The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  “When in doubt, summon an emergency council” is the advice passed on to her by nine out of the ten cabinet members and department heads with whom she consults, choosing only ones that she considers less hostile. She has correctly noted that all are generally a suspicious lot in Washington. She has not been received with open arms. They know she’s in way over her head. (Hoidene in her short term in office will summon seventy-three emergency councils.) “Be careful The American People won’t come to think you can’t make your mind up about anything,” the secretary of the Bureau of Budget Adjustment (BOBA), Newder Phlue, an economist once on the faculty of the University of Benares (Moose thought it was in California when he approved the appointment), where he taught the Law of Diminishing Returns, advises her in their first meeting. “That happened to me when I first came here from India. Indians love bureaucrats who cannot make up their minds. Americans don’t. Indecision scares Americans. I had to learn to appear as if I had made up my mind, when of course I hadn’t.”

  But Halacia Sanders, the secretary of HAD’s Division of Census, Polls, and Standards, advises her, “Don’t worry about a worry that isn’t a secure worry. The American People like it when you’re not a hundred percent sure and you admit it.” And then she speaks softly. “Don’t listen to Phlue. He’s an Indian. From India.”

  So, with no consensus, Hoidene summons her first emergency council of the Department of Health and Happiness (HAH-EC1) (at Purpura’s sudden “suggestion,” Health and Disease, HAD, has been renamed HAH), which votes unanimously to officially name “this shit” The Underlying Condition (UC). Fairy Flu and Gay Cancer are ruled out, though not before discussion. An Unidentified Fatal Male Malady (AUFMM) is thought imprecise. “‘I’m suffering from AUFMM’ would also be a mouthful,” one of the participants points out. “Homosexuals Oppressed Per Example” (HOPE), although a nice acronym, is believed to be too positive. It’s agreed, finally, “The Underlying Condition” has, in the words of Dr. Roscoe Middleditch from NITS, “a neuter sound.” “In the absence of a consistent symptom to identify it by, what else could this shit be called?” this last from Arturo Ferri, from the Government Printing Office, where he is billed as “Supervising Director of Typesetting.”

  As with so many historically important milestones, no one quite remembers from whose mouth this wording sprang. Who said what first? Who or what inspired whom so that three words, “The,” “Underlying,” and “Condition,” could be pieced together as the summation of this afternoon of work and its entry into medical history, and the world’s.

  “Doesn’t it sound nicely mysterious and reminiscent of something pastoral, from Wordsworth?” Dr. Caudilla Hoare muses.

  Dr. Middleditch tries to sum it up. “It seems harmless enough. It seems nonspecific enough. It seems inoffensive enough.” He is thought to be a useful mediator to have on your side.

  “That’s what we want,” Hoidene says. And then, after a moment’s pause, “Isn’t it?”

  Dr. Rebby Itsenfelder, brooding and looking concerned, turns on Dr. Hoare. “Wordsworth? You are mentally deficient. We are talking about dying men.”

  Dr. Hoare smiles icily. “It is always so disappointing when one’s cohorts have no feel for poetry. Rupert Brooke, then. At least he was one of your poofters.”

  “I would like to change my vote,” Rebby says.

  Dr. Monserrat Krank, who has come down from New York with Itsenfelder “for this important meeting,” says, “You cannot change your vote, Rebby. The vote has been tallied and approved.”

  “What difference does that make? Since when is good science so rigid? If this rude and inept woman is for it then I am against it. In fact, the more I hear this new and stupid name, the more I am against it. And I do not think that gays will like it either.”

  “Do we really have to worry about what they think?” Dr. Nostrill asks. He has just been officially reappointed the head of HAH and is speaking up more forcefully. Evidently many don’t like this reassignment. “Now he’s really over us. Everyone has to report to HAH.” “I thought Swilkers was the head of HAH.” “No, she’s the secretary. She is higher. She’s in charge.” These two speakers decline to give me their names for attribution. “Are you kidding?” one of them says. “In this place? No way.”

  Dr. Dye is smiling and Dr. Dodo Geiseric is nodding off. He lost interest when they wouldn’t name this shit DG-101 after him. He actually suggested it. “After all, I will be its principal discoverer at NITS.” This is obviously news to everyone in the room.

