by Larry Kramer
Anyway, does any endangered population ever try to get to the root of who, by name, has been fucking them over? “Take it [whatever ‘it’ is, or was] at your own peril” has always certainly been de rigueur among the bleeders. “What else can we do?”
Besides, the product is ready to roll out. The latest. The newest. DridgePlusOne-no-longer-Alpha. It is 1975 …
FADS is not admitting something. To give Fullest Approval (they have only granted Full—not Fullest—Approval) would require going through all that expensive and complicated animal-model-monkey stuff. “We shall have the anti-fur-coat crowd picketing our headquarters, encore,” SeineLouvre’s directrice des rapports communitaires, Marguerite-Brigitte Bourgeois, tells Obissa Voltune of The International Herald-Tribune. Nor is anyone acknowledging that for some reason monkeys suddenly appear in very short supply—everywhere. Bosco Dripper throws his hands up in despair, knowing this is true. And there is now an organized religious opposition too, emanating from Utah and Rome. Suddenly, according to Netroit Farty at FADS’s own Bureau of Community Relations, “We is [sic] inundated with requests from every sect you all can think of to immediately prohibit using living things for experiments of any kind. God don’t like ugly.”
Besides, and anyway, and of course, the product is ready to roll out. Hemophiliacs have been waiting a long time. By now there are even more mommies crying publicly about their bleeding sons, demanding its release. Drug companies are not happy when mommies cry to the press about sons dead because their drug isn’t out there yet.
Who is it, exactly, who wants gay men dead?
Stop, stop, stop, nobody is yelling out, Stop! Don’t release this shit as a cure for this shit!
Since it’s still officially nameless, that’s what UC is unofficially called, “this shit.”
But the product is out there. On the market. For sale.
It is about to be discovered though not admitted that gay hemophiliacs given DridgePlusOne in its current form will be perfect transmitters of “this shit” to homosexuals, who we know are fucking each other like crazy all over the globe.
Even after overcoming this cleansing barrier (which was not so difficult to do), even when it is overcome (which will be fully achieved by 1983), all these companies will continue to distribute untreated Factor VIII for two, for three, for four, sometimes for five more years. What is going on here? That’s what’s going on here. These companies led by Von Greeting are and will be getting away with murder. Old stock has to be cleared from the shelves, you know, before the new stuff can be produced in bulk. Talk about a criminal act. Did no one ever hear of just throwing shit in the toilet and flushing it? And why did it take so long to refine the heating techniques that were first used by Army scientists on the battlefields in the 1940s and were first announced in The Journal of the AMA in July 1945? That’s how long heating blood has been around, to get rid of hepatitis from donated blood. What is this delay all about? Who’s calling the shots? Where is our country’s official overseer on this particular product?
It will not be until 1987 that Factor VIII will be completely cleared of poisons. By then most of the gay population, certainly in New York, will be infected with the UC virus. Indeed, by the time the population of the world has reached five billion people, indeed, by the time the UC virus is actually identified, which is earlier, on the eve of 1985, almost every gay man in America who’s had sex will have been exposed to it or to someone who has been exposed to it. Just as all it took was only one donor infected with UC to fuck up the entire batch of a pool of collected blood from all over the world from which Alpha was made, all it will take is one thus newly infected gay hemophiliac to get it out into the gay population, partying as ever in never-never land. Dr. Rebby Itsenfelder’s screaming about Dridgies and their derivatives and knockoffs will shortly be almost (but not quite) beside the point, they having been joined by infected DridgePlusOne, Partekla and its tentacles, and, of course, NITS, as leading tributaries feeding into the roaring river of what’s to come. The gay world, and hence and thereafter the rest of the world, will never stand a chance.
It’s 1975. And we haven’t even come to ZAP.
Back to you, Fred.
DANCING IN THE DARK
In the effervescing 1970s, Greeting’s bestselling product has been Dridgies. Dridgies are everywhere. They seem better than ever. Are they the real Dridgies?
