by Larry Kramer
Washington is such a small town.
THE HOUSE OF THE LIVING DEAD
Nasdean Masrullah, Pedro Ofennback, Laurent O’Brialy, Farrell Ostend, Gray Tiger, Aleen Horst, Gregory Samms, Corbitt Bronson, Samuel Adams Levy III, Sandor Odensee, Forsythe Pleasants, Count Gerhard Leonhardt, Billy “Burp” Broadway, Blake Mistrall, Thomas Jose Santiago-Jones, Wolf Hester, Will Balloon, Andrew Oliphant, Crawford Vander, Lyn Hoffenshue, Norbert Rue, Billy Federickson, Gloria Schmiesshorn, Morton Veblen, Stormy Whether, Altrud Vinnegan, Janus Wysterdamm, Tim Ogun, Robert Jose Alton, Kiefer Kreditz, Calvin Arthur Jones, Markt Heisenberg, Julian Baksal, Giovanni Aranato, John Jacobson, Ivan Kellerman, Matt Luxe, Peter Pauleski, Lindsay Williamson, Gritty Burthem, Morris Jay Libby, Durston Holder IV, Ronnie Mayes, Trumbull Martinson, GoGo Gallery, Marty Fink, Dolphus Schweitzer, June Morganthal, Harold Von Maur, Norstein Theblen, Larry McGuire, Jim Kellyman, Hyman Grossbart, Muhammed Ali-Kver, Drover Kimmel, Rex-Claudette Joelle, Bennett Arthurman, Sheryl DeGiuseppi, Carlos Santa Maria, Barry Ginestra …
INT: GAY CENTER. NIGHT.
A long line of FUQU members are lined up to add names for above list on a big blackboard. Bradley, the new secretary, enters them in his notebook.
AN ARMY OF LOVERS …
Many will write their FUQU history. It was as if each one came to know they were now living and making history. Dominant voices will push their way forward, determined to be heard. That is the way the best histories are written. Isn’t it? Sarah Schulman will supervise, mold, and archive a lot of it. Fred, Maxine, Scotty, Sparks, Ron, David F., so many others, will all have their versions. And of course Dame Lady Hermia and Dr. Sister Grace.
MELVIN
I have been elected treasurer!
I am sixty-seven years old. I am a successful accountant.
FUQU!
Fed Up Queers United!
Queer.
Queer? I’m actually calling myself queer?
The word had been taboo. For decades homosexuals had fought to ban that word from our lips. We are homosexuals! Then came gay! Just when gay was finally acceptable the kids decided to rehab queer. We must corral the language of our oppressors, they say. Why? To defuse it. Oh. How does using it defuse it? It makes everyone hear it and say it. That’s defusing it? It makes it a less powerful word. Then why do you want to call yourself something that’s less powerful? We’ll make it powerful in a different way: it will be ours. Oh, yes. Of course. I must try not to be an old fuddy-duddy. Older gays don’t understand very much about the younger generation. Most of FUQU is young. I always tried to act young for my age. I wore a wig for a while but my young showbiz clients said it was more butch to just shave my head. I would never have thought of that myself. I’m actually able to pick up guys now.
They are a big bunch of angry kids. Cute, though, even handsome. The look of heroes, I tell myself, as we all meet together to plan some sort of future. I’m glad there are so many of them. I’m glad they’re angry. At last someone is angry along with me. Half of my clients have died. My biggest client, Michael, is dying. He directed Chorus Line. Do we all still remember Chorus Line? It made me rich. It made him rich. It made Joe Papp rich. How can we just lie down and die? We have lots to be angry about!
FUQU is so cute and hot that our meetings constantly fill up with even cuter and hotter newcomers. Going to FUQU meetings has replaced going to the bars. Now is not so hot for bars anyway. Go to a meeting. Do something useful. Get out of the house!
Down deep they’re frightened. I can see that. Many of their friends are dead too. They come from coed colleges where men and women live together. They’ve grown up reading gay and lesbian novels and seen movies about themselves and documentaries and reports in the press and actors portraying them on TV. Many of them even have parents who don’t mind their kids are gay. It’s a new world. Older guys mourn the death of the old world. Not me.
