by Larry Kramer
GENEALOGIES
A FEW DAYS IN THE LIVES OF …
Scotty is in love with Perry and everyone is smitten with Adam, who is in love with himself. Jonnie is particularly in love with Adam. Adam disdains them all. Adam says he walks home and has sex with two or three or four good-looking guys on the way. It’s his way of forgetting that he’s not happy with his life or his career or where he’s going or who he is. He has little respect for anyone who’s after his body. His body is rock-hard and overmuscled and his small head looks out of proportion. He knows he is not as connected upstairs as he wants to be.
Fred worries that his children are too promiscuous and that not all that much has changed since the old days, not that the old days were all that old or long ago. He occasionally throws into conversations about who is seeing whom, “I hope you’re using condoms,” and Bart or Mart or Evan or Gladwin will snort something like, “You are such an old auntie!” “Well, you all just better be,” he declares, and hears “Yes, Mom,” or “Sure, Pop,” in response.
In a more ordered and orderly world, Scotty and Perry should be lovers. They would be good for each other. Scotty is good with organization and Perry is good with details and they both are cute and verbal, so people look up to them. There is one fly in the ointment: they both like to get fucked. Although the terminology of earlier eras—top and bottom—has been more or less retired as more and more like to do both, there are fellows who prefer one over the other. So it’s a problem when a bottom falls in love with a bottom. Scotty is so in love with Perry that he says he doesn’t think about it: “I only like sex during courting anyway. After, I just want to cuddle and watch TV and sleep in someone’s arms.” And Perry says that’s what he likes too. His beloved now dead Francis is and will be forever on his mind, so cuddling’s just fine for the moment. For a while, this will work. Everyone watches and waits. All boyfriending in this place is highly visible and of great interest and is a constant flow. And everyone knows how Perry lost his lover and still has scars.
Perry’s also a young Greek god. He doesn’t know it like Adam knows it (and as Bruce Niles never knew it; Bruce, who has lesions now, and whose gorgeous model Albert died, and who has a new boyfriend named Turtle, who’s sick now too). Or if Perry knows it, it doesn’t do him any good. He’s convinced his life is totally fucked up. He doesn’t know what to do with it. He lost the only love of his young life, and since Francis’s death he hasn’t let himself love anyone else. He just won’t! He liked Scotty fine when they were just friends, but when Scotty said he was in love with him, Perry was suddenly uncomfortable. Still, Perry is lonely enough in the big city that he just stays put for now.
Both Scotty and Perry test positive for The Underlying Condition. There is this test now. At last. Most guys won’t take it. What’s the point? There’s no medicine that works. I’d just as soon not know, a lot of guys feel, but some want to know anyway. So now Scotty and Perry know they’re going to die. Though they say, I’m going to live through this! Everyone comes to say that. I’m going to be the one who licks it. I know everyone says that, but I’ll be the one. You’ll see. Fred doesn’t have a sick friend who hasn’t said it.
“I loved Francis. Francis loved me back,” Perry told Scotty.
“Francis is dead.”
“I know that!”
Francis made all our decisions, he wants to tell him. He made me laugh, too. I don’t laugh very much anymore. He tells Fred all of this and it breaks Fred’s heart.
Perry had worked in Washington for Daniel but Daniel and Daniel’s musty house were depressing. He was smart and all that, but he didn’t have much sparkle and oomph. He also talked to Perry about Fred constantly, all Fred was doing and had started, etc., etc. It was Fred this and Fred said that, so after a while Perry had to leave him a nice note and get to New York and join FUQU and find Fred for himself. Fred turned out to be just as Perry knew he’d be. Doing something important. That’s all that Perry wants now.
So he spends all his time going to all the meetings that FUQU is constantly having. No sooner does a problem present itself than a committee is formed on the spot and a meeting time established. Soon it’s possible to go to a different meeting every night and over the weekend. He managed to be tired enough at the end of each day so all he had to do with Scotty is allow himself to be cuddled. He still had dreams about Francis and would often wake up in tears. Scotty wasn’t very good with tears, so it wasn’t long before he suggested it was time for Perry to bunk somewhere else. Good thing there is already a firm tradition in FUQU of bedding down on spare beds here and there. There’s always a place to stay for however long it’s needed. Charlie had an extra bedroom.
