The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  I flew back to America via Florida. I wanted to see Gertrude Jewsbury again. Gertrude was in a nursing home, blind and almost deaf. I could still see in her face how beautiful she was. She had been so kind to me. She clutched my hand, so grateful that I had come. She kissed me and kissed me. She told me that I was soon to be her heir as well and to do something with the money for the good of the world. “You will now be a very rich man indeed!” she said. We both cried and hugged goodbye, this time for good.

  I came back and I managed, finally, to start to write the section, David’s War, that Fred has included in this history. It was an arduous and painful task and it did not free me up one bit.

  I am still trying to rise up from my ashes.

  Someone is still following me.

  WHAT IS HAPPENING TO US?

  Frederick? Daniel? I hear from no one.

  I wish to shame you for faltering in your participation in our noble endeavor, but I sense instead that one by one you are becoming overburdened for the most sad and valid of reasons.

  We are grappling with one of the greatest existential dilemmas of all time, an unresolvable turmoil of murderous indecencies.

  Corragio!

  FRED IN THE DUMPS AGAIN

  I still miss GMPA too much. I failed at what I wanted it to do and I’ve still got nothing to take its place. After such a long period of furious activity, constantly ringing phones, a mountain of daily problems waiting for my input, and the sustaining closeness—indeed comradeship of a sort I’d never known or felt—of so many devoted fellow workers as we all aspired to make something happen, for several years now I have found myself alone, with nothing to do, bereft … God, such melodramatic words for loneliness, for inactivity, for self-flagellation, for the conviction that one is right and no one can see that. I feel like a pariah again. Feel, fuck, I am a pariah again.

  In all my Prick articles and in my play, I never put out specific suggestions on what we should do to fight back. It’s one thing to scream we must fight for our lives, but how! And I certainly haven’t come up with any suggestions to me, myself, and I on what I should do to not feel so fucking empty and useless. I go to Dr. Homer. I don’t go to Dr. Homer. I go back to Shmuel, another old shrink, whom I left when I realized the Orthodox Jew in him couldn’t really connect with homosexuality. I go to that dyke shrinkette who helped me “get over” Felix. I’ve had so much therapy over the years! You’d think I could get up and walk. Shmuel used to make me feel that I was one of the most important people in the world. How did he do that? How can I get through what I must get through? He’d shrugged his shoulders enigmatically. “No loss ever goes away, if it’s been that meaningful,” he said.

  There’s a benefit tea dance for GMPA at Boy Boy. I go. I know I’m not welcome. The place is packed. Nobody talks to me. By now my fights with the GMPA board are pretty well known. I wonder how Bruce and Joey and Dick and Dan and Mickey and … explained my absence. Fred’s gone crazy. Fred’s become a total loony useless schizophrenic psychopathic self-obsessed idiot. How can I sit here and accept such ignominy? Hi! Hello, there! At last somebody nods.

  “Hello, Gabriel.”

  He turns around and walks away. Gabriel. How long have I known you, Gabriel? Fred, they don’t want you here. Gabriel doesn’t look well. Dick doesn’t look well. Dan doesn’t look well. Bruce doesn’t look well. And another of his lovers has died, but I hear he has a new one.

  “Hi, Jay.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He can’t see you,” Jay’s companion says. “He went blind last week. I guess you can’t tell in the dark. I guess you can’t see a lot of things in your own blindness.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t remember me. We fucked when I was twenty-one. I thought you were quite a man.”

  I slept with this guy once?

  “Fred? Is that you, Fred?”

  “Hi, Jay. I’m sorry to hear about your eyesight.”

  “Yeah. It’s awful. There isn’t anything for it, you know.”

  “I know. What about that ZAP stuff from Greeting? Are you eligible to sign up for a trial?”

  “Not yet. And it doesn’t work for this.”

  It’s hard to look at him. He must have lost fifty pounds. He was a lawyer, a good lawyer. Very smart. I sent Robbie Swindon to him to sort out his dead lover’s will.

