on it. I vant vide vorld to know.” And so comes into being the Ferdinand Kursie Institute, Partekla, Idaho. I had no idea that perversities could be so profitable so fast.

  All of Partekla was Furstwasser land that somehow wound up in the government’s hands during World War I instead of being returned to the Partekla Indians, from whom the Disciples of Lovejoy stole it. Amos insists our division will revert to us in due time and that Edgar will protect us and not allow otherwise. Because of our intended activities Edgar doesn’t want there to be any visible connection with him or his department.

  One part belongs to Amos, too. I guess a third belongs to Philip as well, though I don’t know how a college pact (even one we sealed in blood) that “we shall be together in what we do forever” can be binding, but Amos is insistent on Philip’s continued inclusion. I still keep wishing Amos weren’t a fairy. I thought he might grow out of it like I did. I can’t believe his feelings for Philip are so strong after so many years of hardly seeing the guy. I wonder what will happen when they are back together again.

  Brinestalker, did I tell you you’re a genius? It’s all beginning to fit together nicely.

  I located someone outstanding in Berlin to oversee all of Partekla. His name is Dr. Stuartgene Dye. The more I learn about him, the more that I can’t wait.

  YRH

  The first thing Dr. Stuartgene Dye does upon arriving for his first day in his private laboratory at Partekla, with its fresh paint still not dry, is to pierce his nipples and thread them with bands of gold. It’s his own celebration, his own gift to himself, for being back in his own country, for being here. He is the new director, its first, of this top-secret “Ennoblement,” a word supplied by Philip when Amos asked for a distinguished name “for when the ball gets rolling.” Philip always obeys; this was an easy one. In response to Philip’s querulous demands concerning the wherebouts of his son, Amos told him that David would be safely returned. Yes, Amos and Brinestalker confided in him their plans for Partekla, and even promised him a financial participation, should whatever it is be profitable.

  This has all been conveyed by mail. Philip is terrified Amos will turn up at Masturbov Gardens. Amos can be very sinister, and when he is, Philip is truly frightened of this man who professed such great love for him, “why, since the first time I saw you freshman year in New Godding, across the Yaddah campus, when you and I and Briney became such comrades.”

  Amos has been “in like” a hundred times with another man, and both he and Brinestalker have separately traveled the world and consulted every quack and read every “medical” volume on the “sickness,” for that is what everyone says homosexuality is. Why has Amos come back to focus on poor Philip? It would seem to be an act of a most sadistic and/or masochistic nature. Indeed, when they first met, sadism and masochism were being investigated, in Vienna, in Berlin, in Oslo and Stockholm, in Adelaide, in Philadelphia, all places Amos and Brinestalker visited to pick up pointers. Briney now claims to have turned straight immediately after Yaddah, which as we’ll see is not quite true. Philip still tells himself he’d forgotten all about both of them until in his financial desperation he reached into this past and applied to Amos Standing for a job and was reminded. Philip understood nothing when he arrived in Boston, and then went with Amos to Berlin, experiencing a returning hunger so strong and consuming that now he remembers that he married Rivka to escape it, a mistake just as torturing as the obsession for his two friends’ bodies. In Germany, after Briney left, taking with him the leavening he peculiarly provided for the threesome, there was only the harsher reality of Amos alone. One did not say no to Amos. And once again Philip is increasingly troubled by his realization that he does not want to say no. He wants to be bound, beaten, and demeaned as much as Amos delights in doing all this to him.

  So Germany for him was a bad place at a bad time, as it was and will be for others and for quite some while. Philip found one long-lost lover and loses one newfound son. He runs away from both of them. And now he can’t go back. Amos’s big client shut off all entrances and exits to his country. “Amos promised to watch out for David as if he were his own son,” he’d told his wife, not voicing the real
reason he had come home, which was to firm up his decision to leave her for Amos and return to Berlin, until he saw his three other sons, and yes, even sour Rivka, and was overwhelmed with guilt about how he had been avoiding his responsibilities on the home front. He sits there and awaits the return of his son, fearing for his own future. He does not want to go to Partekla to claim it.

  The second thing Stuartgene does is to anesthetize a young man who has been watching his nipple procedure, and to puncture this young man’s foreskin, threading through it a chain he clips to a metal ring. When the young man, who was walking among the evening shadows in downtown Boise when Dr. Dye picked him up, wakes and discovers not only that he is in great pain but that he’s being brutally disfigured, he begins to cry. Because of the chain, he cannot comfortably move on the metal lab table. He would scream but for the effect of the anesthetic, which has left his throat numb. Indeed, this young man is a prisoner of this moment in time, this place in time. He sees no future and recalls no past. Dr. Dye approaches him again. He smiles at him. He runs his hand across the young man’s face. It’s a nice face, a kind one, the eyes so trusting only moments ago.

  “Here, let us take some of the pain in your cock away,” Dr. Dye says, producing a ready hypodermic and injecting the penis. The young man hardly has time to consider screaming. He is fast asleep. He is dead. It works again.

  Dr. Dye then severs the penis, the scrotum and testicles. He flips the body over and eviscerates the various canals utilized in anal sex from the kid’s rear end. He labels the parts and freezes them and locks them in a thermal chest.

  With the formulas and chemicals and potions and poisons that are now his to use freely in his research, Dr. Dye, just commencing his work in this new laboratory, proceeds to dispose of the remaining flesh and bones and hair, easy tricks he learned from Dr. Mengele. He has concocted his own more advanced recipe that results in the complete, utter eradication of bodies. No need to put ashes in an envelope or to bury them or to flush them down a toilet. It takes a while, but it works. He will learn to make it go faster. Stuartgene is perfecting a method that the Nazis only dreamed of.