The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  Fred is excited. I am, I am.

  RON

  We also did Seven Days of Rage. Each day an action on a specific issue: homophobia (a thousand protestors march up Christopher Street with pink balloons and at Sheridan Square we hold a massive Kiss-In); People with UC (University Hospital, Newark) protesting that only four people are enrolled in New Jersey trials; People of Color (leafleting in Harlem); UC and Substance Users (NYC Department of Health); UC and Prisoners (Harlem State Office Building); UC and Women (Shea Stadium, which Max arranged brilliantly); Global UC (Rockefeller Center); Pediatric UC (protesting the placebo blind trials in children, a difficult issue to make clear, outside the FAO Schwarz toy store on Fifth Avenue, a pretty lame demo); National Day of Rage (back to Albany, Vito Russo makes his historic speech: “Someday you will remember this”).

  PERRY

  Mister Always Supportive Sparks Puffington said: “The net effect so far is a frenzy of small actions diluted by the sheer volume of activity.” He and Scotty were visibly unhappy, dissatisfied, lurking around, never smiling. I suddenly wondered if we could trust either of them.

  We have two more demos outside Elliott Garbantz’s office. We do not leave this creep alone. Resign! RESIGN! How dare he say there are fewer of us getting sick than he’d said were getting sick, even COD said we’re getting sick, we are getting sick! Such a strange thing to fight about. Not only has he chopped the number of total cases by half but some mysterious force has also cut the total number of gay people in America by 90 percent. As if anyone knows how many of us there are! Something very fishy.

  ENTER JIM EIGO

  Eigo nails Elliott publicly: “Dr. Garbantz, your estimates are based on comparisons between the UC epidemics in San Francisco and New York. But in New York one-third of all cases in gay men are in black and Latino men. San Francisco’s cases are 96 percent white. So isn’t comparing New York’s gay populations to San Francisco’s both racist and homophobic?” The man did not know what Eigo was talking about. We are learning that we have to read the ruins. Garbantz doesn’t answer Eigo. So we start up our chant: SILENCE EQUALS DEATH! We put out posters with pictures of Goins and Garbantz with THESE MEN HAVE BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS all over the city. We go after Goins now big time. SHAME! We’ve already gotten rid of one rotten heath commissioner, Herta Glanz, remember, that sad sack of shit. Where do they find these guys? Now when Goins appears anywhere in public we drown him out. SHAME! They say he’s worried we’ll give him a heart attack. On TV he says, “I’m not saying they’re Nazis or fascists, just that they use Nazi and fascist tactics.” Thanks, Kermit, that helps us focus. Nazi/Fascist it will be. Hannah Arendt, here we come!

  BRADLEY

  At the beginning of each and every meeting people get up and write on the blackboard: since last week, Dennis Savine died. Donny Hallam died. Chris Vatter died. Truman Alexander Martinson died. Driscoll Kandinsky died. Calhoun Bingman. Greevy Putnam. Travis Stutts … died. I then list them in our official minutes that I’ve been keeping.

  Out-of-uniform cops start infiltrating our meetings. We don’t recognize them until the following week, when we see new new faces instead of last week’s new faces, who aren’t here this week. You’d think they’d have sense enough to send the same faces. They never look gay. You’d think if they are going to go through the trouble they’d fag themselves up a bit.

  Freddy O’Rourke died. Cops break into the apartment of the Action Committee chair, Steve Quester, at 6 a.m. and break his nose after we’d been particularly vocally obstreperous against Elliott Garbantz, calling his house in the middle of the night. Paul Martinson died. At demos policemen now rough us up more visibly. Steve’s nose had a lot of stitches that now get infected. We have pledged nonviolence. But they sure haven’t. Michael P. and Jeff G. get hurt. Jeff’s in the hospital for two days. He was injected by a cop with something or other. They are fighting dirtier. We send a message to the mayor to call off his thugs.

