The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  I should interject that I worked for Binky Krank at First American Films when Moses Rattner brought me there. I was one of Binky’s assistants. It was an honor to sit in on his meetings while he brilliantly pieced together complicated deals that somehow satisfied everyone, greedy producers and greedier stars, while still leaving plenty for First American. They financed my film of Sleep, from which I actually made some money because of the way Binky set me up. I still get invited to dinner once in a while. I have heard Monserrat speak fondly of Rebby. In fact, I was there when their organization sprang into being.

  He had finally worked up his courage. “Monserrat,” Rebby begins, barely inside the handsome living room of their town house, then stops. He’s nervous again, she realizes, and says nothing while waiting for him to go on. He won’t sit down. She looks up at him expectantly. She is very fond of this infuriating man. She once thought him a genius. Matters have not turned out well for either of them. She was once thought a genius too. Science is so very fickle.

  “Monserrat, we have both in our lives seen a great deal that is awful. This is more awful than anything we have seen. The jungle ditropa we worked together to eliminate in North Africa was benign compared to what I see is happening.”

  “What do you think is happening?” Her voice is soft and guttural, still with cadences of some foreign land. She always says it’s Switzerland, but then do not they all, those for whom German is a first tongue? In her case it is impossible to question her political bona fides. As a mere teenage girl she went to Israel. She, a Christian, had somehow fallen in love with the notion of this young country fighting to exist and so she went there to live and fight with them. She fell in love with a Jew and married him. They fought side by side in the Irgun, the armed terrorist organization. She fired rifles and threw grenades. She became a doctor there. By the time she was noticed once again by Oliver Wendell Krank, who’d first spied her on a previous trip, she’d already divorced her young Israeli husband. She did not want to marry Binky. She did not want to leave Israel, which she felt needed her. She did not want to come to America, which she knew did not. But Binky is very insistent. He was ready at last to marry after years of playing New York’s most eligible bachelor and now he had found his wife. It’s actually a very touching story. That’s why the media loves her. That’s why she got all the publicity at Invincible that sealed her doom there. But I knew Binky had little sympathy for the homosexual.

  “Plague,” Rebby answers her simply.

  She nods. She knows his great tendency to over-worry has previously been more or less partnered with fact.

  When he tells her what he’s seen, she immediately realizes she’s found a full and fine, indeed noble occupation for herself. Inside her there is sympathy for these present-day gay sufferers. Many more Israeli young men were gay than her country will admit. She had been in love with not a few of them. She described all this to me when I came to interview her for our GMPA newsletter. Noble is very important to her. She and Rebby had almost been a great partnership several times in the past, with other potentially noble enterprises. She immediately starts noodling around in her brain for possible names they might call their organization, which of course they must immediately commence to establish. She will call hers the American Foundation for … Well, perhaps it is a mite too early; this disease does not appear to have a name yet. But she will be executive director. She will give Rebby some sort of title, of course, like medical director. Yes, she is very fond of Rebby but he is very sloppy, very messy, very unkempt, and must be kept away from the fund-raising parties. That he is a homosexual and that this appears to be a homosexual disease do not bother her. In fact, this touches her. Rebby touches her. He so wears his heart on his sleeve. He is incapable of disguising his feelings, which are always strong and emotional and fervent. She now, too, is a Jew. Jews are so committed to the weal of the world. She is proud of that fact. It is one of the things that drew her to Israel from dreary Switzerland and one of the things that drew her to Rebby when they were both working on that lifesaving project at Cambridge that didn’t save anyone. Now that they’re both in America she’ll find a way to work with him that will be more satisfactory. They are both very smart scientists who respect each other.

  His many patients flock to him because they know he cares for them as if they were his children. If you have no money or insurance he treats you for free. This is rare among doctors, particularly in New York. She knows he has no money, and she has given him some.

  He will prove to be one of the very first doctors of homosexual men to sense that something awful is coming on, and that, unhappily, they are partners to their new diseases, although in fact he will also believe it started long before anyone else will think it did. He remembers seeing strange stuff in Africa, his homeland. “Men butchered monkeys there and ate them” was what he thought at the time might be the cause of whatever was killing people there. Of course no one believed him. Africans had been eating monkeys for centuries. He, with Dr. Emma Brookner, will say that this awful something is spread by having sex. And that the only way to stop it happening is to stop having sex. Which is an impossibility. So whatever it is that’s happening can only continue to happen. Martyrs have been crucified for saying less. How can he fashion an alternate route, a higher road, another ticket to ride? How do you make unsafe sex into safe sex? It is not a concept that has been so on the table before. He knows in advance it will not go down well. It will not go down at all.

  Of course no one listens. Dr. Rebby Itsenfelder will have his failures to contend with all his days. When Daniel and I come to talk to each other again we’ll find ourselves both using that sad description of “tragic flaw” as certainly defining Rebby.

  Rebby has just been served by his building’s co-op board to vacate his rental office, “because of your predominantly homosexual patient population, which, according to everything we have been able to determine, are now contagious individuals entering and leaving our building and hence endangering the health and the lives of our shareholders.”