  “You heard about Robbie?”

  “Yes,” I answer. “Of course.”

  “You don’t even remember me, do you?” the fuck from long ago asks.

  “Fred—” Jay is still talking.

  But I’ve left them. I’ve been watching the DJ booth. The loud music’s taking a break and so is the DJ. I know him, Bobby, Joey, something. I walk over to his glass wall and wave. He waves back. I motion for him to let me in and he does.

  “Hi!” I say enthusiastically, using our embrace to smother the fact that I can’t remember his name.

  “What’s up?” he asks me.

  “Not much. How about you?”

  “Nothing much. Life’s okay.”

  “Still never seeing the light of day?”

  “I’d shrivel up and die.”

  “Hey, can I use the mike to make an announcement?”

  “Sure. You guys are sure doing great work. Here.”

  And he shoves the mike into my hand. What am I going to say?

  “Hello! Testing, testing. Can you hear me? This is Fred Lemish coming to you from the DJ booth. I have something to say to you. You belong to an organization run by a board of murderers! They refuse to fight to keep you alive. All they do is help you die. Tell them they must fight for you! Tell them they must fight and not be so timid and not be so afraid. Tell them they were wrong to throw me off of the board. Tell them … oh, tell them we created something wonderful and they need me back!”

  This is not what I’d wanted to say. I wanted to rev them up to be fighting troops. To get them angry, but not at me! All I was venting was my never-ending hurts and pains and kvetches. Why can’t I let them go?

  By now there’s a crowd outside the booth, on the other side of the glass wall, staring at me as if I’m crazy. I don’t even look at the DJ as I hand back his mike and open the door and return to the room where the music suddenly goes on again, loudly.

  Five guys, ten guys, a hundred guys, two hundred guys, I don’t know how many, but I’m surrounded and pummeled and poked and yanked.

  “You’re trying to destroy us!”

  “Shut your fucking hole!”

  “Go live in another country!”

  “You’re trying to destroy your very own child!”

  That hits home. I start to run. Once again I realize I can’t criticize this group without hurting it and this group is all there is. What am I doing? When am I going to learn … what?

  I hit the cold air outside and I keep running. I hear someone running after me. The once twenty-one-year-old long-ago fuck. He comes home with me and holds me as I cry my frustration. He wants to stay the night. I don’t want him to stay the night. I send him away. I want to be miserable all alone. I wonder how Daniel is. Daniel’s been sad and strange lately himself. I wonder if he and I should try to make love again. We’re both a mess. A great recipe for beginning “a relationship.”

  I look up. Tommy’s let himself in with his old key.

  “Sugar, are you all right?” He rushes to take me in his arms.

  I don’t know words to use. I hang my head and shudder no.

  He comforts me. He spends the night beside me. He tells me the names of at least a dozen more who’ve died. “Somebody died on the dance floor after you left.” Throughout the night I awake to cry and Tommy is there sobbing with me.

  * * *

  To:

  Sir Polkham Treadway

  Director

  Sir John Greeting Institute of Worldwide Medical Knowledge of All Peoples

  London

  From:

  Vonce Greeting

  President<
br />
  Greeting Pharmaceutical Company

  Washington, D.C.

  My dear Sir Polkham,

  I have been fascinated to read of the remarkable exhibition you have mounted at the Institute, “The Asylum and Beyond: Aspects of Treating the Mentally Ill Since the Thirteenth Century.” You have certainly extracted much of great interest from the far-flung collections assembled by our joint original progenitor, Lord Greeting. I’d heard he was passionate about so many things, but electric machines emitting voltage into the brain, portraits and etchings of patients being whipped and chained and put into Bedlam, detailed early directions for cranial surgery, the list goes on, was certainly ahead of its time. It is no wonder that one review I read complimented you for putting on “the creepiest show in London.”

  I was particularly struck by the work of the Hungarian psychiatrist Leopold Szondi, who in the 1930s maintained that he could tell a patient’s illness by examing their reactions to photos of, for suspected homosexuals, homosexuals. I would be grateful if you could send me more detailed information about this doctor and his experiments, should you have any to hand.