  Dr. Dye stops to speak with Dr. Itsenfelder on their way out. “I just love it when you call doctors inept and rude. Please don’t stop. What did you say your name is?” He makes no attempt to read Rebby’s badge.

  Rebby blushes. Obviously no one in this place has ever asked him his name. Hoidene beams. The director is speaking to one of her boys. She must rehire him immediately.

  Later I wondered why no one at HAH was filled with a sense of excitement: here was a new disease. Was this not a challenge? Did it not instill a tiny bit of ambition in anyone? After all, doctors are supposed to be on the lookout for new stuff that could make them famous. The well-known illnesses are woefully overcrowded with scientists to study them and doctors to treat them. Until you’ve latched on to something new no one knows who you are. You don’t want to go into anything too crowded. You want a new baby. This one sure looked like it qualified. But, no, not this illness and not this crowd. I constantly hear the whispers. “Faggots. Yuck.” Tom Boatwright of GMPA, a gay man, actually said it out loud. “Gay sex is already known as ‘the Ick Factor,’” he told everyone, hoping for some understanding. I’m evidently to know GMPA stands for GAY MEN PAY ATTENTION. They certainly seem to be preparing for the worst.

  I say to Hoidene, “I guess you’ll have to try and figure out which ones are the jerk-offs and which ones are the just plain bigots.” She answers, “Isn’t there anything in between?”

  Dr. Krank, to her credit, did go up to Dr. Hoare. “Poofters is such an old-fashioned word, Doctor. I’m sure you would like to appear more au courant.” And she regally walks away.

  Later that afternoon Hoidene receives a call from the White House. “They love our new name for this shit!” She calls me often to tell me things like this. “You are just so sympathetic,” she says. “I recognized a kindred spirit the minute I saw you.” It turns out she says that to a lot of people. She feels very insecure and she has good reason to. Everyone here has good reason to, but she doesn’t know that.

  I feel compelled to point out that Hoidene leaves all her meetings at least three times and returns shortly wearing a new wig, each more fetching than the last. With each reentry, she smiles in pride at her achievement. Every now and then she gets some applause, which makes her smile even bigger and she gives a little curtsy.

  At her first most-ballyhooed press conference (Manny wants to show her off), and brandishing a copy of the latest issue of The New England Journal of Spots, she stands with its editor, Dr. Arnold Morron, Dr. Stuartgene Dye and Dr. Dodo Geiseric of NITS, and Dr. Megace Frolik of COD, Dr. Euterpa Vondel of FADS, and Dr. Nostrill. Hoidene announces, “We don’t know what’s going on but at least now we have a name for it. We have decided to call it The Underlying Condition.”

  “What does that mean?” come the clamors from the press for further clarification.

  Dr. Geiseric steps forward.

  “It means simply that something is happening in the body that upsets the equilibrium of the immune system. Whatever it is that is so upsetting, it is an underlying condition to something else that is going on above it (or perhaps below it for that matter), not only in the frontal system but in the body as a whole. My experiments in my lab reveal beyond any shadow of a doubt that if we can isolate what is happening to the frontal system then we will be able to attack what is destroying, certainly injuring irreparably, the body whole.”

  “What in hell is the frontal system?” a white-coated young doctor yells out.

>   “That will be all the questions for today,” Hoidene announces. She’d thought more attention would be focused on her. “I had not expected Dr. Geiseric to talk so long. Not that anyone understood a word he said.”

  I believe I have got all this down right. More and more I am confronted by the harsh reality that this is not my beat. It should be but no one will believe it.

  At the announcement, a Dr. Benois-Frucht confronted Velma Dimley. “It may have a name but that’s all it has. Has any budget been increased? No. Has any budget in fact been drawn up? Not according to my contacts. Has any real research begun? No. Has The Truth lifted its prohibition on writing about it? No. Is anyone out there sounding a warning, behavioral or otherwise? No. Will President Ruester say this new name out loud?” He said all this right to Velma’s face.

  Jakie Flourtower was there with Velma, and rather attentively so.

  “Shucks, what a shame. So many fegala dyin’ like fairies and nobody’s flappin’ their wings,” Jakie said to B-F after B-F yelled at Velma.

