The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  No one moves.

  FRED: Felix Turner was a fine, noble, smart, adorable, beautiful person. I am grateful that he graced my life. How dare you come and spoil his day?

  The pastor and Mrs. Turner, well and expensively dressed, have their eyes closed as their lips move in prayer.

  TOMMY: Don’t let it get to you, sugar. It’s what I grew up with too.

  FELIX JR. (about eleven years old): Mommy, can I take that picture of Daddy?

  CUT TO:

  Felix looking at his son.

  FELIX’S VOICE: It’s the first time I’ve seen him in years. He’s grown so.

  FRED (giving the boy a photo): Your father was a wonderful man and he wanted to love you very much.

  Mrs. Turner snatches the photo from Felix Jr. and starts ripping it to pieces.

  MRS. TURNER: I hate you. I hate you for ruining our lives. (Turning to the audience.) I hate all of you for what you are doing to our country. (Grabs Felix Jr. and starts to pull him out. Then she rushes over and grabs the urn of Felix’s ashes and starts out with them.)

  TOMMY: Here now, ma’am. Let me take this from you.

  He takes the urn. Mrs. Turner is sobbing. She allows Tommy’s embrace. Fred takes the urn and gives it to Felix Jr.

  FRED: Here. I know your father would want his son to have him.

  INT. FRED’S BEDROOM. NIGHT.

  Fred is lying facedown on his bed, shaking with tears. Tommy sits beside him trying to comfort him.

  CUT TO:

  Fred and Tommy still in street clothes, lying next to each other. Fred is asleep but Tommy is staring at the ceiling. He is by now very much in love with Fred. Fred suddenly shoots up from a nightmare.

  FRED (screaming): Help!

  Tommy takes him in his arms and they both start crying.

  FRED: I wonder how long any of us has. I wonder it every single moment of every single day. I feel so dreadfully lonely.

  TOMMY: Oh, sugar, me too.

  INT. FRED’S LIVING AREA. NIGHT.

  Fred and Tommy, their eyes still filled with tears. They’ve been eating Chinese takeout. There is a big blow-up photo of Felix, so that Fred can talk to it.

  FRED (kisses Felix): Felix, why are they letting us die? Someone is letting this happen.

  TOMMY: Bruce is in Invincible. My own brother’s sick now. Why did you go to Dachau? To see how awful everything was?

  FRED: Something just said, Go look. I’d been thrown out by my friends. I was looking for something. I needed to fight.

  TOMMY: You still do.

  Fred is looking at Felix, who shakes his head in agreement and blows him a kiss.

  FELIX: Yes, you still do. You promised me.

  FRED: How did you become a hospital administrator?

  TOMMY: I was a Navy SEAL. I ran the propulsion plant, the nuclear reactor, on a fast-attack submarine up under the North Pole for six months at a time. I swam underwater missions into Russia. A couple of times. I learned how to kill on cue without batting an eye. My reward was they sent me to college to learn how to administer hospitals. They made us look at films of Dachau. God, what evil.

  FRED: That’s what’s happening to us. Evil. I want an army. We need to start a new organization devoted to political action, to fighting back.

  FELIX AND TOMMY: YES. YES. YES.

  FELIX: Fred, start your army. Make another speech! You promised me to not stop fighting.

  FRED: Who would show up now to hear anything I said? No one talks to me. They cross the street when they see me coming.

  TOMMY: You’d be surprised. More and more people are more and more frightened than when you started GMPA. They’re asking me where you are, why you aren’t there.

  IN WHICH FRED HEARS FROM DR. DANIEL JERUSALEM

  “WELCOME, DOCTOR. I HAVE MISSED YOU. I REMEMBER NICE TIMES IN YOUR ARMS.”

  Dear Fred,

  What are we to do? I have read your novel. I have read what you are writing in The Prick. I know about GMPA and salute you. I support what you’re trying to say and do. I’m writing because I’d like to help. Awful things are happening here, too, of course.

