by Larry Kramer
The groups that were forming up, GAAAH, GAA, GFA, GLOW, HLF, started multiplying before and after Stonewall. They were all liberal and progressive, of course. What they weren’t was unified in their goals. Always, though, the question “What will our movement be all about?” is not only asked but answered, in varying degrees of impossible impossibilities before a minimally acceptable notion will surface, more or less. Another nail coming up and going in.
What it all eventually boils down to is this:
“We want sexual freedom, to do whatever we want with whomever we want whenever and wherever we want.” It is curiously parsimonious, this stingy description that excludes so much more than it includes or dares to dream. Why does it all boil down to sex? Why does no one dare to go further in outlining a vision for a future that includes all rights denied, of which there are too many thousands to count? The reasoning behind this is also imprecisely known. For one thing, so few are speaking for so many. Where are these many and why do they allow so few to speak for them? Allow is as imprecise a word as all the others. To some gays Pubie Grottie’s famous cry, “We Shall Fuck in the Bushes and on the Streets!” has had a mobilizing effect on those who thought only of this and, hearing support from their friends, believed they were speaking for the many. Whose is the loudest voice in this alliance? God knows, no dyke wants to fuck in the bushes. So Grossie was overruled, hence sending her into the already overflowing number of women who tried to fight for their rights, only to disappear for fear of the men.
But this small isolated cocky proclamation is the entire tit that this invigorated gay movement sucks on. “We want to live our own Sexopolis!” is heard from more and more. Whatever new organizational entities burp forth during the coming years, they will proclaim only this paltry hedonistic wish, continuing unchanged, unaltered, and sworn to in fealty until it will be too late. The damage will be done. The world will think gays, at the least, perverse. This is a movement founded on wanting too little, dreaming too small. It will prove to be the death of an awful lot of people. And of course it will be the men who rule the roost. Lesbians determinably now tend to their needs more quietly. Grossie Wildeschone and Babs Gershowitz, in fact, will not be heard from again.
To a later historically famous meeting Pubie Grotty, Cocker Rutt, and Muxter Questlos will invite the famous French Futurist Jean-Paul Fatoottst, who is to play such a pivotal role in fashioning the text for future male “queer bonding.” He formulates most of it on this very trip to America after a visit to the Pit of Hell, a New York S&M bar where he’s so thoroughly punished by absolutely everyone that he goes home to Paris and creates his historic “A Philosophy of Participatory Incarceration,” which, should you really be able to parse it, glorifies the pleasure and entitlement of the most extreme of sexual acts. Academics, particularly, love him, no doubt because his queer prose is so incomprehensibly dense. But his message of the glory in being pissed on appears to fulfill an academic and scholarly need.
YOU GO TO MY HEAD
Since back in America, Fred’s learned to dance. With so many new friends, Fred’s danced and danced. He’d been to Fire Island. He loved the new discos. He was even a card-carrying member of Capriccio, a hard-to-get-into place. On lower West Broadway near Canal, on a second floor above a Chase, in a hangar as large and twisted as Saarinen’s at Kennedy, the cavernous Versailles that was Capriccio, all high gray-flanneled walls and the widest field of shining waxed wood on which to move and glide and shake and boogie and sweat and show the muscles (he’d even joined a gym!), wiggle the ass, bump the crotch, say goodbye to all cares, with all our brothers, everything bathed in light and sound, the legendary sound!, which Juanito, Puerto Rican handsome, English not so good, in his control room turned all into greatness as he placed his Vlandor Arm with its Nefisto cartridge on its Zee-able turntable, thus activating speakers and woofers and super tweeters, the resultant decibelacular sound engorging all of the above, Hot Men!, Dancing!, Love!, Friendship!, this legendary spot of Heaven on Earth, our very own beloved exclusive club, Capriccio!
And the Lights! A cacophony of multicolors, flashing waves and arcs, electronics of incredible wizardry, channels for Spin and Normal, Invert and Pause, Advance and Throb, button after button touched to program mood after mood, synergistically Siamese-twinned to songs and shoutings and mind-expanding Joy.