  I have no idea why these Truth people came down from New York for this. I would say they could have read about it in The Truth except that no coverage of the event appears in The Truth.

  * * *

  I like my new name also. It makes me sound so … mysterious. And relevant. And universal.

  FROM DAME LADY HERMIA’S EVIL NOTEBOOK

  Few constituencies are reacting to what is happening. Both The Truth and The Monument editorialize, briefly, “on behalf of all perplexed citizens: What does ‘Underlying Condition’ mean?” (The Truth.) “Does it mean we all have it—whatever it is—inside of us in some underlying form or other?” (The Monument.) At a meeting in the Oval Office, Linus Gobbel asks: “Is someone trying to tell heterosexuals we can get it?” “Well, theoretically we can all get everything, even rich” is Dr. Dye’s amused response to The Monument’s Science, Technology, Computers, and Automotive columnist, Horenda Tybalt. That paper’s rabidly right-wing columnist Beaufort St. James editorializes: “If someone is trying to tell heterosexuals we are all potential homosexuals, nothing turns voters into Republicans faster than fear of faggotry. The more they show themselves, the more they can be hated.”

  “This new emergency council summoned by Swilkers has seen too many horror movies produced by Dr. Krank’s husband. What is Dr. Krank doing on a government commission anyway?” asks Dr. Nesta Trout in a letter to the new editor in chief of The New England Journal of Spots, Dervis Tuttle. Nesta was once an associate of Dr. Krank’s at Invincible Crewd-Harbinger where Monserrat had made another blemish on her record promoting that Ingaardium-X, some concoction from Paraguay thought to be a cure for cancer. No one lost their lives, exactly. Several people in Paraguay just no longer walk. This is not to be confused with the Radiant Opthamole that Monserrat and Rebby worked on at Cambridge when they were younger. I believe a number of patients on those trials were lost. Monserrat is now acting like a good film executive’s wife, still looking for what I believe is called a hit. NEJS actually publishes Nesta’s letter. One wonders whom she’s diddling with. And why.

  FRED’S JOURNAL

  THOUGHTS ON PEOPLEHOOD

  No one could think of a better name than UC. Most of those suggested are nasty and fill the gutter press. This continues on the TV talk shows and as fodder for late-night comedians. And then the whole name issue disappears. A good name is always hard to find.

  The gay population, which might be thought to like the name for the very reason that others don’t, hates it the most. At least in New York. As with so much concerned with our well-being, gays in the rest of the country are voiceless. Not that they are so rah-rah help us! in New York, but here a certain number of them, at least, talk about matters in a vaguely public fashion, and worry about themselves in a slightly more audible manner. If this sounds confusing, it’s just that activism is an unfamiliar, uncomfortable, disagreeable, and totally unfamiliar word. Nobody wants to be called an activist. It’s always been a disparaged activity. Those few who felt compelled to speak out on our behalf in the past were considered drips. Of the first water. Everyone knew this. I certainly did. And. Guys are crossing the street when they see me coming. I am not getting good (gay) press. Even though GMPA is growing bigger, no one likes what I am saying so publicly, most particularly Bruce.

  Oh, a number of meetings are convened by the unusual assortment of social organizations that fall within the homosexual rubric of gay men, lesbians, and transsexuals/trangendereds (we are having trouble distinguishing between the two, should there be a distinction). Tommy and I try and go to as many as we can locate, to plead.

  These are what we have to work with:

  Soul Sisters, Drag Queens of Coarse, Drag Queens Über Alles, Black S&M Activists, White S&M Activists, Black & White Brothers Who Are Not into S&M, Black & White Sisters Who Are into S&M Lightly and Amusingly, Lesbian AA Below the Bowery, Gay Men AA Above the Bowery, Harlem Whites Against Gay Racists, Lesbians Alone United, Gay Men for All Seasons, Marimba Marching Men, Dykes on Bikes, Lesbian & Gay Truckers, Pink Pussy Patrol, Butch Men for Jesus, Lesbian & Gay Jews in Opposition, Gay Gals & Guys Who Square Dance Together—all groups of gay thises and thats looking for something to get behind or on top of, or at least onboard with, anything to while away rainy days and lonelynights. Has something appeared that just might get all of these off their Buts? Are there suddenly Gay Guys & Gals Who Care that their fellows are getting sick and dying? Can we start making T-shirts emblazoned with HELP! We all know how much we love our T-shirts.