America is soon flooded with many kinds of “poppers.” Many kinds of Dridgies. Many kinds of Dridge Ampules. The real, the fake, the beautiful, the damned. In ten minutes there is not a sex store anywhere in the world that does not sell a knock-off version, made who knows where and from who knows what. Fuck your brains out, dears and dearies. You go to my head!
FRED WASN’T THERE
Fred tried a couple of times to get into Ruby’s 69 but they wouldn’t let him in. Ruby’s was the hottest place anywhere in the world. You had to be gorgeous, rich, famous, powerful, at least one of these things. People lined up for blocks and waited hours to work their way toward bozo bouncers selecting which ones could be passed through the ropes. There some gay guy he knew from somewhere would give an almost imperceptible nod of his head to admit the chosen ones. When he finally made it this far one night he realized this guy was someone who hated his book. So he never made it inside this holy temple. He was pushed to the side. He stood there and watched as Sammy and Kipper and Trafe and Randy and Dordogna and Andy and Mick and Sam Sport and Roy Cohn and Junior Trish and Dereck Dumster and Liza and Halston all went toddling in. They all seemed drugged out of their fucking minds. He recognized them all except for Dumster, who would one day attempt to destroy his people.
THE WEAPONIZATION OF VONCE GREETING
Von’s notebooks are in the Greeting Library in London, but not available to the public. It is noteworthy that almost everything you need to prove a hideous case of anything is available somewhere or other, most often under lock and key. And it is remarkable that much material that you’d think would have been destroyed by somebody was not destroyed by anybody. The best record-keepers of all were, ironically, the Nazis themselves. They must have known they were making history.
Von knows he is trying to make history. What is the point of living otherwise?
Von writes in a notebook: “I am proud to be an American. I am proud of my success, of my Yaddah education. I am particularly proud that I was captain of an all-Ivy football team, to show—well, to show that I’m a true man. My desires and goals are worthy.”
Von is still a handsome man, over six feet tall, with all his hair, with the disciplined body of the athlete, the football player, the shot-putter; also the Yaddah scholar (with good grades garnered by a successful ability to cheat). No one would think he is gay.
He’s read deeply into what he calls the Supreme Haters. Barbie, Schellenberg, Merwin Hart, Gerald L. K. Smith, Heusinger, Gehlen the great, Skorenzy, von Bolschwing, Kremer, Antonescu, Trifa, Malaxa. And of their Supreme Facilitators: Ford, Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles, Huey Long, Father Coughlin, IBM’s Watson, Harriman, Wainscott Trish. And of course Hitler. Lumped all together he calls them the Great Exterminators.
He wants to be one of them.
Von wrote: “There is much to be learned from all these gents.”
John Foster Dulles had said, “For us there are two sorts of people in the world: there are those who are Christians and support free enterprise and there are the others.” He became Ike’s secretary of state. President Eisenhower fired every gay government employee shortly after his election. Brinestalker and the Dulles brothers provided him with the names.
Von had worked under Allen Dulles at the OSS and CIA. Allen Dulles was so eager to negotiate with the Nazis at the war’s end, if not before, that he masterminded a scheme “to recruit large numbers of SS officers for Cold War service” (writes Doug Henwood in “Spooks in Blue,” a 1988 article in Grand Street, also drawing on Robin Winks’s Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War 1939–1961). Al
len Dulles wanted them over here in America and, “with the assistance of the Vatican, engineered the ‘escape’ of thousands of Gestapo and SS officers.” Among these were Josef Mengele, Klaus Barbie, and Adolf Eichmann. Exfiltrated Nazis were free to offer their services to Latin American dictators and drug traffickers as well as the CIA and NITS and, of course, Big Pharma.
Von wrote in his notebook: “H. L. Hunt will help me. He has three hundred radio stations and $50 million a year of income on his fortune of billions. And there are many other names on the Powell Memorandum list. Coors. Scaife. Koch. McKenna. Olin. Bradley. Richardson. Earhart. Mellon.
