The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  I desire now to say with emphasis that our concern for the bitter fruit of sin is coupled with Christlike sympathy for its victims, innocent or culpable. Our unequivocal statements are not hateful. If certain behaviors are abominable sins in the sight of God, and they are, then the Church and its officers would be unloving were they not to sound the voice of warning, just as a loving mother warns and protects her small child from the terrible consequences of swallowing lye. The Church must label as wrong behavior that which impedes eternal progress. Failure to do so would be cowardly and unloving. The world, rejecting eternal values while focusing on the physical and carnal, labels the Church intolerant, judgmental, and mean. The opposite is true.

  Satan passionately does not want us to follow the Heavenly Father’s plan. Therefore, he formulates cunning imitations based on the principle of gratification and pleasure. Subtly, his devious detours draw some of us away from our divine destiny. Satan attempts to distort our vision and make us blind.

  God’s plan tells us that our place in an eternal blueprint didn’t begin with our birth. Nor will it end with our death and burial. The plan of redemption helps us understand that without covenants made in holy temples, we will not in the eternities to come enjoy the companionship of father, mother, brothers, sister, wife, children, or grandchildren.

  We are eternal beings participating in a critically important temporary experience. This fallen earth is not our home. We are being tested. The power of Satan is real. He seeks to make us eternally miserable by tempting us to misuse our sacred procreative power and by confusing what it means to be male and female.

  Individuals with these disorders have choices to make. The straight and narrow path leads the right way, regardless of same-gender attraction’s cause, or whether or not it can be cured. The ongoing debate about the cause of same-gender attraction and whether it can be cured is irrelevant in the context of true religion. The right way is very simple. You did not choose to have these feelings, but you can do something about them.

  Homosexual or lesbian behavior is a serious sin, as is heterosexual fornication in adultery. It must be stopped! The claim “I was born that way” does not excuse actions or thoughts that fail to conform to the commandments of God. We must humble ourselves, count our Gospel blessings, and take the tough straight and narrow path that leads us to our eternal home and the fullness of the Heavenly Father.

  In order to stop homosexual behavior one must comprehend the seriousness of the transgression, feel deeply repentant, and have a firm commitment to change. The best way is never to offend the Holy Ghost in the first place. Let the Holy Ghost be your constant companion. When we make bad choices we need to get the light of Christ back. The right course of action remains the same: control thoughts and never, never participate in homosexual or lesbian behavior. In the day of resurrection you will have normal affections and be attracted to the opposite sex.

  God bless you, my beloved young friends, and be with you and give you the courage to admit and correct mistakes. Pray for strength to overcome. You will be given power through the Savior to overcome your burden. You will possess the power to control your thoughts and to restrain yourself from behaviors that destroy.

  I promise you, your Church promises you, all Disciples of Lovejoy promise you, Jesus Christ promises you, that we shall all do everything in our power to fight this fight with you to condemn anything that keeps your own righteousness from being achieved.

  May the Holy Ghost save us all!

  TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME

  MAXINE

  I was having these dyke dinners. I couldn’t work in an organization where I didn’t feel connected to people. And especially in a large, male organization I wanted to get to know the women. When you sit in a group with all those men and it’s not you that it’s happening to, and you’re trying to figure out what you’re doing there, it’s good to verbalize that to each other.