  The painful fact emerges. There are many groups. Each group has few members. There are few if any alliances. Why work with another group when yours hardly functions? They’re just like everyone else. Why should they be different? Particularly when so many of them spend so much time trying to be like everyone else. Gay doctors in Queens don’t talk to lesbian doctors in Queens, if indeed there are any lesbian doctors in Queens, or gay ones either, which of course there are. It’s like this across the board, across the country, across the world, as will increasingly be obvious in these upcoming years. We are people but we are not a People. We’re going to die because of it, but we don’t know that yet. I must try to make them see this. I must. I must. I must.

  It is actually an exciting prospect.

  It is!

  YOU FUCKERS! WE ARE A PEOPLE!

  More and more I am trying to say this out loud.

  “Why do you think,” Pubie Grotty muses in his weekly column in The Village Vice, “that gays are so opposed to this new disease being called The Underlying Condition? Because once again we’re the scapegoat. Because once again we’re being blamed for something we’re not responsible for. Can’t you see? ‘Underlying Condition’ is just a metaphor for homosexuality.” Once again Pubie Grotty assumes the role of automatic spokesperson for everyone gay.

  Pubie, as often, has a good point, but just as often he twists it around to point the dagger into his own heart. If there is an “Underlying Condition” of homosexuality, then can’t this be made into something positive? That all The American People have homosexuality in us, the idea Linus Gobbel pooh-poohed? Using this disease as a vector to make this case could be a useful tool. No one would buy it, of course.

  Gay men are feeling very guilty very quickly. You can be in denial, but you can only deny so much as more and more friends fall by the wayside. Sex drops off fast and furiously. At first. For some. More or less. Sort of. States of denial don’t last long. Denial denies even itself. Guys actually move to states where there are no cases, as if to some magic never-never land. Or countries. Many rush to get their passports in order. A few are already living in Canada.

  “To be both a possible carrier and a card-carrying homo is a heavy trip for too many,” Bella had defensively answered when I asked him in Hokie’s office before he died why The Avocado wasn’t writing about what was happening. “I think that means don’t write about it.” Bella couldn’t remember his editor in chief’s name at th
e moment, who’d ordered this. There had been several recently. Bella had looked awful, thinner, terribly frightened. I was reaching a point where everything was looking bleak, without differentiation. Even the sun didn’t shine on the days it was shining.

  “Doesn’t your editor know what’s going on?” I pressed Bella further.

  “Oh, Fred! What is going on!” Bella started crying. I tried to embrace him, which he allowed for only a second. “I don’t want to know!” And he ran out into the hallway of Table and that was the last time I saw him.

  INT. GMPA OFFICE. DAY.

  A very small space. It’s a madhouse. People in and out. Everyone on never-stopping-ringing phones. Mickey is going crazy on several of them. Tommy with a couple more. Phil, who is black, is trying to direct Grady and Lenny, two young volunteers. Estelle, an older woman, also taking calls. Emmett and Lee, now an item.

  ESTELLE: GMPA. Estelle speaking. How may I assist you?

  (To Grady): Well, aren’t you some hunk!

  (To the room): Someone needs a will.

  PHIL: Give him this number.

  LEE: Where’s the patients’ group meet?

  PHIL: Tonight. Here’s the address.

  EMMETT: Is there a parents’ group?

  Bruce comes in from the street in a suit, with attaché case.

  TOMMY: Not yet. But I’m working on it.

  GRADY (picking up ringing phone): GMPA.

  LENNY (picking up ringing phone): GMPA.

  GRADY: Hey, they’ve got their first case in Moscow.

  LEE (picking up ringing phone): Oh, hi, Mom.

  GRADY (to Estelle): Thanks. I joined to find a boyfriend.

  TOMMY: Graciella, City Hall is an equal opportunity employer, doesn’t that mean you all have to learn English? (Slams down phone; into another):

  Don’t move! I’m sending a crisis counselor.

  (Dials another number.)

  BRUCE (putting down a phone): San Francisco’s mayor just gave their organization four million dollars. Mickey, why aren’t you in Rio?