And the Clothes! Tight tees and tight jeans and old boots and bare chests, or the finery of show-off: costumes of delicate frippery or outlandish look-at-me.
And the Men! Have you ever seen so many Hot Men! Gloried, storied, muscled, fatless, mustached, youthful, smiling, sexy MEN!
Fred had never seen anything like it. What has happened to his country since he went away? It was like dancing exuberantly in his bedroom in Masturbov Gardens, only now he was doing it out in the open and for real.
And the Drugs!
Tonight everyone was high on a snort of Magic by midnight, to be followed by a tab of Glycn at 2:00, a half of Nyll at 3:00, and a hit of Blotter by 4:00, acid not usually ingested so late, but a long night was wanted, tomorrow was way off, with so many more events to follow after that. Sleep was for lazies, dropouts, unconcerneds, incompetents, misser-outers.
The music was in high gear, songs intertwining, a low feed-in of the theme from Cobra Woman, played on the theremin by the composer himself, audible beneath the overriding blanket of “Honey, Where’s Our Love Gone,” the tensions of many thousand bodies minutely matched to the music’s every whim and the evening’s drugs, all this amplified, innuendoed, transmogrified beyond anybody’s pure cognition, the smashing of the brain!, all it felt was GOOD!, this place can really show us how to play!
And to forget!
Fred took no drugs. He’d tried them but found no answers, and he was on a pilgrimage for answers. Isn’t that what writers bearing witness must do? He had to be clearheaded for that!
As they all dance Fred thinks that in this mélange of sound he’s heard the theme music from his own hit movie Lest We Sleep Alone.
THE AVOCADO
The Divine Bella, The Avocado’s gossip columnist and man in the East, attends a shitting weekend at the Putnam County mansion of Moud Soud, a Saudi prince enamored of the many new things he’s learning from The American People. Forty-three young handsome men shit on each other, or are shat upon, or walk in it barefoot, or give each other shitpacks in the many-hissing-spigots steam room. Bella’s column, which he composes in his head almost on any spot, pausing only to give himself his shot of BaxxterPlusOneAlpha, tells it like it is, even if The Avocado’s current editor, Skolnick Jameson, thinks it’s a bit too much. “Bella, it’s a bit too much. Make up something else.”
The state of the gay press at this moment in time is in dire straits. Well, it’s always been in dire straits. There’s never been a time when it hasn’t been in dire straits. The Avocado, out of lazy Los Angeles, rules the roost by default and the generous pocket of Dranch Nuckel, a short, overweight, intense pseudo-intellectual homosexual whose fortune comes from selling insurance to the indigent and then foreclosing. He is fond of editorializing about “Our day will come!” and “Brother must meet brother in fraternal love and honor.” That he is without love, or indeed many friends, does not bother him. He pays for them both and is thus surrounded by each. The magazine is profitable by dint of its many pages of classified ads of those men looking for what most gay men are looking for, and hence widely subscribed to and passed around. The Avocado fears no competition. The Prick is too invisible and Orvid too eccentric. That this is the best the gay world can put forth to communicate with each other coast-to-coast, keeping everyone up to date, is sad, and when UC arrives, will be, along with so many other items, tragic.
The Divine Bella’s name is Bertram Bellberg. He, too, is overweight but jovial and never-endingly full of enthusiasm for the audience he visualizes writing for. He bounces, literally, from event to event, always wearing his signature outfit, a worker’s uniform of some kind or other. He has an en
dless wardrobe of them, which he wears buttoned open to his navel or one overall strap casually askew, his hairy chest of Brillo pridefully displayed. If one can overlook the shitty subtext of his life, Bella is a loving, lovable, well-meaning fellow.
A CLEAN BILL OF HEALTH?
In 1973, the American Psychoanalytic Association removes homosexuality from its book of sicknesses. This has been a long fight and it is far from over.
