by Larry Kramer
“Unh, well, thanks. I’m glad at least you got your money back. Sammy, we are dying like flies. You know that. No one is in charge. You know that. We have one administration after another that hates us. You know that. You are one of the richest men in the world. You know that. Don’t you want to become a hero and a role model for twenty million gay people? You and Randy and Kipper and Trafe?”
The more they sit there immobile, the more impassioned I become. I give them a copy of my new book with my essays and speeches on the plague. They promise to read it. No, I make them promise to read it. “Yeah, sure,” they all agree. Derry tells me they left their copies in his office.
Why go on? You get the picture.
I leave L.A. again defeated and depressed:
No movie. No support from rich gays. A second president who doesn’t say the words Underlying Condition. A New York Truth that won’t tell the truth.
I am the dreamer who still sings Adreena’s songs in the shower.
At some benefit party over the Christmas holidays back in New York, the L.A. big boys all shun me mightily. Randy’s beard, Dordogna del Dongo, now more involved in her Randy-Ran’s life than ever, comes over to me with a huge smile.
“Darling. You are doing such great work. But you do not expect us to like you? After all, darling, you have written such nasty things about us. I personally have found them all amusing. But that is only me. Poor little Dordogna.”
CONTINUING DIRTY DISH FROM DANIEL THE SPY
In November, on our NITS campus, occurs the first meeting of the entire UC Clinical Trials Group with all the scientists, all the principal investigators, and a lot of activists from FUQU. In a room of 820 scientists and staff, the activists cause panic. Each of them is smart and knows what’s going on. Each of them also knows that we are years behind and (save for the FUQU contingent) hasn’t a clue how to proceed.
I am suddenly aware that I want to use the words we and us to include yours truly, Daniel Jerusalem. Interesting. Am I tired of being the spy? I must fight against this feeling. I need to stay right where I am.
Everyone now knows that Jerry has given permission for FUQU to be here. Nevertheless, Howie Hube, the designated “contact” between NITS and the PIs, stands up to say bluntly to the packed room of “our side,” as he points at the FUQU contingent, “They come uninvited.” The room erupts in cheers. Then he points again to the several dozen from T+D in the back rows, and repeats so harshly that his voice cracks, “And they come uninvited!” Crowds at football games don’t cheer any louder. You would think this would be a challenge to Jerry’s power and he would rise up and defend us. But he doesn’t. He just sits there.
Last night Jerry met with that executive gang of PIs. They were livid about any activists in attendance, who would thus be “privy to our actions and decisions and data.” They’re afraid it will be discovered how the UC Clinical Trials Group is run. Obernought and Lell are particularly upset, having done a ZAP study that Maxine and her dykes protested upon its release “for its lily-livered anti-feminist ass-dragging.” When Farrell and Gretta see Max, well, as they say, if looks could kill. Gretta now claims to be the first to discover that UC happens in women, ignoring the scuttlebutt about Dale Mulch, but at this point that’s irrelevant. The party line from the White House is still that women don’t get UC, and Gretta’s been silenced.
Once again David G. gets thrown out first. A bunch of NITS cops come in, pick him up, and carry him out. Now Hube asks everyone else from FUQU to leave. Another dozen cops have appeared and are roughly facilitating their doing so. Police are increasingly in evidence every time there’s a UC gathering. It’s a little scary, like we now have our own secret police. They report to Jerry, although he won’t own up to it when I confront him. But I’ve seen the official memo from Shovels to Jerry outlining and approving “all oppositions necessary.” The idea originated with Shovels after Dr. Sullivan started getting booed wherever he went. Sullivan replaced Dr. Garibaldi, now recognized by these kids as a martyr. Trish is replacing Dye with some airplane pilot named Wishbone who races cars as a hobby. “None of my boys will ever get treated like this again by any fairies,” Trish is overheard saying by my old friend from the Jew Tank, Minna Trooble, whom I have just rediscovered. “He also says terrible things about Jews,” she said, “not knowing that I am one and in his very own office.”
The UCCTG system has come to a grinding halt. No one knows why, of course. God help the historians who will try to write honestly about this someday. Costing a fortune, enrolling few takers, obtaining no data, it’s an unholy mess. And PIs refuse to acknowledge any part in this disaster.
The Gang of Five is the inside group of principal investigators who have somehow found each other and coagulated into the center of power for all of the dozens of UC ZAP trials NITS is ostensibly supervising around the country, of which, presumably, officially, Jerry is supposed to be in charge. It’s FUQU that dubs them the Gang of Five. Jerry is letting this gang call the shots. I ask him why he’s abdicating the position of being in charge here. His answer: “What makes you think I’m not in charge here?”
That only five PIs have surfaced as important is scary.
“This is all going to take forever,” I mumble to Jerry.
“How many years you been here now?” This is his idea of a joke.
“Jerry, there simply has to be a way to make all this crew go faster!”
“You can’t make science go any faster than it does.”
“I don’t believe that. And neither do you.” I pause. “I hope.”
“You sound like Fred. How is Fred? He’s been quiet lately. Give him my regards.”
Farrell Obernought obviously has problems with gays. Gretta we have met. One tough Florida cookie. Tyrone Coffin is from the Midwest. His medical center has responsibility for about ten major urban areas, which is ludicrous. The result is he goes to none of them and nobody knows who he is. Pansy and Maxwell are in bed together on some kind of attempt at making a vaccine. Maxwell, at Harvard, is a vet as well as an M.D., and Pansy, at Stanford, is a shrink as well as an M.D. “What they know about vaccines beats me,” even Paulus says. “Any vaccine they could concoct would make people even sicker.”