They wear black all the time. Black jeans and black work boots or black dress shoes and black shirts and black sweaters and black dungaree jackets. They have the shortest hair one week and the longest hair the next. Guys have sideburns sliced above the ear top one month and way beneath the lobe the next. Whoever is dictating fashion and style is unnamed and invisible but when a change is made it is made quickly and by all. No argument. It’s amazing. They fight with each other very little and with the world a great deal. They are excellent. I just know it. I am in the right place. I just know that, too.
We can change the ways of the world.
FUQU, world!
I just love our name.
“Where are you off to tonight, Melvin?” my office staff asks.
“FUQU!”
They don’t get it yet. But they will.
We started with a few hundred. We hit five hundred one week. Then we hit it every week. Now it’s even more! I collect two dollars from each of them for our rent to the Center and for our expenses. We rent buses to go to D.C. and Albany and Chattanooga and for wherever we’re planning to protest out of town. I’ve invested our funds in money market accounts to make us a few extra bucks. I don’t tell them. I don’t think they’d understand the principle of money market accounts.
Some say we’re an army, growing and growing into a national army. The women members don’t like that comparison. It’s too them, meaning heterosexual. We do not in any way want to be like them! A creep compared us to Nazi storm troopers. That really freaked me out, as the kids say now. I was in Nazi Germany and I know what storm troopers were like and what they did. I was only a little boy, but I remember, and we got out in time, thank God, but the twerpy young man who made that remark, on the floor no less, so that all could hear his stupidity, received a major tongue lashing. By the time I was finished and Maxine was finished, Ralph was in tears, blubbering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything.” At the end of my tirade, I bellowed, “We must be proud of who we are and what we are doing!” There was major applause and whistling and stomping on the floor, with their boots! And at that same meeting I was elected our treasurer, unanimously. I have never been elected anything in my life.
Right-wing zealots are convinced that gays have huge lobbying organizations with enormous power and funding flourishing everywhere, especially in Washington. Can you believe that? In The Washington Monument there was an op-ed from some right-winger warning the world to beware of “sick homosexuals.” I thought The Monument was supposed to be a liberal paper. How can they print stuff like that? I put copies of this op-ed on the back table and Kevin made a motion that we should go down to Washington and picket The Monument. It would have passed but Avram, who is a sensible leftie, said, “Whoa! Let’s do more shit in this town first.” And he was seconded by Eric and Frank, who are already boyfriends. And then Gerri got up and said, “I think we should form a committee to brainstorm what we can do against the Catholic Church.” And there were enormous cheers. We have a lot of Catholics. I forget we have all these Puerto Ricans too. Hispanics, I must call them. I am learning lots about political correctness. “Meet me in the far back corner after the meeting,” Gerri says. And that’s how things get started. Next week they’ll come back with the action all planned out and everything. She’s very respected, Gerri. Big butch dyke with the sweetest angelic face. She’s a contractor. “I’ll do your apartment,” she said to me. “I hear you’re moving. Me and my team are really good.” Her brother died of UC. “My younger brother. It really broke me up. It still does.”
The biggest FUQU demo we’ve had so far was maybe six hundred. With a million faggots in the New York City area, that’s not very many. I’m talking like Fred now. We ran up some pretty big expenses with lawyers and court stuff from getting arrested at our demos, but Tommy Boatwright at GMPA covered them. “But don’t tell anyone, especially my board. They hate Fred. And they don’t trust me because Fred and I are friends.” This fucking community! But FUQU will change all that! As long as we continue to grow at this rate, I’m not worried. We’ll win. We’ll lick
this.
Now there are beginning to be inquiries about chapters in other cities. Out-of-towners come to our meetings to see what we’re about. When our demos sound like fun, we get bigger crowds. Going after Pig Goins is fun and draws a bigger house, as we say in the theater. Going after the governor and schlepping up to Albany is like a matinee on Yom Kippur, no audience. Washington, too, is kind of far, but we might be able to do it every once in a while if the weather’s nice and our treasury increases. Scotty gave us a thousand dollars. And David Hockney is giving us some of his art to auction. Keith Haring, too. Scotty is going to arrange a big art auction. He’s a real organizer type. He was on Wall Street. They fired him when they found out he was positive for UC, and he sued them and won. He got some big settlement. I think he’s the first one to do this and win. He’s from the Main Line. Philadelphia. Rich and handsome. His brother has a yacht. Scotty took a bunch of us on a cruise for a few days. I never took my shirt off. I couldn’t. They’re all so gorgeous. I never had a social life like this.