Based on the evidence they have gathered, or rather the growing pressure that’s been brought by an increasing number of closeted gay members, the Committee on Nomenclature recommends delisting homosexuality as a mental disorder and sends its recommendation up through the APA bureaucracy—the Council on Research and Development, the Assembly of District Branches, the Reference Committee, the Executive Tandem. Eventually it reaches the APA Board of Trustees, which in December 1973 casts thirteen votes in favor of the change, with two abstentions and four members absent. Both Shmuel Derektor and Korah Ludens vote in favor. Dr. Aalvaar Heidrich votes against.
Cure-therapists, mostly psychoanalysts such as Irving Bieber and the zealously homophobic Charles Socarides (whose son will turn out to be openly gay and work for President Boy Vertle), are furious and begin gathering signatures demanding a referendum to overturn the board’s decision.
The referendum is held. Of ten thousand psychiatrists voting, 51 percent support the board’s decision, 47 percent oppose it, and 2 percent abstain. With that vote the issue is settled and the APA finally acknowledges that millions of gay Americans are not, after all, mentally ill.
This decision does not go down well with that 47 percent, and, as will continue to be seen, with an almost overwhelming number of other groups and organizations and politicians and presidents and shrinks and just plain ol’ folks and your next-door neighbors, all of whom and which refuse to accept this sort of thing.
FAREWELL TO ALL WHAT?
The little cottage in Hykoryville sits alone no longer. The neighborhood is all built up. Other little cottages crowd in upon it. You can see in everyone’s windows as you walk down the street. Rivka Jerusalem now has the beat-up Dodge, which she drives here from Masturbov Gardens and parks in the narrow driveway, so she can’t even see Mrs. Lemish on the bus to ask about her own sons, who must be quite grown-up by now. She wonders if her blood organization still even employs her. It seems that the world is closing itself off more and more, especially in small towns like this one. Yes, she recalls that what Verdingy did was secret and that being not seen was an issue, but really, way out here in the sticks, it’s been hard to take any of that seriously, though of course she worries about it down deep, like so many things that seem too complicated or too uncomfortable—oh, what’s the difference. For years now she’s just spent the day in an office where no mail comes and no phones ring. She sits at her desk and stares, or sometimes she goes to the stack of old magazines piled on a neighbor’s curb awaiting the trash collector’s biweekly visit, and brazenly plucks a few (once upon a time she would have considered such an act undignified) and takes them back to this cottage empty of the needy clients she so enjoyed helping who used to line up on busy days during wartime, to aimlessly thumb through them. Where did all the people disappear to who needed her help, the destitute families and lost servicemen or their wives missing monthly allowances the government hadn’t sent? She’s no dummy. She reads the local papers. She knows there are still problems ARB would ordinarily routinely handle. Fires, for instance. There have been houses burning down more frequently now as the population grows poorer. But she receives no summonses for help. Who isn’t telling her what? The silence is killing her. This was the one place where she could be useful.
For a while she tries to write her autobiography. For six months she writes each day, beginning with her birth, scribbling on the backs of outdated forms with now useless rerouting numbers, getting down everything she can remember. A few weeks into month six she realizes she’s making it all sound nicer and more romantic than it was. She is writing the life she wishes she’d lived. She’s writing lies. So she stops. She realizes, and it stuns her, that she does not want to write the truth. She does wonder why they closed down the Hykoryville office after all those poor little boys were murdered, but why did they reopen it again a few years later, and transfer her back here from the District office, where she thought she was still doing important work? Was it because she’d asked a few innocent questions about all those mysterious packages going in and out of someplace called Partekla? She still gets her check every two weeks in the mail like the old days. Once or twice over the years she even got a little raise in salary. Miss von Lutz has long since disappeared from the main office, and no one seems to know anything about her, or even that ARB has an office in Hykoryville. “Where is Hykoryville?” the girls on the phone downtown always ask. “It’s true we’re experiencing a difficulty in volunteer recruitment now that there are no more wars,” one woman admits. Rivka’s past the usual retirement age by five years or so, and she fears that if she pushes too much she’ll lose her check. She doesn’t want that. Then she’ll have to stay home all day with Philip, who’s been ready to retire and claims he’s only waiting for her.