  So, next the Women’s Committee decided that we wanted to focus on the only group of people who had not been told that they should do something—straight men. What is a quintessential, straight-male place where we could do this kind of an action? And then, Kathy and Rebecca—both big baseball fans—Kathy said, A baseball game! And both of them got electrified. Maria nearly had a fit, because she was, like, what? She didn’t know from baseball games. But everybody else was going, Yeah, a baseball game, a baseball game. So immediately, we called up and found out, believe it or not, that there was going to be a home game at Shea Stadium on the day we designated Women and UC Day—what luck. So we got up on the floor of FUQU, and I was the person who presented it. So I said, What we want to propose is an action for Women and UC Day at Shea Stadium. Dead silence in the room—absolutely dead silence, tense dead silence. And then somebody stood and said, You’re crazy! We go to Shea Stadium, they’re going kill us there! Those homophobes! And then other people started standing up and saying the same thing, and I was saying things like, It’s the men in suits who are killing us. And then, Ron, God bless him, stood up and said, Okay, folks, let me just tell you that a lot of gay men go to baseball games, and I am one of them. And it was like he came out of the closet as a baseball nut, and as soon as he did that, another man said, I do too. Still, people were really scared, so we would bring really detailed descriptions like what to wear to a baseball game, how a baseball game is played, and when, exactly, we’re going to do something. We decided to make banners. We came up with all these great slogans: UC IS NOT A BALL GAME, DON’T BALK AT SAFER SEX: STRIKE OUT UC. Our idea was to buy seats in three parts of the stadium—right field, left field, and center field—and it would be like call and response. One group would open their banner, and then the next and the next. So we had to buy tickets, but we didn’t have a lot of money, we decided we would start by buying one bunch of tickets—like sixty—three rows of twenty—and then we’d sell those, and with the money, we’d get the next bunch. We had no idea that this was going to get to be a huge thing. And then we decided that actually what this was going to be was an educational action—that we weren’t going to rush the field or anything, because it was going to be televised on ESPN and we could reach hundreds of thousands of people who would see these messages, and we would also give out stuff at the gate. Debbie, who was on our committee—she worked for Creative Time, which does all kinds of performance art stuff—was already meeting with the security at Shea Stadium about doing something in their parking lot. We had been trying to get in touch with the Mets, because we wanted them to proclaim it Women and UC Day, and we kept calling, and they were not calling us back. Debbie was at a meeting with the community police about how they were going to handle her event, and they didn’t know she was in FUQU, and she heard one cop say to another, Did you hear? FUQU is going to storm the stadium. David France had written an article in The Village Vice—the first big article about FUQU—and he mentioned how we were going to do this action at Shea Stadium, and I guess some cop read it. So they were talking about how they had to get riot cops out, and we just didn’t want this thing to escalate into that. Gerri called up the local precinct and said she was from FUQU, and that she just wanted them to know that we were coming down to the stadium to do an educational action and that we weren’t going to rush the field, in case they were concerned. And by the time that night came, the head of the Mets met us, took our press packets and our leaflets, and gave them to everyone in the press box. They let us be at every single entrance. We gave out twenty thousand leaflets. It was a great leaflet. It said, Here’s the score. It had a score card: Single—there hasn’t been one single acknowledgment about women getting UC; Double—double the number of women have UC than last year. I forget what Triple was, and then it said, Home run—most men don’t use condoms. And then, No Glove, No Love. It was in Spanish and English. And we gave out twenty thousand.

  We wound up selling three sections of 60 seats each, which is 180, and we had these banners, and it worked out great.

  We started opening up
the banners, and everybody started swaying with the banners, and then the people across the way opened up their banners, and then their banners started swaying. And then the third group opened up their banners, and their banners started swaying. You could see them from anywhere. You could read them really, really clearly, big white letters on a black background in a night game with these big spotlights. And there were loads of young people—a lot of young kids come; this is where they hang out on Friday nights with their friends. We didn’t have any bad experiences from anyone. And then the cops escorted us to the subways. It was such a creative action and it was really fun to do. It was a combination of serious politics and joyful living that was so different from the left, which basically believed that you couldn’t smile until the revolution was over. We would do actions where we really put our bodies on the line, and then we’d go out and party all night. When you don’t have time for that kind of stuff, you basically dehumanize a movement. A movement is about people. If you don’t have a community of people who make you feel good about who you are and what you’re doing, you’re not going to stay in it. You need some life. Because it was sort of like as soon as you were getting over feeling that you could go on after somebody’s death, somebody else would die. So it was hard for people. It wasn’t an abstraction. It was people you were working with all the time, and being with all the time in a social situation as well.

