The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart
Page 103
“Why do people hate us?” I ask Mr. Hoover on this visit to him when I come back from Mungel. “You put me in camps where I saw how much they hate us.” I’m not sure how I know he’s responsible, but that’s what comes out of my mouth and he doesn’t correct me.
“Now that you’re home, what do you want to do?” he asks.
“Why do they hate us? Can you help me?”
“I started your education long ago, and I will continue to do so, if that’s what you wish. What you will do with such information—well, this will be interesting to see.”
I am never asked about Hoover as I am about Mengele. If people knew about me and both of them, would I be considered a monster too? How in the world do I care what anyone thinks?
WHERE ARE WE?
The never ending story of what’s happening is too horrid for most homosexuals to believe, even if they could hear it. It was unbelievable enough to hear all those unconfirmed rumors about Hitler and homosexuals and concentration camps and ovens. A pathetic parade of a few dozen calling themselves the New Hushmarkeds protests outside the White House and then disperses when it looks like they’ll get arrested. They’ve marched from the Capitol to the White House with placards saying “What Is Really Going On at Partekla!” Nobody knows what Partekla is. No one inside the White House even looks out the window. The New Hushmarkeds will only be around for a matter of months. There are few of them. So no one sees them. Or hears them. Or cares about them in the least. Including all other hushmarkeds. Correction, homosexuals.
The longer life’s lived like this, the more there is to haunt it. “Search for my heart no longer” (Charles Baudelaire), “the beasts have eaten it” (The Flowers of Evil).
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Larry Kramer is an award-winning playwright and author, and a celebrated public-health and gay-rights advocate. He wrote the Academy Award–nominated screenplay adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and rose to further prominence with his bestselling novel, Faggots. A pioneering AIDS activist, he cofounded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982 and founded ACT UP in 1987. Kramer has won numerous awards for his plays and in 2013 was named a Master American Dramatist by the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater. In 2014, the HBO adaptation of his play The Normal Heart won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY LARRY KRAMER
FICTION
Faggots
NONFICTION
The Tragedy of Today’s Gays
Reports from the holocaust: The story of an AIDS activist
DRAMA
Women in Love and Other Dramatic Writings (Sissies’ Scrapbook, A Minor Dark Age, Just Say No)
The Destiny of Me
The Normal Heart
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
A Word for My Beloved
Volume 1: Search for My Heart
Follow the Bouncing Ball
Fred’s Sources
The First American People
According to Bosco
Enter Velma Dimley
Questions on the Table
Introducing Dame Lady Hermia Bledd-Wrench
A Rejoinder to Bosco, a Plea to Fred, and Then Some, from “A Biggest Mouth of the Moment,” Dame Lady Hermia
So Let Us Wend Our Way
Dame Lady Hermia Talks About Plagues
How Fred Came to Know Dr. Sister Grace Hooker
Coincidence?
The Cause as Enunciated by That Other “Biggest Mouth of the Moment,” Dr. Sister Grace Hooker
Dr. Israel Jerusalem Tells You Now
Dame Lady Hermia Adds a Bit
Dr. Sister Grace Holds Her Ground
Dame Lady Hermia Resumes
From Alaska Comes the Following from Dr. Israel Jerusalem
Hermia: And Furthermore
Evil
Dame Lady Hermia’s Question on the Table
Fred Jumps on Board
Fred on the Very Heart of Mankind
Who Are These People?
Jamestown
Fred’s Facts on the Table
Darkus the First
Tortura
New York, New York!
The First Hookers
Your Roving Historian Tells Us About the First Great Man
“There Is Evil at the Core of Life”
The First Playwright?
An Important Date
YRH Tells Us the History of Yaddah, Fred’s Alma Mater
An Imporant Publication Is Launched
A Most Important Statement for Our History
Ianthe Adams Strode Attempts Her Own Genealogy
The Great Awakening
A Very Important Lecture
The State of the (Still Not Quite) Union
George Washington: A Reconsideration
The American Revolution
The Adjudicator
The Two Alte Marias
Jeel-bare
The Death of Loves
George and the Jews
Slow Toll the Bells of Sexual Truth
So Ends This Reconsideration of George Washington
The Sons of the Pocahanti
The End of an Era?
Philadelphia
Benjamin Franklin’s Real Almanac
The Penis and the Rectum: Some Thoughts of Dr. Hogarth Hooker from My Book of Fleshly Thoughts
Concordia, Eastern Shore, Maryland, March 12, 1790
Northern Territory, Terra Hote, November 3, 1790
Charleston, South Carolina, January 2, 1792
New Orleans, Louisiana Territory, August 1792
The Last Days of Hogarth Hooker
His Brother Lucid Tells About Hog’s Ending
Reactions to Hog’s Ending
State of the (at Last) Union
A First Hello
A Very Great Unrequited Love
Idaho
February 12, 1809
The Hooker Archives, Cont.
The Massacre at Fruit Island
Dame Lady Hermia Starts Digging In
Lucid Continues
Voiceless
Hermia Continues
From the Pen of Dr. Israel Jerusalem
A Few Good Men
Wanderers
Blissfulness
Lucid and Messie in New Bliss
Oh, Oneida!