“You’ve got to hand it to the Jews. If it weren’t for the yids, there wouldn’t be all this useful hate of fairies. Hitler also put fags front and center on the map of Unwanteds. He threw them in hand in hand with the kikes. It’s an interesting thought. I’ll have one of my PR boys write an anonymous pamphlet about it. ‘The Bonus of the Ovens: How the Jews Facilitated the Mass Extermination of Homosexuals.’ Thomas Paine was big into pamphlets and he’s still famous to this day. I studied him at Yaddah with Tom Jones and James Jesus.
“Yes, I want to be a Great Exterminator too.
“And I have the weapon to accomplish it. I will weaponize it to kill as many queers as possible. With a bunch of hymies thrown in for good measure.”
THE DIVINE BELLA SETS SAIL
There is little agreement on the importance of Bertram Bellberg’s last acts. He’d administered to himself his daily shot of DridgePlusOne and changed into his leather policeman’s outfit of chaps and vest and boots. He feels the need to be humiliated and he knows where he can go. He leaves Herbie’s house-sitting chores and hops the ferry and train from the Island to the city and heads to the Wise Old Owl, a club that caters primarily to straights, but in the dark shadows a whip is a whip, piss is piss, shit is shit, and there are always a few desperate gays like Bella who need a quick fix. An active imagination—and who here doesn’t have one of those?—can even believe for the moment that some hefty lump is not a babe with tits but a man with pecs. Groveling on the ground disguises a multitude of shortcomings. And so he goes here, and he satisfies his needs, and he leaves a little bit of himself scattered around and about.
Did any heterosexual customer of the Wise Old Owl contract an illness from contact with Bella/Bert? All that shit and piss and gism on the cement floor, it’s hard to know.
Our Divine Bella, Bertram Bellberg, then catches his ferry in time and returns to a very empty Fire Island, to walk along its abandoned shoreline, carrying his boots as he walks barefoot in the sand once again to Herbie’s elaborate villa on the ocean that he’s still house-sitting. A few hundred feet from its regal stairway that from the sand leads up to the cascading series of verandas and various porches and lookouts from which you can wave hello to the world, the Divine Bella collapses to the ground and dies. It will be several days before a representative from Ocean Trash discovers him on his weekly removal rounds.
BANNER MOMENT!
BaxxterPlusOne (as it is finally named for the moment) is now in the veins, the bodies, the blood of The American People. It has been for some six months since July 3, 1975, when Von Greeting at Greeting-Dridge and Dr. Ekbert Nostrill and Dr. Stuartgene Dye at Partekla/NITS pushed the GO button. It’s now out there for real. Signed (by FADS), sealed (by NITS), delivered (by G-D).
This moment in the history of gay punishment is another milestone in the continuing evolution of its current chief manipulator, Vonce Greeting. He had supervised every moment of the development, release, and rollout of this “treatment.” Not a bip or bleep or pimple had escaped his attention before his permission was granted to proceed. He had been the creative force that brought his Mona Lisa into being. Deals have been cut with each of his foreign distributors to allow him to speak for all (and to funnel all profits out of America). They all were on fake Bohunk Vernissage’s fake books as “suppliers and manufacturers,” a device to avoid not only taxation in America but also any further FADS approval. Had anyone raised a cry of alarm, he had only to say, “We’re making our marbles in France, Germany, and Japan,” which meant “Shut up or it will be smuggled into this country” (which some of it already has been anyway).
But a stark realization now smacks him in his face: his own company reports that his poisoned Mona Lisas aren’t infecting enough men fast enough. He’s monitoring these new numbers like a man who’s not going to leave the Vegas craps tables until he hits a big enough killing. Yes, statistics are dribbling in, particularly from New York and San Francisco, but not at a rate sufficient to indicate infecting a big enough “patient load” of gay men.