One morning a young woman arrives in a limousine with the ARB emblem and driven by a uniformed driver. She wears an expensive two-piece tweed outfit, with an overcoat and bag made of the same material, and a little hat too. She is very much of a muchness, Rivka thinks, noticing a tiny gold pin with the ARB emblem on the woman’s lapel. Rivka had never seen the pin and wonders why she was never given one.
“Hello, Mrs. Jerusalem, my name is Junilla Almong and I am from Home Office and I have come to tell you that we are closing down this branch, which cannot be much of a surprise to you. We should have done it years ago but quite frankly no one even knew it was here until last week. You have been an exceptionally faithful and loyal employee and so in addition to your pension and health insurance we are giving you this lovely watch. What’s a retirement without a watch, eh?” She hands Rivka a little box. The watch is so small that Rivka knows her eyesight will not work well with it. “Your employment with American Red Blood is officially terminated, or will be when you sign these forms.”
This woman with the strange name takes a manila envelope from her tweed bag and removes several pieces of paper, which Rivka dutifully signs where indicated. The woman leaves before Rivka realizes she hadn’t said a word or offered a cup of tea. For some time now she’s recognized such symptoms in herself as those of depression. She’s read a book from the local library after seeing an item in The Monument about its author, who says that many aging women suffer greatly from depression. Well, why shouldn’t she be depressed? She lives with a man she hardly speaks to. She has four sons she never sees or hears from. Indeed, the one who was away so awfully long has gone away again. Now it turns out she’s spent her adult life doing a job that has come to nothing. Everything, it now appears, is and has been an unanswered question.
Philip’s job with the government has been over for several years. He sits at home as helpless and disengaged as she does here. When he speaks he only says things like “I want to live someplace warm,” or “I want to live someplace where I don’t have to move.” Once she asked him what not having to move meant. “I want to sit in one place and look at something pretty and not move,” he said. “Forever?” she asked him. “We have so much time left to use words like that?” he answered. She remembers being struck by the poetry of that sentence and wondering again if perhaps her husband harbored talents he’d never shown her. Now she finds herself strangely touched from his saying, “I want to retire to that hotel in Miami Beach where we went on our honeymoon.”
Rivka walks around the cottage for the last time. She goes upstairs to bedrooms that have never been used except for file storage, and downstairs to the basement, where huge refrigerators are still rumbling, gobbling up electricity, with no more blood inside to keep cold until it’s collected. She was told—how long ago?—
not to turn them off, just in case. There is nothing here of value to take home. The typewriter is ancient and every ream of paper yellowing. There’s a little money in petty cash and a little in the local bank. Presumably the house is worth something if it is to be sold. The price of places in this neighborhood had “held firm,” as the local free weekly newspaper recently reported, although Rivka can see the neighborhood’s turning black. Would Miss Tweed Outfit be interested in any of this?
She doesn’t know what to do about locking up for good. Take the key and turn it in the lock and then do what with the key? Throw it back through the mail slot? She decides to take it with her. If anyone wants it or wants any further information from her, they must know how to find her. Surely her home phone number, utilized so many many times during the war when “emergency shipments” were due, is in a file somewhere. Maybe not. She doesn’t care.
What has she learned in all her years here? she asks herself as she closes the last window, the one in her own office, a dining room once upon a time, with a few framed frayed photos of her family dusty on her desktop. She throws them in her wastebasket. Then she bends to retrieve them and rips them into pieces, lest some enemy discover them, and laughs out loud. She sits down, winded by this act’s impertinent and inherent demoralizing effect. She feels degraded. All those names that had sounded so mighty. Puttsig. Von Lutz. Tolson. Brinestalker. Grodzo. Or romantic: Oderstrasse. Port-au-Prince, Kinshasa. And of course Partekla.
I have learned that Amos Standing loved Philip Jerusalem and that because of it my son David was taken away from me when he was less than six years old. I have even learned that he was at that Partekla and that he, like his twin, like their father, is a homosexual. He came home, all right. But he went away again. He was only home for what now seems five minutes. How time flies. No. It really doesn’t. Some things last forever. What is this thing that gobbled up all my men?