An End to Bliss
Dame Lady Hermia Reacts True to Form
Westward Ho the Wagons!
“And the War Came…”: The Homosexuality of Abraham Lincoln
Joshua Speed’s Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln
The End of a Love Affair
The Penis of John Wilkes Booth
Wilkes and the Fatal Meeting
The Final Love, the Final Words
The Civil War
Walt
Here Begins the History of the Masturbovs
Turvey
An Age of Hate
Blood and Shit
Wanderers
A Mother
A Lake
Everywhere
Two of Our Leading Characters Meet Each Other
Klans and Knights and Orders
American Red Blood Established
Lucid in Washington
Pushnow
Germans
From Walt Whitman’s Journal, 1869
Homosexuality
A Celebratory Walt!
Lesbian
Medical Reaction to the Official Identification of Homosexualit
y
Dr. Paulus Pewkin Is Asked His Opinion of Early Homosexuals
Interviews with and About Homosexuals
An Official Murder of Someone Different
And Also…
Rutherfraud B. Hayes
Several Nineteenth-Century Men
Fred Summons T. Hewling Duppers
James Abram Garfield (1831–1881)
Anthony Comstock and His Comstock Act (1873)
YRH Pieces Together the Life of “Mark Twain”
First American Homosexual Rights Activists?
The Camps of America
Dame Lady Hermia Makes a Big Discovery
The Camp at Abbator, Texas
The Camp at Nantoo, Oklahoma
Women
From Grace, of Course
Fred Uncovers the Legend of Peter Power
The Legend Grows
The Dridge Ampule
N.B.
Dr. Sister Grace Goes Ballistic
Have We All Forgotten Already?
Hoves More into View
The Appearance of Sir Henry Greeting, the Union of Greeting-Dridge, and the Arrival of the Dridge Ampule into the World Big-Time
Disciples and Alliances
The Washington Monument
The NITS Are Coming
Organized, Sanctioned, Legal, Acceptable Murder on the Way?
The Bloods
Good Breeding?
Dame Lady Hermia’s Research on Brinestalkers
Over There
A Touch of Flu
Once More into the Breech
Something to Do with Truth
Shmuel
Thanatopsis
Your Roving Historian Welcomes Another Expert
Mercy Hooker
Evvilleena Stadtdotter
Your Roving Historian
Israel Learns More on His Journeys
Too Much Too Soon and Not Enough Too Late
The Thirties Are Stupid and Silly. And Messy.
Open for Business
Hooray for Hollywood
Me, German?
Hermia Noodling
By and About Korah Ludens
Your Roving Historian Tells Us About the Stadtdotters
Your Roving Historian Fills Us In on Some Important Information About an Unimportant President
Glause?
More from Israel’s Notebooks
Admiring Grace
Dame Lady Hermia Pecks Away at Her Investigation: Evil Is Coming Closer
YRH Finds More Shit
Nu Shit (In Which a Brilliant Young Scientist Is Forced to Sound Like Charlie Chan)
Shmuel
Vamping Till Ready
From Your Roving Historian, Burgeoning Scientist
Israel Writes to YRH from the Federal Penitentiary in Garth, Alaska, August 1990
Grodzo Visits America
Blood Marches On
The Hushmarked Society
Peter Is Introduced to Adolf
Hands Across the Ocean
Masturbov Gardens
What’s Coming Next
David’s War
Dame Lady Hermia Bledd-Wrench Launches My History of Evil
The Past Is a Foreign Harbor
Brinestalker’s Defense
Dr. Stuartgene Dye
From My History of Evil
The Son Also Rises
YRH
The Son Rises Even More
Israel and Grace
The Skinny According to Fettner
People Quite Often Appear from Out of Nowhere
Ianthe’s Day
What Daniel Learns at the Jew Tank
Doris Hardware Calls Them as She Sees Them
Happy Birthday
Yids, Fairies, Whores, and Sexopolis
More
Pictures at an Exhibition
If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Another
Affairs of State
From My History of Evil
Fred Responds
Of Course Boris Greeting Can Speak
From My History of Evil
Dress Rehearsal for the Greek Wing
Why Are You Doing This to Me?
Ianthe Adams Strode Replies to Dame Lady Hermia Bledd-Wrench’s Inquiry
Dr. Sister Grace Is On to Something!
Back
Shit Past a Certain Age No Longer Smells
This Is Where I Was Taken
From My History of Evil
In Which Daniel Jerusalem Tells Fred More About Sexopolis and Mordy Masturbov, and His Uncle Hyman
State of the Union: Fred Gives It a Shot
Don’t Forget to Take Your Dridgies
Daniel, at Home
David, at Home
Daniel, Not at Home
Ianthe Reminds Us That Old Spies Never Die
D. Hewling Duppers Redux
David Visits an Old Friend
Where Are We?
A Note About the Author
Also by Larry Kramer
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2015 by Larry Kramer
All rights reserved
First edition, 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kramer, Larry.
The American people. Volume 1, Search for my heart / Larry Kramer. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-10439-9 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71297-6 (ebook)
1. United States—History—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Search for my heart.
PS3561.R252 A83 2015
813'.54—dc23
2014023449
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* Israel often writes in the third person in his notebooks.