I wish the media paid us more attention. Just like with GMPA and UC, they don’t cover us. Michelangelo and Bordo and Gabe and Ann and the Blotch have formed a media committee. Ann used to work for CBS and Diane Sawyer. Ann gives little demonstrations for when the camera is on us and we have to utilize every second to get our message out fast. And so adept are the kids at being cute and handsome and smart and convincing that the media will come to love us, I’ll just bet. We are told all the time that the reason they don’t cover us much is because their bosses won’t let them. Well, we’ll just have to give them more dramatic stuff. And then the world’s perception of us will be as a great and indomitable and ferocious army.
You bet.
Great!
FUQU!
DANIEL THE SPY
Almost all on ZAP trials have had a case of PCP pneumonia. COD’s embargoed the treatment for it. There is no data to suggest that PCP prophylaxis is beneficial. According to Jerry, it may, in fact, be dangerous, which is another of his increasing number of dodges. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “Dr. Omicidio does not feel it’s beneficial to remove this particular obstacle with this particular procedure” is what Jerry’s report to the White House said. Yes, he’s been to the White House and had his photo taken with the Ruesters.
Of course Rebby screams any chance he can get. “Why is there still no research into the OIs?” He calls Jerry “a monster,” because “all these young men are dying today.” He said this to his face at a meeting at NITS. In front of a lot of people. People are now seen at meeting after meeting. “My patients live longer than any others!” Rebby yells.
“Why, do you think?” some young doctor asks.
“I won’t give them ZAP, for a start. And I put everyone on PCP prophylaxis even though it is not approved.”
“Where do you get a treatment for it?”
“I order it from South Africa, where it is readily available. It is a simple antifungal spray you inhale that is used there for a number of things. It is an act of murder not to use it!”
He will not be allowed into a NITS meeting again. HAH has put his name on some list.
Dash Snicker says G-D has over half a billion dollars’ worth of advance orders for ZAP already. Debbi Driver says there are a quarter of a million applications for the new PI ZAP trials.
FRANK TELLS ABOUT ZAPS
THE ACTIONS, NOT THE DRUG
I like to tell everyone I invented the zap. I didn’t really, of course, zaps go back to Jesus, but I had to explain to Fred and the floor what a zap was. I said we have to do zaps, lots of zaps, zap zap zap, and they have to be fast, quick, in and out, not too many people, or you can have a lot of people, depends, but you have to catch them off guard, whatever them we’re zapping. I explained that you kept your zaps a secret in your own special little individual cells and we didn’t have to vote on it on the floor like a regular action required.
I went into FUQU because I found out I was UC-positive and there was no in-between, you were either positive and you had to stay alive or you weren’t and you were probably a useless wuss. Although many of my friends who are positive have turned out to be wusses. Drives me nuts. I tell them and of course then they’re not my friends anymore. “Don’t bother me with your shit” is their response. FUQU is my only friends now.
My friend Adrian does a lot of Chinese medicine and acupuncture, and my friend Rick who ran for mayor of Columbus, South Carolina, is into homeopathy and macrobiotics. He wanted me to give up meat and ice cream and I told him he was out of his mind. I said meat and ice cream have kept me alive for all these years, they’re going to keep me alive for the rest of them.