  FRED

  Shouting SHAME and RESIGN is not going to be enough, even if fucking shithead Goins has his heart attack. It’s not getting us anywhere, all we are doing. We are not focused. We are not dealing with research and treatment. We don’t know enough yet about either of these. We’ve got to teach our kids about these faster. Iris is doing her best. Sparks, Scotty, Eigo … Hurry, hurry … We have to identify and go after the center cesspools of power.

  We send a busload to D.C. to protest a hearing of the latest presidential commission: one cardinal, Buggaro, one straight sex therapist who advertised she could change gay behavior, one admiral, all Republicans, fourteen right-wingers, no gays or UC patients; we break up the meeting by serenading them, singing “Send in the Clowns.” We zap Goins at a ceremony honoring Gay Pride Month, causing a huge backlash from the gay “establishment,” which accuses us of “trashing our own.” You bet, guys. We surround City Hall with bedsheets, protesting the lack of hospital beds. On Gay Pride Day, FUQU’s contingent is many blocks long. THIS CROWD CHEERS US! THEY APPROVE!

  Zap here; zap there; court dates for those arrested at Wall Street, at City Hall, arrested here, arrested there. Jill and Katherine and all our other pro bono lawyers are keeping busy.

  ANOTHER NEW YEAR’S DAY

  Another sad walk around the city, passing places where so-and-so lived. This time I leave the Village and Tommy and I visit hospital waiting rooms. It seems to us as if all the hospitals have nothing but UC patients. We watch as friends and parents and lovers come and go. We recognize many faces, as they do ours. No one is beaming Happy New Year thoughts. Many are in tears. A few stop to hug us. “We’re all in this together now, aren’t we?” a black woman says to me, before rushing out of Metropolitan City, not wanting to hear my reply. St. Victim’s, Invincible, Beth Sinus, Table Medical, Presby North and South. We run into Perdita Pugh at several of them, on her rounds. Tommy gives her an especially big hug. She’s all dressed up, more than ever, he says. Tommy compliments her big diamond brooch. “Christmas present from my lovely husband,” she demurs. She has thirty-one visits to make today, she says. We run into Emma at Table. She looks terrible, exhausted and coughing. I give her a hug. “I’m glad you’re finally doing what you’re doing but nothing’s happening. I’ve lost one hundred sixty-three guys who’ve dived off the cliff. The dean’s ready to throw me out.” In the waiting room of Presby North, Caspar Schmidt waves and rushes over. “Fred, I am developing a new plan! I am bringing it to the floor. I have determined that UC is a mass hallucination! And I have discovered the cure. We must build a radiant cocoon, a sphere in which the body is placed for the blood to be heated.” Caspar is tall, blond, Teutonic-looking, with a big smile. He’s from Iceland. He looks pretty healthy. He’s a psychologist. He says he studies mass behavior. He’s a member of T+D. His last year’s insight into “the cure” was based on “my firm conviction that the people who get sick and die are the people who do not like themselves, who are ashamed of being gay. UC is caused by internalized homophobia. None of my patients who are accepting of their homosexuality are sick with UC! I believe that the irrational forces of the blood can conquer the intellectuality of the spirit!” A few months later at a meeting he pulled me aside to tell me, excitedly, “The epidemic is half over. When that happened with the Vietnam War, it was … half over.” By the time I get home tonight Caspar will have left a message on my machine: “Fred, this time I really have it. Walking home after seeing you, I finally have the cure! I’ll tell you at the next meeting.” By the time of our next meeting, Caspar’s died.

  I was to have met Deep Throat in Table’s waiting room at six. He said he would come up to me, that he knows what I look like. I wanted to meet him, of course, and I wanted to introduce him to Tommy. But he didn’t show up.

  THE STATE OF CERTAIN THINGS

  (FORMERLY STATE OF THE UNION)

  Gays can hardly call their increasingly unwelcoming country a union. What do gay people think about America’s history? What do gay people think about their place in histo
ry? Tommy will have a survey taken, an in-depth survey conducted by professionals, and they will ask several thousand San Franciscans whom they perceive as being gay whether they identify themselves as homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Almost 70 percent answer bisexual. It’s an unsettling result that so many gay people refuse to self-identify as homosexuals. No heterosexual would not self-identify as heterosexual. There is a passion for entitlement that should be obvious and relevant now FUQU has chosen for its motto Silence = Death. Will it be enough to inspire those who live through UC—because this Fred is determined to do!—to emerge with a sense of accomplishment and pride?