  Where have I been all these years? In so many ways one attempts to set out on a life, and to achieve a belated independence from that which chained you: a family, myriad unhappinesses, an adolescence that tortures the self more than physical changes can ever straighten out, but most particularly that family, that body of flesh and blood which eats at the same table as you, always. (I know you are familiar with much of this yourself.) God, how I wanted to get away from them. I hated Washington. I still do, now more than ever, which is why I’m happy to work with you in whatever way I can. I agree that we must bear witness.

  Yes, I have become the doctor you saw me preparing to be. It just seemed the right thing to do. And I do it. I’m good at it. Does that mean I like it, being a doctor? I don’t think I want to know the answer. You have a lot of time to ask yourself that question as you sweat through all the years it takes to become one. It’s not about “like.” It’s about “have to.” My conscience is riddled, like some bulletproof vest that should but doesn’t protect me, by “responsibility.” That word stabs me all the time. It has a lot to do with my patients dying before I can help them. I suspect it all has a lot to do with David as well. I know it does. I never stop seeing his back, all scarred with the mysteries of his being. I don’t know if you remember my twin. Whatever happened to him, could it have been because of me? I now think the main reason I can’t leave Washington is that I’m waiting for him to come back. How would he find me otherwise? And I have been unable to locate him. I know this sounds too mysterious for words. It is for me as well. I know little about what happened to him beyond the fact that he was imprisoned in a German concentration camp during the war when he was still a kid. I believe this camp was for homosexuals, and that our father, who was evidently homosexual himself, had something to do with it. I guess this is all shocking to lay out in a letter. I’ll tell you more the next time we’re in bed!

  So I never left town. I spent years saying I couldn’t wait to get out of here, but I was back in Washington from Yaddah Medical School (where I studied and we fucked), and from Table Medical Center (where I interned and we fucked, I think), as soon as I was fully credentialed. I rented my own first apartment, overlooking a relatively pretty bend of the Potomac from a Georgetown hill where George Washington is said to have looked over to Virginia and declared, “I shall build my home over there.” George is said to have stood everywhere in Washington and looked out over everywhere and declared ownership from every perch and balcony. I’d never had my own place to live, one where I bought everything for it. Now I do. The apartment led to a comfortable house in Georgetown where I live and work part-time.

  I opened my own office. I see mostly gay men. I was a success fairly quickly. There are few gay doctors who admit to being gay, and guys are increasingly wanting that. So yes, I saw early cases of what’s happening. I wanted to do something. I didn’t know what to do. I felt utterly hopeless. So I applied for and was granted a Goffman Visiting Fellowship at the National Institute of Tumor Sciences.

  The NITS wilderness of our childhood is now a large federal bureaucracy of more than fifteen thousand employees and hospital inmates comprising some two dozen individual medical centers and a large hospital, the Hogarth Hooker Clinic, where admission is based solely on a case’s applicability to specific research that one of the thousand or so doctors on staff is pursuing. There’s so much here that I’ve not been able to take it all in. I doubt many who work here have! America is getting sicker by the moment, not only with our stuff. You can feel this expansion of America’s illnesses, and from here at least, it’s meant to feel challenging. Dr. Stuartgene Dye claims to have ambitions and goals, although he seems a very strange man. He walks around the place as if he’s preparing for something. He announces coolly that we must be prepared for the “treatment” of hundreds and thousands of patients who will be “the guinea pigs for the f
uture health of the world.” Please parse that for me, will you?

  The two men I am assigned to are Drs. Middleditch and Omicidio, the former rather stately and intellectual and the latter scrappy and handsome, to me at least. He was evidently quite the ladies’ man. He told me that “you guys” don’t like him. Middleditch is some sort of stealthy leavening force who keeps a low profile and tries to keep things running smoothly. He’s in charge of Cancer. It’s by far the biggest section of NITS and it’s where this shit we’ve been living with should be housed when they stop ignoring it. That’s right. There is nothing being done at all. I thought maybe that’s why they assigned me to NITS, to work on this. But after my initial inquiries produced only vague answers, I’ve stopped asking. There is an enormous cast of characters, both here and connected to here, and I assume, and hope, we will all be meeting each other about this soon. There’s been more than enough to keep me busy just looking. I guess that sounds weird, doing nothing but looking. But I think most people here are doing the same thing. It’s a big ocean and I’m trying not to drown; perhaps we all are. I keep looking for ways to live in a new country that I can’t seem to locate. This does not auger well for us, but I’m still trying to withhold judgment.