  AND BY THE WAY, DON’T CRY

  MAGENTI

  Nobody dealt with grief, because we kept ourselves very busy. You were always on to another action. And the tacit agreement people made was: And by the way, don’t cry. Instead, the understanding was that you would take your grief and turn it into rage, and you would take that rage and do something with it.

  MARSHALL

  But grief is also sadness, and loss. And a lot of people had already experienced that, and did not want to feel those things, and were tired of feeling sad and alone and defeated. So it made sense that this was just the place for them to be.

  GENEALOGIES

  LAST WEEK

  We’ve all been each other’s lovers. That’s among the most moving facts about this plague.

  Do we all have some sort of genealogy of death?

  History’s not been very kind to sex. Sex has always been the embarrassment swept under the rugs of history. History’s not been very kind to homosexuals either.

  What a bang-up combo double whammy.

  DARREN IN INVINCIBLE

  Darren fucked with O’Donaghue last week and Egypt told me O’Donaghue has minpasmosis, evidently very rare. Egypt says no one he knows has ever seen it. He had to look it up in some ancient text. (Dr. Sister Grace was always rushing off to consult some ancient text. “There is nothing new under the sun, Freddie,” she always said; “all this new shit is so perverse it can’t be new, it must be something ancient coming back to haunt us.” God, I miss her mightily.) This minpasmosis takes on average one day to catch, manifest itself, and kill you. That means O’Donaghue should be dead by now, which he obviously isn’t. “Well, so much for that fucking ancient text,” I can hear Grace saying. Darren has heard that O’Donaghue has the minnies (it’s ten minutes before it has this nickname) and thus thinks his own days are numbered. Darren has never been sick in his whole life (“I still have my tonsils and appendix!”), and now here he is, on the brink of some ancient death.

  O’Donaghue had never slept with anyone else but Darren. He was his first. He’d been a virgin. O’Donaghue was seventeen when they met, and he was nineteen now and about to be dead.

  Darren himself then gets sick. He faints at Macy’s while redoing one of the windows that faces Thirty-fourth Street. It’s the night of his FUQU affinity group meeting. Somehow he manages to scribble down Bradley’s phone number for the ambulance attendants before instructing them to get him to Invincible, to Dr. Egypt Poo, who immediately connects him to an assortment of tubes and wires. Bradley calls me and all the members of their group, which is called the Macy Monsters in honor of Darren, and a bunch of us all rush to Invincible, where none of us is allowed to see Darren.

  Egypt lets me visit the next day. Darren is convinced he’ll never get out of Invincible. Invincible Crewd-Harbinger is known as guinea pig hell. Tommy says Invincible is the richest and has all the latest wizardry. It all looks very last-ditch-standish, science-fictiony. Tommy hates this place. “They don’t want us here any more than any other place does.” Emma told me to tell guys not to go there. But Darren went because it was where O’Donaghue now had died and Darren wants to join him in the next world with as little delay as possible. “I figure his spirit is in this room, certainly on this floor, because this is where we’re all kept, and I’ll die and he’ll come and take my hand real fast and lead me wherever he’s hanging out and that way I guess it won’t be so scary. I guess that sounds pretty weird.” Nineteen-year-old kid talking this way.

  Darren had come to some lecture I did at Columbia about what it was like to write movies about “real-world events.” I only did a couple classes. Movies were a pile of shit compared with the reality of the world I was dealing with now. Look at how no one wants to make my play-movie, even with Adreena. I keep writing new drafts for people, for free even, when they come along and say they want to make it. I’ve written seven drafts so far for her. Darren and the class, of course, wanted to hear all about her.