In a few months, Fred will fix Scotty up with Kevin and that will last for a short while too, until it turns out that they’re both bottoms as well. Ah, the love complications of wartime.
When Fred found out he was positive he felt existentially that he’d reached the end of time and was walking around in a void. He’d been writing his play about the Ruesters, Just Say No, and had to have an emergency hernia and they’d given him the blood test, which they weren’t supposed to do without his consent. The surgeon said, after Fred protested, “Oh, stop it, Mr. Lemish. What if I had cut myself while operating? You are lucky I operated on you at all. Most surgeons at Table will not operate on anyone who has any indication of UC. Period. Any other questions? Your scar is healing very nicely. You’re welcome.”
Dodo’s test is still going to be a big problem, loaded with curves and innuendoes.
THE ARRIVAL OF IRIS
An unsmiling straight woman scientist named Iris got up one evening and said to the crowded room, “You guys don’t know dipsqueak about what you are fighting or should be fighting. If anyone is interested, I’ll teach you.” She’d been observed sitting silently at earlier meetings, sternly frowning. Some of the women wondered if she might be some sort of a plant. Infiltrators are already being feared, and while an announcement at each meeting’s start encourages unknown strangers to identify themselves or leave, no one really believes that will work.
Fred realizes immediately that the appearance of Iris could be the beginning of something really important in FUQU’s development and history, and in the history of UC, and indeed the history of The American People.
Iris gathered her group and they call themselves the Treatment+Data Committee. T+D. It’s Sparks and Perry and Stephen and James and Scotty (who is also on Fund-Raising) and Suzanne, that straight doctor with her straight infected husband she shouldn’t have to put up with “unless I weren’t such a masochist, mea culpa, mea culpa.” Kersh and Barry are interested in the Data part. And Eigo, Sparks, and Scotty and Fred of course are obsessed with finding a treatment. The assortment will grow. Power will come to them commensurate with the knowledge they now will gain with Iris.
Iris is a Queens housewife who is a biochemist Ph.D. and has worked for both industry and in the medical field. “They both are difficult places to work,” she says. “You’ll see. This is a corrupt system, our health-care system. It’s hard to work in and hard to change.” Doesn’t smile much but she’s secretly pleased that her group has attracted smart ones; she can tell.
She starts by teaching them about how NITS is in charge and how it operates, as well as FADS and COD and HAH. “They’re different but they aren’t so different. But they think they’re different, which will make our job more difficult. I think our big advantage over them will be our learning how to work with each other. They don’t.” Then she says, emphatically, “We are going to work together. You hear me?” She made it sound like a religious commandment.
Of course Fred joins this T+D committee. He is not naturally adept at navigating scientific stuff, like the others are already showing themselves to be. “I can’t differentiate between an antibody and an anecdote,” he jokes. Since he senses that this is the committee that will do the major important stuff, he thanks Iris publicly every chance he gets. He’s already proud o
f her. Stephen, and then Perry after Stephen dies, writes up all their meetings and puts copies on the back table for the main meetings on Monday night to read, along with piles of stuff now appearing in ever-greater quantities, put out by all the committees, and individuals as well. Everyone is amazed by the quantity and the quality of the stuff people are locating and even getting duplicated in their own offices on the sly. There must be a dozen committees by now, though they fluctuate as people’s interests change, or as members die or move away.
Soon Melvin has to arrange a lease on a copying machine and they have to rent a room to put it in. “Is this an office? Do we call this our first office?” Maxine and Tom C. want to know about the room way over on Tenth Avenue. “I don’t think we should have an office,” Maxine says. “We are a grassroots organization.” As if that would explain it to everyone, like it did to Maxine, who remembers “every political movement from way back when. And the ones that last are the ones that do not have offices and Xerox machines.”