  Homosexuals are not listed in any historian’s indexes. Historians from Herodotus and Thucydides to the twentieth century have overlooked our presence. With the steady growth of knowledge about the existence and acceptance of homosexuality in ancient Greece (see, most recently, the amazing The Greeks and Greek Love by James Davidson), it is obvious that Herodotus and Thucydides and their followers somehow still elected not to see us, not to see so many of us, not to see such an overwhelming number of us. There are now more homosexuals than there are Jews.

  What does any of this say about where homosexuals find themselves in these years of this present plague? What a dumb question. Why keep harping on it?

  Haven’t enough people noticed that Peter Ruester stacked the deck in such a way as to make it impossible to rectify what’s happening? No one is noting this sufficiently. It’s proving to be a quiet revolution that he’s leaving as his legacy.

  Peter has been a much-loved president. This is difficult for some to comprehend or to square with the truth of things. Fred will write a “Hail and Farewell” obit for The Avocado when “this murderer” will die in 2003, in which he will compare Ruester with Hitler. “He has been responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler,” Fred will write, which will be true, because by then there will be some 80 million cases of UC worldwide. It would have been nice if during his final days in office someone whispered into his good ear, Peter, old boy, why not go out on a cloud of compassion for all men. Unfortunately we know he hasn’t had these kinds of whisperers around him, nor did he appear to want them or miss them, or even know he doesn’t have them. Certainly his wretched Lady Macbeth is not this person. What was this woman all about?

  What hideous bequests he’s leaving us. How can any histories of the Ruester years be convincing and definitive? They can’t and won’t be.

  Mordecai Masturbov, the man who changed the mores and the morals of this country, does see handwriting on the wall. What will he do about it? Nothing but to weather the UC storm. It will go away. People have to fuck. He commences wild parties at a new Sexopolis mansion in Hollywood. Invitations are coveted. There are always plenty of B-list players with nothing else to do but publicly preen half-naked. He’s not unaware that Fred Lemish is accusing him and Sexopolis of “an active participation in the cause of this plague.” What a small world. He waits to see if Fred’s accusation will have any legs, if the media will pick it up and come to hound him, or if any of his subscribers will cite it when they cancel their subscriptions. He need not have worried. So much for Fred Lemish. Like Von Greeting unleashing into the world a larger supply of Dridge Ampules to bolster his sales of Factor VIII and ZAP, Mordy redoubles the number of his Sexopolis mansion orgies and the coverage of same in the pages of Sexopolis. He waits to see which way the wind blows. It does not blow at all. He zips up the titillation quotient of Sexopolis. For the first time naked penises are allowed. Dimly and artistically lit, of course. Why, some of them might even be erect! This is a first and this garners much publicity. Circulation and the sale of newsstand copies shoot up even higher. Various cries of alarm from opponents of visibly erect penises try to prohibit this new development from proceeding too far, until Sam Sport challenges this in the Supreme Court, and wins. So once again Mordy has broken a mold. He starts escorting his Sexopolis girls out publicly. His marriage to Jinx Seeley? Well, like Doris and Velvalee, she’s become quite maternal, attending to all his playmates as if they were her children. If Mordy wants to fuck one of them, she gives him her blessing. He finds he actually enjoys this “new Mordy.” He’s turning out to be his own ideal reader. Once again, he’s saluted as a “role model” for the men of the world.