  Darren cries when he sees me. “You came to visit me?” Felipe, his (uninfected) roommate, is with him, holding his hand; the devotion flowing between these kids is heartbreaking. If only the rest of the world knew how to love so. It tortures me that I can’t honor any of this sufficiently with mere words. What is “this”? How can I make it clear? Just tell the facts, Fred; just tell the facts; that’s all you can do. Don’t embroider. Keep yourself out of it. I wish I could. No, I don’t. We’re all in this together.

  THESE ARE THE FACTS!

  The facts are that Darren suddenly bolts up from my arms, like he’s been electrocuted, then falls back on the mattress, dead.

  Now I hold Felipe in my arms.

  “I’ve never loved anyone, ever, in the world, like I loved Darren! And he was just my roommate.”

  INT. THE CENTER. NIGHT.

  Meeting of FUQU in packed room. Felipe writing names on blackboard: Darren Reynolds. Michael O’Donaghue. Fred stands facing the group as Felipe finishes.

  FRED: They both came to us so young. Let’s try not to forget them.

  We see many of the crowd with tears in their eyes. Ron starts a chant, picked up by the crowd.

  RON: Fight back! FUQU! Fight back!

  Iris stands up to talk. She stands until the room is silent.

  IRIS: I was sent this letter from a Mr. Dropkin.

  DROPKIN (tall, black hair, a troublemaker): That’s me.

  IRIS: You want to know why it’s taking T and D so long to what you call “deliver.”

  DROPKIN: That’s me and a lot of us, I’m sure.

  IRIS: You have a lot to learn about what I’m trying to teach you.

  DROPKIN: Such as?

  IRIS: Such as immunology, virology, epidemiology, blood, molecular biology, pharmacology, toxicology, clinical medicine, how stuff gets funded, how NITS and FADS and COD work … Any other questions? Guys, stand up and answer anybody’s questions.

  A bunch stand up immediately. Sparks, Scotty, Claudette, Barry, Perry, Eigo, Spencer, Spud, Rebecca, others. No questions come from the floor. Iris smiles. Applause from the floor.

  ONWARD!

  We can’t sit still! Right now I’m coasting along on a certain euphoria that Fred Lemish is getting his dream organization.

  But the Ruester is still not crowing. He still has not acknowledged we’re alive.

  And we haven’t faced up to moving on NITS yet.

  But this is what we have been doing. It seems like an awful lot. It’s not enough, not even for a whole year:

  We did twenty-five full demonstrations with the whole organization. We did seventy-three z
aps with affinity groups or individuals without the whole organization. We protested on Wall Street; at the General Post Office on income tax deadline night; at the White House, where we also performed civil disobedience (CD), meaning seventy-six of us got arrested (including me); at the Third International UC Conference in Washington, where we booed Vice President Dredd Trish after Ruester got shot; we had our Concentration Camp float in the Gay Pride Parade; we picketed at Federal Plaza here in the city and had CD (173 arrests); we did our famous five-day, twenty-four-hours-a-day, round-the-clock picketing of Invincible Crewd-Harbinger that really freaked them out, not because they were the worst but because they were supposed to be doing research and practically nobody is in their various OI and ZAP trials. There are supposed to be ten thousand people in trials across America and there are eight hundred, only eight hundred, across the whole country. Iris and Kersh and Gary and David G. are trying to figure out why this NITS system isn’t working. We did a little demo outside St. Putrid’s to protest Cardinal Buggaro being appointed to a third UC Commission; we did phone ZAPs of Northwest Airlines, booking tickets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, for their refusal to carry a sick and dying patient; we demo-ed in D.C. at the public hearing of that useless second Presidential UC Commission; we demo-ed at the Supreme Court and at the United Nations and at City Hall against Goins; at an appearance of Pat Robertson in Bed-Stuy; and we had a number of sit-ins in the office of the fink new NYC health commissioner, Elliott Garbantz, for lowering the number of UC cases in the city—just like that, poof, they’re gone!—so they don’t have to officially statistically claim them or pay them for disabilities; and in December we interrupted a forum of the presidential candidates at Javits Center. Not bad for such a young group. We’ll do better next year.