But T+D especially needs the machine, so its acquisition is begrudgingly approved by the floor.
FRED AND MAXINE
Strangely, Fred and Maxine like each other. They are from entirely different … well, everything. She has seen it all, a Marxist, a Stalinist, a Hegelian, a Trotskyite. “Yes, I go back that far,” she tells Fred, who is interested in learning what they all were. “No, there are still a few of each around.” When she explains them to him, he can’t keep them straight. He remembers when he was in London many of the young writers he hired were proud Marxists. To be caught up so fervently in a political dialogue of diatribes and dialectics was new to him then, and it still is. Fred will joke that he and Maxine are FUQU’s momma and poppa. “I did not become an activist until UC came along,” Fred almost boasts. And then he said in a phony English accent. “And I lived abroad, you know.” Then, as if he is suddenly back then and there, reliving something or other, “An American accent got you better everything, service, tables, you could get away with almost anything being an American.” Including the English young men, he’s thinking, the cute guys with their smooth milky white skin who seemed to like older men, who liked to have sex with him and talk about coming to America, where they’d never been. He wonders what’s happening now to the guys over there, in London, where he lived for a while a long time ago, where he was (more or less) happy, and made a good movie that he was (yes) proud of. Another lifetime ago, Fred. And he snaps out of then and comes back to now.
Maxine takes him aside. “I’ve been watching you. Whatever’s on your mind, you’re going to torture yourself to death. And it’s going to marginalize your effectiveness, which can be mighty and useful. Stop it!” He smiles at her and they hug. It’s good for everyone to see that they’re friends. Maxine is a major power force from the very beginning. She is a take-charge kind of person. When she talks, people listen. As more women arrive, she immediately corrals them into their own dyke caucus and feeds them brunch on Saturday at her house in Brooklyn. Max is a retired professor at a city college. Along her route she married, had two daughters, discovered she was a lesbian, and got rid of the husband. In his diary, Fred writes, “I get too angry. Max doesn’t get angry. Max stays cool. I must ask her how she does this with such apparent ease.”
“Because I have been on too many front lines for too many years,” she will answer him. “After a while all the fights are pretty much the same and all the cast of characters are types I know how to deal with by now.” She taught psychology. “You’re an artist. I’m not an artist. Artists are meant to get excited and lose their cool. Just try not to let your psyche get caught in the doorjamb too often as the door gets slammed and then slammed again in our faces.”
The women, of course, adore her.
AND EVERYTHING CONTINUES TO GROW
FUQU!
And more people become infected. And get sick. And die. Since fear is around more tangibly, no one talks about this. Yes, fear moves right along. It’s stopping for no one.
About half of everyone in FUQU has been tested and half of these are positive. Or have already buried a lover. Or a best friend. Or a roommate. Everyone knows someone now.
Perry’s count is five hundred. Under five hundred is the beginning of trouble. Under five hundred means you are supposed to take ZAP, which some guys have been taking on yet another trial. He doesn’t want to take ZAP. As far as he’s concerned, ZAP sounds like poison. Most of T+D are in strong agreement. Dodo and Dash Snicker may be silenced for the moment. “But Jerry can’t be trusted,” Barry is saying already, seconded by Annmarie, who is particularly interested in Haiti. She went to Haiti before and during the period when Haiti was considered a launching pad for this plague. She loves Haiti and it continues to break her heart. She sees that they have taken themselves out of the limelight, the Haitians going extremely ballistic in denying responsibility for anything to do with UC, and they have been able through diplomatic pressures to get themselves removed from that stain of the list of the guilty, as well as removed from whatever help might have come to them via HOW had they only stood tall.
Blacks from anywhere, certainly American blacks, are furiously unwilling to come anywhere near UC discussions. The number of people of color who show up at FUQU, though it grows, is never as substantial as it should be. The same was the case at GMPA. Bruce and Fred and Tommy had gone to black churches and tried to get them unsuccessfully to come and show their faces and be heard.