  Omicidio has obviously been waiting for something to happen, something to pounce on, something he can call his own. He’s hungry, as some doctors are, for something to ride to the moon. You can see his impatience. He’s always looking around, eyes darting everywhere even while you’re talking with him. It’s not unlike being in a gay bar and talking to someone while trying to see who might be looking at you from across the room. Ostensibly he’s researching some rare blood disease that maybe ten people a year come down with. “At least I’ve got no competition,” he said to me, not smiling, although I took it for a joke. “UC is going to be a tricky hard sell,” he said. “Too many who’d rather hate than help.”

  Unusually, I’m also permitted to continue to see my own patients in my Georgetown office, I guess (or hope!) because it’s recognized how little NITS knows about gay men’s health, even though not that much is changing because of this realization, meaning that I don’t see gay patients being studied here. Too long a sentence to describe a big empty hole! I don’t see any gay doctors either. I think why I got accepted is because of my uncle Israel Jerusalem, who has a Nobel and did a lot of his early work on NITS grants.

  I’ve been required to become an officer of the Public Health Service and to swear to more oaths of allegiance than I feel comfortable with. Once a month I have to wear a uniform, not unlike a naval officer’s. I’ve been told I look cute in it.

  The reputation of NITS, of both the sum and its parts, has been considered incontestably fine. Or so I thought, which is why my inquiry to you out of the blue comes at this moment in my own perplexed observations of what is and is not going on here.

  To both borrow and paraphrase the work of the late Professor Erving Goffman of the University of Pennsylvania (after whom my appointment is named), which he set down in his classic study Asylums, it was his belief that any group of persons—doctors, scientists, academics, patients, support staff, prisoners (there is even a hospital here filled with prisoners, under lock and key, who happen to suffer from illnesses of interest)—develops a life of its own that becomes, once you get close to it, a disabling social structure enfeebling those entrusted to its custody. And that a good way to learn about this world is to submit oneself to the company of the members therein residing and to the daily round of contingencies, petty and otherwise, to which they are subject or in which they choose to become engaged, if contingencies can be said to become engaging, which in terms of a bureaucracy they certainly should but often aren’t. That is another long-winded sentence that I guess translates into my wanting to try and find out why gay men as a group are so disregarded because of their health, and if this has something to do with our health-care delivery system. In Washington we tend to view everything in terms of “systems.” You always hear, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And we know that broken things rarely get fixed. All this interested me, intellectually, at least until my patients began dying, when I started being interested in it emotionally. Am I making any sense?

  Anyway, for a short while after I entered NITS I felt safer inside this place than in my own office in Georgetown. It’s just so big here, with so many impressively credentialed docs and researchers that initially I wanted to just talk to as many of them as I could, only to discover that most of them aren’t very talkative. They all—and I mean it seemed like every single one of them—sensed I was gay, and they definitely didn’t want to talk about UC. If this is how bureaucracies exist and thrive, and if they’re so safe, why can’t people grow within this place discussing anything and everything? I’m coming to sense that isn’t possible, certainly not about people like us. How are we to take care of each other, we “homosexuals”? As I write these words I see, as Goffman said I would, or should, how naïve I’ve been, how sheltered and protected you can become with Yaddah and Table degrees, etc., etc. Did my own family not teach me all that I needed to know about fear and distrust and I want to say hatred but I won’t … yet? (Someday I’ll fill you in on all that as well!) Is this the world Goffman went on about? Is this place I am at “a disabling social structure”?