  I should also like to explore the possibility of your transferring this exhibition to America under our joint auspices. Washington’s primary repository for the mentally ill, St. Purdah’s, has been shut down. Easily a hundred years of records of the sort you are exhibiting cannot, for some reason, be located anywhere. I believe I can interest Yaddah University, where I have recently been honored to serve on their Board of Overseers, to join with us in presenting to America the records you have been able to salvage.

  I commend you for your remarkable entrepreneurship!

  Yours in brotherhood,

  Von

  A REPORT FROM LITTLE ROCK

  Bob Saliccia was arrested parking his car behind the one gay bar in town, The Mystic Eagle. He was arrested because he had a suitcase containing a woman’s blond wig and a matching gown and pumps in shocking pink. Officer Bud Bracken, who said Arkansas did not tolerate “this sort of thing,” had hauled him out of his ancient Plymouth two-door. Asked by the judge what “this sort of thing” meant exactly, Bracken said, “He also got falsies and a big brassiere.” The judge pressed him further. “He also got big purple spots on his dick.” The judge asked him how he came to see the suspect’s penis, much less the contents of his suitcase. Bracken answered, “Because he was waving it at me in the parking lot.” Bob Saliccia was then questioned. “He took out his gun, Judge, and said, ‘Let me see what you got.’ When I did, he said, ‘You expect me to let you suck my dick when you so diseased and with all them ladies’ clothes?’ Then he said, ‘You want to work again in your drag you gotta give me the names of a dozen of your friends who come to this bar from over the state line.’ That’s when I got back in my car fast and started my engine and tried to drive away, but he called more cops who cornered me and beat me up and—well, Judge, here I am.” “You ain’t gonna believe some sicko person like this, Judge, against the word of an officer who worked faithful for this city and state for fourteen years?” “Young man,” the judge, an elderly gray-haired unsmiling woman, said to Bob Saliccia, “I don’t like cases in my court like this one here. I suggest you take a powder, maybe move to another state, and never let me see the likes of you again. As for that spotted penis, I am sentencing you to a visit to the emergency room at that hospital down the road. If you got what I hear is going ’round then I don’t want it going ’round any faster because of you being in my state. Come to think of it, maybe they can cut it off. I believe we still have some laws on the books from the good old days when we did such things. I’ll have my clerk check and phone the emergency room. Officer Bracken, please escort him there. And stay with him until he crosses the state line.”

  BRINESTALKER TO SLYME

  Yes, I did tell you that I could change homos to heteros. It is a further extension of the groundbreaking work I undertook at Partekla, which I also told the First Lady about. I started out as a homosexual myself, but because of the pathetic obsession my best friend of that time had for a weak and pathetic lover of his, I determined that if this was what “gay” love was all about, it made me puke. My pivotal Partekla work had to do with turning prissy sissies who liked to get fucked into men who did the fucking. It was my first step out of bondage.

  I am sorry to hear about her son. Unfortunately, I no longer have my office and staff to deal with his case. However, I recommend that someone get in touch with Dr. Charles Socarides in New York and make an appointment for the young man. Charles has had extraordinary success in this field. He and I were once students in Vienna together. I will notify him to expect to hear from you.

  Here are a few words of Charles’s wisdom: “Over the years, I found that those of my patients who really wanted to change could do so.”

  I hope this will be the case for her son.

  Of course I will keep this confidential! You need not have asked.

  In the meantime, may I thank you yet again for your support for our efforts, yours and mine, and for your latest contribution of names for our growing list at the Tricia Institute.

  My best regards to the First Lady.