  “Tommy Boatwright has assembled a group of lawyers at GMPA,” I tell him. “They will help you.”

  “They are calling themselves Gay Men Pay Attention,” Rebby had told Monserrat, to which she replied: “I wonder if it is wise, hitting the nail so on the head? Whose idea was that?”

  “I believe it is Fred Lemish who came up with the name.”

  “That explains it.”

  Rebby shares this with me and we smile.

  Then he suddenly throws up his arms. The gesture coincides with an upswing of musical volume from the DJ and screams from the floor.

  Rebby is unaware of this. He is lost in perplexity.

  “I got a letter this morning with a xerox photo of somebody’s penis with a butcher’s knife drawn over it, chopping it off. And my name is attached to this hand that is holding the knife,” he yells over the music.

  “You saw all the letters attacking my articles in The Prick?” I yell back.

  Rebby nods. The music fades down. “Has the mayor put a price on your head?”

  “It was like this after my book came out. Friends just suddenly stopped being friends. I’m trying to learn how not to let it bother me.”

  “When you learn how, teach it to me.” He clasps my hand and gives it a squeeze. “Patient after patient looks at me so puzzled. ‘You didn’t warn me that this was coming,’ a few of them have said. Now it’s my fault!”

  Below us a few hundred naked guys are trying not to jerk off. It is like Fire Island Pines but indoors and in the winter of our next big discontent.

  I change the subject. “Where did the name Rebby come from? I assume it has something to do with rabbi?”

  “I am the most irreligious man in the world. And I am stuck with this name, which actually is Rabbi. Can you believe parents would do that to a child?”

  “Rebby, if it isn’t just one thing, what is it?”

  “The evidence simply isn’t there for jus
t one cause.”

  “Why? Why isn’t the evidence there?”

  “Because whatever it is isn’t very strong, if you can believe that. Vel tests tell us that it constructs a weak blode. And a weaker neutra. It throws out a pathetically impotent fulce. How could any of this make so many of us die? I don’t care if the n-3cs are not protective enough. I have patients with no n-3cs. Or no 729/s. I just don’t think these are good enough surrogate markers for an epidemic. I do think there might be something else that could ignite some fuse. I just don’t know what it is. And I don’t have any money to investigate it.”

  And then he looks out into space before continuing in his tone of despair.

  “And when and if there is money for research, I guarantee they will research the wrong things. They will look first for the causative agent instead of at all the infections that are killing my boys. This is putting the cart before the horse and it is always the way science is done, putting people last. It would be far easier to find cures for the infections than to find this virus, which it undoubtedly is, and which will take forever to locate.”

  He looks back at me. “The New England Journal of Spots and The New England Journal of Blood are both refusing to report this worsening symptomatology, claiming that it’s still ‘anecdotal.’ Fred, it is going to be truly awful.”

  He sags visibly, a body wounded by years of being denied the means of verifying the truths he identifies. “Greeting is making so much money from Dridgies that its British chairman, Newnham Treadway, was knighted and then made a lord. Sir Newnham is now Lord Farst. I played with Newnham’s cock too, in a Bayswater sauna. I am still a British subject, you know.”

  “How did you meet Monserrat?”

  “We were both young scientists working on Radiant Opthamole at Cambridge. You probably don’t even remember Opthamole, radiant or even lambent. Well, for ten seconds it was going to change the world. It was going to cure all ailments and illnesses and maladies, cancer included. Cancer especially. The wonder drug to end them all. It was even on the front page of The Truth. We discovered it in the Greeting Labs at Cambridge. It was flushed down the toilets of American Greeting. The results that Monserrat and I obtained could not be duplicated elsewhere. I still suspect there was a little industrial espionage going on, although I don’t know what kind or by whom, or why. Opthamole had promise. I suspect someone will resurrect it someday. No drug company ever completely throws anything away. If it can’t be used to cure your arthritis it will surface to cure your gout. For my sins I came to America to work at NITS, which for me was a mistake, and Monserrat went on to marry one of America’s richest men. And now she is very grand. Try as we might, we were not able to put our knowledge together. Perhaps with our new organization. I asked you how yours is coming along.”

  As if to answer for me, Jacente brings the music up to its most crashing crescendo, turns on the mirrored ball, and the dancing dervishes below us all start screaming and yelling and, yes, pissing on each other.

  “1,112” AND COUNTING

  BY FRED LEMISH THE NEW YORK PRICK

  If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you we’re in real trouble. If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get. In all the history of homosexuality we have never been so close to death and extinction before. Many of us are dying or already dead.

  There are now 1,112 “official” COD-defined cases of what is happening to us. When I first became worried, there were only 41. There have been 195 dead in New York City from among 526 victims.

  But these numbers do not include the uncounted number of us walking around with swollen lymph glands, pneumonia, purple skin lesions, and fatigue.

  The rise in numbers is terrifying. Whatever is spreading is now spreading faster as more and more people come down with this stuff.