  There are no studies here into homosexuality. NITS is prohibited by law from funding anything so controversial. Ruester’s Congress has silently seen to it. So it would never even occur to anyone to study it and us. To be forbidden from doing so now with the arrival of UC is utterly disabling.

  You would probably say that I was beginning, as you certainly already have, to develop a sense that I belong to a people. I don’t give myself that pat on the back yet. Gay people are hard people to belong to, to be a part of. Although you and I were briefly lovers, we didn’t continue that closeness. We didn’t continue to see each other. What does that say about us, as a people? We are strangers to each other and ourselves.

  I sensed that you, too, had an obsessive interest in what was going on. We have this in common, and why it hasn’t thrown us into each other’s arms again is as good a question as any for which both of us should be seeking answers. More and more as each day passes I see how sad so many gay people are and probably always have been, and certainly will now be in increasing numbers. Like I say, how do we take care of them and their health, particularly when we’ve so failed at looking after our own emotional needs? I see this in your writings too, you who survived your own attempt to take your own life.

  I have learned that for certain causes and cures, goals are too threatening. This has shocked me—that research is not responsive to demands. So how in the world are causes and cures discovered? Who or what is preventing this work from being done? I certainly did not think, going in, that the answer to this last question would be, as you are beginning to write: the president, and those around him running our country.

  P.S. It’s sad we lost touch with each other for such a long time. I have remembered your skin. And that you kissed wonderfully. I’ve seen photos of you in newspapers and gay magazines. You appear to have held up quite well. I think I’m rather uninteresting to look at, an aging doctor with graying hair and glasses, but it’s an image I cultivate to make my patients feel more comfortable with me, and I with them. I’m almost fifty and I hope I don’t look it. I’m lonely. I admit it. I fall in love with my patients all the time!

  Dare I ask about you?

  P.P.S. Did you ever complete the purchase of that turquoise Estabrook fountain pen?

  * * *

  HERMIA: Where is our dear Grace? A Dr. Schwitz Oderstrasse is beginning to be quite voluble publicly with his accusations about Grace and her activities at that Partekla place. She’s usually not one to let a cat get her tongue. It has been a while since she was at Partekla. But there is never an end to things, and she knows it.

  DR. SISTER GRACE’S WAR: I AM UP SHIT’S CREEK

  OKAY, IF THIS GLORIOU
S CUNT IS GOING DOWN, SHE’S GOING DOWN FIGHTING HER FUCKING GORGEOUS ASS OFF

  No one is going to listen to Dr. Sister Grace. I can see it happening. I can feel it. I recognize it. The fartfinks are closing in on me.

  By now I know that everyone dealing with this shit is a fucking clinchpoop grade-A idiot.

  I give the following information for safekeeping to my only living relative, Hermia. It is important. It will save our people, all people, all our all-over-the-world people. I give it before the crapulent assholes get me. The assholes usually win in the end. You must have it in case I am eliminated. I have left further instructions in my will, which Lucas Jerusalem has prepared for me. I will not go down having kept my mouth shut.

  No one will talk about shit. The kind we shit all day. No one is talking about assholes, rectums, vaginas, penises, semen, what happens when fellows stick their wangers up assholes or into cunts. No one is talking about placentas or reproductive organs.

  I have discovered that a certain type of vaginal bacteria causes a thirteen-fold higher likelihood of becoming infected with UC. Nasturtium shat in his pants when someone told him this. (Who?!) He definitely does not want anyone to know it. What is wrong with those White House assholes? How can you embargo an important discovery like this!

  NITS refuses to study any of this, citing a law passed in 1923 that prohibits “the use of any human waste as a medical nutrient.” (Code$w32#, Section: Annals of Int. Med., NITS Archives, Bk 20872347.) In 1923! A law passed in 1923 is still followed to a T, this stupid grubby obtuse fucking law. It is against the law to research “anything connected to the human reproductive and ancillary systems.” “Ancillary” in 1923 included everything from the breasts to the knees.

  The Vurd Act has been amended to bring earlier terminology more up to date, pointedly excluding homosexuals.