  FRED GOES TO DENVER, AND THE DENVER PRINCIPLES

  The Denver Concordia Protocol Initiative was actually called into being by Dr. Kiefer Kreditz of the New York Association of Gay Doctors, a drip of the tallest order, who invited me and COD’s Dr. Paulus Pewkin because, as Kiefer said, “It is time for us all to convene and listen to each other.” Pewkin and I shared a room at this conference. I remembered him from my journey to COD and him telling me to get lost and I delivered my Kinsey speech to an empty auditorium. Now he’s saying, “I hope to overcome some of your skepticism about COD and our intent and competence.” I didn’t want to room with him, and told him so, because I still thought his organization was awful, which I also told him, but there were no other rooms. Paulus had already been featured on The Prick’s cover, with that swastika overlaid on his face. I asked him why he was here, had he come to spy on us?

  I tried to talk to him about syphilis. I’d heard he was a leading player in this field and had majored in sexually transmitted diseases at Harvard. “Is there any connection,” I asked him, “between UC and syphilis?” The answer is he was not answering.

  “Why do you guys, by which I mean doctors working for the government, have such difficulty responding to direct questions with direct answers?”

  “I guess we’re afraid to be wrong. You don’t know what a disaster life in government service can be if you’re wrong.”

  I think that was the only sympathetic thing I ever heard him say.

  Out of the blue, a ragtag group of men with UC had decided to piggyback this scheduled “national” meeting of this existing meek organization of gay doctors and health-care professionals presumably interested in their health. Its spokesperson was Michael Callen, who had himself become a pariah for courageously admitting publicly that he knew he was sick because he’d been out there fucking the world. Not only, as I well knew, did no gay man want to hear this, but no gay doctor did either because it marked them as irresponsible for not saying so too. Few doctors were willing to be openly interested in gay anything. They thought they were courageous just showing up here, but I was coming to distrust the lot of them. They claimed to represent a huge group of gay doctors, but they obviously couldn’t get most of them to meetings like this.

  More notably, this wimp Kiefer Kreditz had tried to hijack GMPA in a sleazy way. When we were starting up, we needed a tax-exempt organization to use for our first fund-raiser, the April Showers dance, where we made our first real batch of money. This gay docs group loaned us their tax-exempt number but then they tried to hold us up for some $25,000 of the $50,000 we raised. Fortunately I’d had all the checks mailed to me and I deposited them in our account and I never gave the creeps a dime. Kiefer Kreditz was still antagonistic toward me. “You promised my group money, Lemish, and I’m still waiting for it.” And
then he said, “I’m sorry we agreed to let you speak. I hope you’re not going to tell us all to tell our patients to stop fucking.” Well, if our own doctors are talking this way, you can see that the battle is long and the night is dark and the mountain is high.

  “Don’t you think you have a responsibility to convey the thought that this is spread sexually?”

  Kiefer walked away. Throughout the following two days of the conference I was approached by a half dozen of “our” doctors, all pleading, “Don’t cause alarm, don’t cause panic.”

  So why did you invite me, fellas?

  The hotel refused to post the name of this meeting on their bulletin board of daily events, that word gay again, so the guys with UC went berserk—an early example of the kind of activism I dreamed of—and threatened to do damage unless they gave us our proper billing. The hotel countered by limiting the number of rooms we were stashed in, hence my sharing with Paulus Pewkin. Bruce Niles was here and that would have been nicer. Bruce and I were still friends then. Sort of. No, we weren’t, but I still would have liked to room with him. He brought Tommy, which means Tommy and I couldn’t be seen together. Bruce kept him on that short a leash of distrust. I was the enemy still.

  There were maybe fifty closeted gay docs present and twenty very uncloseted sick men. More and more, guys were showing their symptoms in public. It was no longer just a few guys passing you on the street looking downtrodden and disfigured. Now it was hard-to-look-at people. Spots were breaking out all over the place. Terrible wastings, terrible blotched faces and arms, teeth beginning to fall out, sometimes in the middle of sentences (it was that dramatic). Fingernails so yellow and warped they belonged in a horror movie. Pus exuding from open sores. It was hard to smile and say hi, and to ask “How are you?” was embarassing. So this was our future. The growing brutality of fact.