FUQU is slowly becoming more UC-savvy, questioning and researching everything we can. The shit we found and the shit we took! God, we were vomiting and hallucinating to beat the band. There was this stuff from—well, I don’t remember where it was from, but you felt like you were the size of a molecule and falling through a sieve, and you woke up on the floor. I had this young friend who wasn’t UC-positive who wanted me to give it to him because it sounded like fun. I was like, oh please, flush it down the toilet. Then I heard about this stuff in Japan. Guys were taking it there and crying hallelujah. I have friends touring there in some musical. And the company that makes the stuff won’t send it here. What better place to zap than their New York offices, which are listed in the phone book. So we get maybe thirty or so and we barge in on their offices in the Empire State Building and immediately start chaining ourselves to the desks and chairs and to each other, yelling, “Your drug or our lives!” and all the employees are terrified and do not have any idea what we’re talking about. The American office only deals with shoes the company also makes. Michelangelo and Blotch had notified the Japanese media, which shows up in droves. Gloria, who speaks a (very) few words of Japanese, sort of explains to the assembled staff what we’re on about and now they’re rooting for us, raising their arms like the prizefighters in Rocky, and I guess these were the photos that got into the Japanese press because within a week I swear we had a message from their home office that they were looking into the issue and would get back to us, which they actually did. A few months later they would sell us this drug, which was called dextran sulfate. It didn’t work. But we had got it. The grungy Truth, of course, ignored us altogether. We will get back at them!
This was our first effective zap, and we got to work with each other smoothly and we all had a ball doing it, which of course is most important. The more we work together, the more we come to really bond and love each other.
Fred knows Hal Prince, the big Broadway producer, who has a contact in Tokyo, and his wife has a friend she loves a lot who is very sick, so Hal got his office to send us a load of some other Japanese stuff we heard about called Urdzu. Our Dr. Levi Narkey had it analyzed and said, “Well, it couldn’t hurt. It seems to be composed of compressed dirt and herbs.” So we started on our own little trial, using a lottery to parcel the stuff out to some sick guys and some well guys, and sat and waited for something to happen, which it didn’t, except that Wallace died, he was the sickest of the bunch and was on his way out anyway. “Thanks, guys,” he said to us in the hospital, “I really appreciate what you tried to do for me.”
I was there with Eric, who always makes a big point of going to see anyone in the hospital, and it really brings it home to you and makes us want to fight even harder. We stayed with Wallace until he died. He was an old friend of Eric’s and he had no one else with him while he was dying. Awful sad. Awful. He said the Urdzu made him feel better. Eric says it was probably only what he called the “placebo effect.” Meaning you feel better because you want to feel better after you take something unidentified that is supposed to make you feel better. He’s learning a lot of stuff like this.
We are going to be distributing this Urdzu stuff. We have this dynamic young girl, Claudette, she can’t be more than about fifteen or sixteen. She’s French. She’s going to be in c
harge of selling it to whoever wants to try it. She’ll also sell that lipid shit made from soy margarine. It really stinks. I mean the smell. Suzanne and Griff have learned how to rip it off. She’s a doctor and is administering it to several of her patients. This shit comes from Israel, from the Weitzman Institute, “so it must be okay if the Jews take it,” Suzanne says.
Did I mention that I’m falling in love with Eric? He’s strong and silent and he gets things done. He doesn’t talk nearly so much as I do. Eric and Fred are old friends from the Y. He really loves Fred. I think Eric would follow Fred to the end of the earth. Eric says Fred saved his life. He read all the stuff Fred wrote in The Prick and immediately stopped fucking around. “No one else was telling me to be careful. My doctor wasn’t saying dipshit. And he’s gay.”
The first really good friend we made after we moved in together, Bernard, he died last night. We were up with him until he died at dawn. It’s a weird and transforming experience, let me tell you. I never saw anyone die before Wallace and Bernard. Eric has seen it twelve times by now.
CLAUDETTE
I wasn’t fifteen. I was seventeen. Almost. I had graduated from Brearley and I didn’t want to go to college yet. I heard about FUQU and it sounded like just what I wanted to do. I’d read about Athenian democracy and I wanted to be a part of something like that. We have hundreds of people every week, trying to make the process more goal-oriented and specific. Spud and I became friends, investigating the same drugs and companies. He was cool. He had green hair one week and purple hair the next, so I did that too. It really turned the other women off, so I stopped it. I could tell some of them were interested in me and I didn’t want to kibosh that. I was in my lesbian phase. Spud’s parents had been in a concentration camp and he was UC-positive. He was cute and we hung together even though I was a lesbian. I had been both, back and forth, trying things out, and Spud thought that was cool. “Such extraordinary life lessons we are playing with,” I happened to say to him. For some reason, that made him start to cry. “Oh, come on, I’ll race you to the corner,” I said. And we did, just like two kids. I let him win, of course.