He didn’t want them dead at first. He just wanted them very very sick. If there are as many of them as the overwhelmingly successful market for his Dridgies indicates, this is a huge untapped market for newer and newer drugs to keep them breathing. That’s how giant pharmaceutical fortunes are made, via million-dollar drugs like his BaxxterDridgePlusOne followed by whatever can be whipped up after it ad infinitum as “new” or “improved.” If we’re lucky, maybe a billion! His scouts have already found some cockamamie new drug in, of all places, Czechoslovakia.
What would the Nazis have done in a situation like this?
Done? Shit, I’m doing it.
What would Edgar Hoover have done?
We’re doing it! What do you think Partekla’s all about?
He must tell Brinestalker and Dye to work that place faster.
FROM THE LAB NOTEBOOK OF DR. STUARTGENE DYE
I want to cry.
I am almost there.
I have disposed of most of my Donalds successfully. Doc Rebbish would be proud of me. From Doc’s thick book of knowledge in that big green trunk filled with possible cures and combinations from traveling native Seneck medicine men I have fiddled and tinkered and revised and broken through to this.
A few more trials will perfect it.
According to the Nazi defectors, the Russians now have means to totally disable a victim, making a man completely subservient to their will. But only temporarily. Their nerve gas isn’t the right path. They are ruthless but don’t know what the next step should be.
I knew what they were doing wouldn’t work in the end. It is my discovery that will totally and permanently disintegrate a body into nothingness.
I am giving birth to one of the most ingenious weapons ever made.
Germ warfare is taking place all over the world. My Partekla will surpass any germ warfare center anywhere. My friend Sir Roy at Porton Down wants to partner with me in anything I choose to do. Not this, Sir Roy. Not this.
And fuck the Russians. We’ll fuck them before they fuck us.
And it will all be because of me.
And Doc Rebbish, of course. Doc would have had a ball at Partekla. What goes around comes around, these white people say.
THE KAFFEEKLATSCH
WHEREIN WE MEET SOME MEN BEHIND THE MAN THEY WANT TO MAKE OUR PRESIDENT
BY JOSEPH KIDNEY
(Joe Kidney has a couple of Pulitzers and many other top journalist awards. He writes a weekly column for the Washington Monument/New York Truth Syndicate. His column is circulated all over the world until he will write his great book about the Ruesters, A Very Bad Dream. The number of his subscribers will then fall from many hundreds to half a dozen.)
* * *
Sometime in advance of every election any serious candidate for political office gathers not only his thoughts, if he has any, but accrues to himself the people who can get him elected. In the case of Peter Ruester this transpired over many years before succeeding. He was ready and waiting way before he ran. No one had taken him seriously for the longest time. But he had. And so had Purpura, his wife.
So he was ready when, finally, “they” were ready. “They” are the people Peter Ruester, and more important, Purpura, the only person he trusts or talks to, have had gathered to them as hatchet men, his Kaffeeklatschers. Good choices are those with lots of
money and the ability to get plenty more. These men—they are always men—are of course looking around for their own hatchet to back, some appealing guy who can speak nice and smile nice and who of course can be bought and reduce all their taxes to a pittance. And to make America strong again: it’s never strong enough for guys like this seeking more power over all and sundry. They thought they’d been on their way with Nixon but boy did he screw up. So they have been waiting around just as long for a Peter Ruester as Peter Ruester has been waiting around for them.
They all sit around in one of their mansions in Palm Springs or Beverly Hills (they try to live where it’s warm) to determine how to divvy up the spoils. There are always spoils. In the entire history of presidencies there have been spoils. Everything everywhere is always getting more expensive and only high-stakes players need think of anteing up. This Monopoly is big-time.
Then they figure out what their political philosophy “for the good of The American People” will be. It must be different from whatever any other opponent’s political philosophy of what is good for The American People is said to be, and of course isn’t, so they can criticize the hell out of it. And then they get The American People to elect their new president. That’s all there is to it. That’s how it’s done. As old as America itself.