  * * *

  Fred went out to Fire Island for the first time in a long time, accompanying a friend who was looking for a summer rental. It was a bright and sunny and cold day in April. Guys were actually living out there, hiding from the world with their walkers and lesions. (“How dare you come back here after what you wrote about us!” one of them said.) The broker said that young people can no longer afford to come here and they’re thinking of enticements. “We’ll establish scholarship funds, just like for prep school.” Fred went walking down a few memory lanes. Most looked the same, although many smaller houses had been torn down and replaced with ones twice their size. It was amazing how many guys were there so early in the season. Fred passed some of them walking the boardwalks, each showing some visible sign of illness. New opportunistic infections always seem to crop up in the New York area first, as if New York is Genesis Book One Chapter One Verse One of The Underlying Condition. Losing one’s eyesight. He saw a few of these, being led by friends. Losing control of one’s bowels, so that, on these very boardwalks, one must take care to maneuver around the piles of shit dotting the path. He saw someone suddenly stop and squat, unable to hold it in. Fred wound up carrying Sam, who like most dogs has a propensity for sniffing shit. The beach itself was also not safe, and men lying on blankets fully clothed could be seen suddenly jumping up and squatting, then covering these accidents with sand. Fred inquired as to the health dangers of all this and Dru Del Monte, the broker, was offended. “I don’t know what you are talking about! Shit! On the boardwalks! On the beach! You are out of your fucking mind. You learned nothing the last time we asked you to leave. When are you going to leave us alone?”

  ANOTHER OPEN LETTER TO DR. JERROLD OMICIDIO

  BY FRED LEMISH SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

  I have been screaming about your Animal House of Horrors since 1983. I called you monsters then, and I call you a monster and a murderer now.

  After all this time, you have established only a system of waste, chaos, and uselessness.

  You are an incompetent idiot!

  The gay community has consistently told you that unless you move quickly your studies will be worthless because we are already taking drugs into our bodies that we locate all over the world in desperation (who can wait for you?!), and all your “scientific” protocols are stupidly based on utilizing guinea-pig bodies that are “clean.” You wouldn’t listen, and now you wonder why so few signed up for your earlier meager assortment of “scientific” protocols, which make such rigid demands for “purity” that no one can fulfill unless they lie.

  FED UP QUEERS UNITED was formed to get experimental drugs into the bodies of patients. FUQU has tried every kind of protest known to man (short of putting bombs in your toilet or flames up your institute) to get some movement in this area. Our years of screaming, protesting, crying, cajoling, lobbying, threatening, imprecating, marching, testifying, hoping, wishing, praying has brought nothing. You don’t listen. No one listens. No one has ears. Or hearts.

  Whose ass have you been covering, Jerry? (Besides your own.) Is it the head of your Animal House, the invisible Dr. Stuartgene Dye, director of the National Institute of Tumor Sciences? Is it Dr. Kelvin Geiseric, another murderer who’s letting you be his fall guy? Dr. Ekbert Nostrill, Dr. Paulus Pewkin, NITS is overrun with possibilities, as are Ruester’s minions, Moose, Gobell, Bohunk, all purveying party-line bullshit that All Is Being Done That Can Be Done.

  I don’t know (though it wouldn’t surprise me) if you kept quiet intentionally. I don’t know (though it wouldn’t surprise me) if you were ordered to keep quiet by Higher-Ups Somewhere and you are the good lieutenant, like Adolf Eichmann.

  I do know that anyone
who knows what you have known for years and done nothing about it for these years is a murderer, not dissimilar to the “good Germans” who claimed they didn’t know what was happening.

  Yes, the level of rhetoric gets higher, the pitch more shrill. It is a style I am perfecting. Daniel is not talking to me. “How can I talk to you and work for him?” he writes. “Have you now gone around the bend?”

  I wonder: where have been the voices of Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, George Steiner, Victor Navasky, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, William Styron, Elizabeth Hardwick, John Updike, Toni Morrison—to name only a few I used to admire but never heard from re. this most crucial issue now facing modern man.

  SPARKS PUFFINGTON

  I believe that if we work hard enough, we’ll uncover some sort of cure. I constantly make glossaries of all the new words we’re learning, from accrual to zidovudine. Treatment+Data has a teach-in. The hall is packed. Everyone is hungry for information. I can see that most of them don’t understand what Iris and Eigo are saying.

  Why do I think Fred’s trouble?

  Harvard men have different ideas about how to change the world.

  This Harvard man thinks this Yaddah man is a big waste of time.

  GRODZO: THEY DO NOT TELL YOU WHY