  Leading doctors and researchers are admitting they don’t know what’s going on. I find this as terrifying as the alarming rise in numbers. Doctors are saying out loud and up front, “I don’t know.”

  Suicides are now being reported of men who would rather die than face such medical uncertainty, no therapies, rotten hospital treatment, rejected insurance claims, and the appalling statistic that 86 percent of all cases die so quickly.

  If all of this had been happening to any other community, there would have been such an outcry from that community and all its members that the government of this city and this country would not know what had hit them.

  Why isn’t every gay man in this city so scared shitless that he is screaming for action? Does every gay man want to die?

  No matter what you’ve heard, there is no single profile for all victims. There are drug users and non–drug users. There are the truly promiscuous and the almost monogamous. There are reported cases in men who claim to be abstinent.

  There have been no confirmed cases in straight, white, middle-class Americans.

  Hospital staffs are so badly educated about us that they believe we’re all contagious. Our patients are often treated like lepers. Food trays are left outside their doors. The few hospitals willing to take us have long waiting lists, no matter how sick you are.

  If this were occurring in straights, instead of in gay men, you can bet all hospitals and their staffs would know what’s happening. And it would be this city’s Health Department that would be telling them. New York City’s Health Department might just as well not exist for us.

  There are increasing numbers of men unable to work. There are increasing numbers of men unable to pay their rent, men thrown out on the street with nowhere to live and no money to live with, and men who have been asked by roommates, and even their lovers, to leave. And men with visible symptoms are more and more being fired from their jobs.

  Our closeted mayor, Kermit Goins, appears to have chosen not to allow himself to be perceived by the non-gay world as visibly helping us in this emergency. No human being could continue to be so useless to his suffering constituents.

  Repeated requests to meet with him, or with his health commissioner, Dr. Herta Glanz, or with his openly gay assistant, Hiram Keebler, have been denied us. Repeated attempts to have Goins make a very necessary public announcement about this crisis and public health emergency have been refused by his staff.

  With his silence the mayor of New York is helping to kill us. Has he even bothered to call our president, whose attorney general has announced: “the president is irrevocably and unalterably opposed to homosexuality”?

  I am sick of our electing officials who in no way represent us.

  I am sick of closeted gay doctors who won’t come out to help us fight.

  I am sick of The Avocado and The Village Vice, which refuse to write about this, not to mention the virulently homophobic New York Truth.

  I am sick of gays who won’t support gay causes.

  I am sick of closeted gays. It’s 1983 already, guys. By 1984 you could be dead.

  I am sick of guys who moan that giving up careless sex until this blows over is worse than death. How can they value life so little and cocks and asses so much? Come with me, guys, while I visit a few of our friends in Intensive Care at Table Medical. They’d give up sex forever if you could promise them life.

  I am sick of guys who can only think with their cocks.

  I am sick of everyone who tells me to stop creating a panic. I don’t want to die. I can only assume that you don’t want to die either.

  I am angry and frustrated. My sleep is tormented by nightmares, and visions of lost friends and the tears of funerals and memorial services.

  How many of us must die before all of we the living fight back?

  I know that unless I fight with every ounce of my energy I will hate myself. I hope, I pray, I implore you to feel the same.

  Here is a list of twenty recently dead men that I knew:

  Harry Blumenthal

  Richard Bronstein

 
Robert Christian

  Ron Doud

  Winthrop Heinz

  Leon Hudsons-Bay

  David Jackson

  Kristos Kostos

  Karl Krintzman

  Michael Maletta

  Timothy Peter Purvis

  Jerry Rappa

  Nick Withers

  Stephen Sperry

  Pierre Steinhardt

  Robin Swindon

  Vladek Tortorelli

  Carlton Wiegand

  Craig Valenti

  Bertram Bellberg

  And one more, who will be dead by the time these words appear in print.

  Can we fight together?

  A bunch of us have formed GMPA for GAY MEN PAY ATTENTION. We meet at the Center every Monday night at 7 p.m.

  Come fight with us! Please! I beg you.

  If we don’t all fight back immediately we face our approaching doom.

  * * *

  1,112! Who is doing your counting, you dumb fellow. I am by now up and running in many hundreds of thousands of you at least, and not only in your country.

  PUMP UP THE VOLUME!

  I had sweated the piece. I had been pent up for so long, with whatever—anger, fury, which I guess are the same. Or they were coming to be. It all seemed so wrong. Being treated like shit every place we turned.

  On that list of dead men, I had had sex with Harry, Boo Boo Bronstein, Ron, Leon, Kristos, Jerry, and Robbie.

  Robbie Swindon. He of the handsome gymnast’s body. He whom I lusted for and bedded down for … how many days or hours? I thought I had really found a nice man to love at last. Two days was all it turned out to be. He left our burgeoning bliss when his lover suddenly died in an airplane. “I can’t see you again! I feel too guilty! He was on the plane at the same time we were…” and he collapsed in tears and grief.