How difficult it is to stay on track! There are so many shoots and offshoots, not only of UC, but now of FUQU itself. All the actions, the demos. They just happen, almost spontaneously. That there is so much unrelenting energy is very moving. Best just to let it find its way, Fred believes, not that there is any other way to handle it. Deal with the problems when they occur. This was pretty much the way GMPA had sprouted. People came along and said, I want to do this, I can do this, and Fred said, Go ahead. If Tommy hadn’t come along to put some rigid armor on the process, GMPA might have been what FUQU looked to be becoming, what Fred had wanted in the first place. A fighting force. Fred prefers this unstructured way. He hates the “job descriptions” that Tommy rigidly imposed at GMPA. The two still fight about this. The wear and tear on Tommy running GMPA are manifestly visible, but Fred is insensitive to it. Fred can be blind to other people and their problems if they get in the way of what he thinks he wants, of what he thinks is needed, of what he thinks must be.
Here, at FUQU, amazingly, Fred sits to the side most of the time, watching to see where all the rivulets will coalesce. Oh, he has his blow-ups, and even a few threats of “If you don’t do this, I am leaving,” to which no one pays any attention. Almost everyone knows who Fred is and many of them are respectful of this, and what he has done. Many, however, do not and are not. This proves interesting to him, if to no one else. He claims he wants to know when he is criticized. “How else can I learn?” He sounds naïve. He sounds too self-important. To how many is he a peculiarity: the aging infected gay man?
* * *
Scotty’s count is 250. It was 650 when Perry was willing to sleep with him. But after Perry left it had fallen, his vidge count, rapidly, to 250. He is feeling shitty. He quite casually says all the time that he expects to die from UC. Greeting-Dridge will be charging $25,000 for a year’s worth of its poison ZAP capsules. No wonder insurance companies are getting angrier, refusing to insure UC patients. You’d think our very own government of our very own country would see to it that no medicine cost anyone $25,000 a year. Scotty and Sparks think revenge is in order against G-D. Scotty has a touch of the film director in him, whipping things up. Fred can already see him in boots, with a riding crop.
* * *
Dr. Monserrat Krank is now on TV trying to convey the message to America that this shit is actually happening to everyone, please to open your eyes, but she isn’t having much success doing anything, even though she’s rich and looks maternal, and of course is a heterosexual, and a well-connected one. Jonnie s
ays he believes that in her heart of hearts Dr. Krank feels it’s already too late. Fred is beginning to intimate as much too, to Tommy, who agrees with him, and that’s very depressing to the few who overhear them. Cute Tony who has just tested positive wrote him a letter asking him to please stop saying these things “because I need your courage to keep me going.” At every meeting guys come up to him to whisper and beg, “Have you heard about anything good that’s coming along?” The sad way of the world. Fred sees this every single minute.
Jonnie, by the way, is preparing for Dr. Krank and Dr. Itsenfelder and their new UC consortium a directory of possible stuff out there that people might look into taking. But when you look at the items on the list, not so many people are rushing to get them. What are Virdiginess capsules, available “out of” Richmond, even if they are available from and administered by Dr. Ralph Phalanx, who is said to have a decent reputation down there? “I have to give my kids something,” he tells The Richmond–Chesapeake Bay Boys Reader, a gay throwaway. “I went into my momma’s old book of early Indian remedies and Virdiginess is one of them. It’s made from a local bark. Lots of famous drugs that work are made from bark. It can’t hurt.” Trace Huvel and Robert Garcia went down to Richmond to get some of this stuff. Robert is looking terrible. Jonnie does say that Dr. Krank is nervous about including stuff like this in their treatment advisories but Dr. Itsenfelder also says “it can’t hurt.” Dacey Dienstag was going to go down with Robert and Trace but he died. Monserrat quietly asks Jonnie to tone down his “noble ideas.” She has her own memories of her own dramas and near obliteration from “the scientific community” for her championing, with Rebby, of Irgardium-X. (Which, interestingly enough, someone is considering now trying out on one of the OIs.)