Greeting-Dridge is also financing Gretta and Coffin. Your classmate Bumstead is now a G-D subsidiary. As is Bohunk Vernissage. G-D now has a monopoly of all UC treatments anyone’s discovered. Such commercial collaborations are against the rules and regulations not only of NITS but also of each of these educational institutions. This comes up before the board of Harvard, where Maxwell’s a big deal. Maxwell wins. Maxwell is allowed to start his own company, partner with Pansy, and own stock in it without being asked to leave Harvard, a first. Von Greeting is on the board of Yaddah, where he set up a deal for one of their faculty to work with Dash Snicker.
There’s a new company called Presidium that’s trying to enter and challenge the UC market. Nobody knows anything about it except it’s well-funded. The dish is one of its owners made a fortune making food for cows and pigs and wants to break into the people-product business. “Several drug companies are already being accused of manufacturing products that intentionally make people sick,” Deep Throat says.
David Byar, from NITS, this big bear of a man with UC himself, is a genius statistician and has worked up figures to dispute everything dumb Debbi and Hube are doing on the few protocols already in operation or about to begin. He and Rebby have somehow met and he’s been introduced to FUQU’s rhetoric and he’s in love with them. “You are so right, here, and here, and here…” as he plows through Eigo’s speeches. “This is what you should do. You don’t need so many patients to extract decent data. A dozen will do.” This, of course, is blasphemy of the highest order and of course he can’t get it published even though he’s acknowledged to be the best in his business. It would certainly put all PI and drug company trials out of business. He and Rebby become dear friends and play classical duets together on the piano. He’s dying and y
our Rebecca’s watching over him, having announced she’s going to become a doctor. How do I know all this? I’m David Byar’s doctor. Jerry told him his “cockamamie idea” was “more statistical bullshit. You guys can make numbers say anything you want to. We do science here, not fairy tales.”
Nevertheless, despite any of the above, the Gang of Five will control the trials, which of course are still on ZAP and not OIs. Worse, SECRECY is the name of the game. When David G. finally sits in on a small committee meeting, they cancel the meeting. It’s becoming a war between the scientists and the activists. They are unwelcome because they can prove that they know more than we do. It’s that obvious. Newt Grossvoll and Levi Narkey are your smart gay doctors who are able to take one look at how one of our clinical trials is to be set up and show in a few sentences why our way will not provide useful information and their way will. David Byar agrees.
I gather your Levi Narkey’s work is going on right now as the “official” DID and DOT and DIP trials are being prepared. These are the “D” drugs that mysteriously appeared. Much of their investigational research was done out of the country, so nobody’s known anything about it. How do I know all this? Via Minna in Bart Shovels’s office. How and why does Shovels know so much about the pharms and their drugs? Minna answered me bluntly: “Because he hates you.”
I keep overlooking the fact that Dredd Trish had been head of the CIA.
Oh, I almost forgot. Deep Throat told me that Dereck Dumster’s father died and left him a billion dollars, and James Jesus says they’re a dangerous family to watch out for. “He’s going to want to be president. I can smell it from here.”
* * *
I cannot tell you in all honesty that I am having no concern. Someone somewhere has discovered what you call a chink in my armor. In certain people I feel less powerful, like I am sick in the heart of me. These people have been given something to fight me. In most people, thank goodness, I am still what you call alive and kicking. They have been given nothing yet or what they are given doesn’t work in them. In many countries far away like Russia and Southeast Asia I am spreading like what you call wildfire. But these are not people whose company I enjoy. But more doctors in more countries are secretly rushing to beat each other in understanding all of me. They work for companies with funny-sounding names. They each have laboratories all over the world. So far only a small chink of me has been what they call isolated. These zaps and dots and dips make me uncomfortable. I seem unable to restore what little they are chinking out of me.
DEEP THROAT: HISTORY IS MADE IN THE DARK
By now you guys should have a pretty good idea of how many conflicting battlegrounds are standing in your way. Statisticians want certainty. Clinicians want patient improvement. Evil greedy pharms only want more profits and no liability. FADS demands “safety and efficacy” as if there were such things. Patients want something that works, demanding that the long-established bastions of mediocrity provide it, and if they don’t, then the patients should disobey them and take whatever they want from wherever they can get it. Regulators, pharmas, researchers, doctors, patients, politicians, activists all have different agendas. And you haven’t learned anything about the spies in our very own government. How can a decent outcome emerge from all this?
You have your high hopes and I have my deep fears and I’m older than you. And Mother taught me everything I know.
HEADS UP
DAVID
Partekla was in northern Idaho. It is a government institution. I read in today’s paper there are terrorist groups there that chop the heads off of homosexual men they capture. I did not know that when I was there.
BILL SNOW
It took us a bit of time to sort of catch on to the science at the level that it happens at science meetings. When you go to a scientific meeting, it’s a very formalized dance, and the scientists basically make presentations to other scientists. And for a nonscientist, the only thing you can understand is the title, and maybe the conclusion, if you’re lucky. So we went to more and more UC conferences and learned how to listen to those talks. And what it meant was us learning ass-backward the virology and immunology Iris is teaching us. We had started at the cutting edge without having any of the foundation. So we’d end up with notes that made no sense and a list of words that were repeated a lot of times, so we figured we’d better look them up. And that was sort of how a lot of us learned our science. And the great discovery is that this is not Chinese.
PERRY
ZAP clinical trials are treading water. No one knows why. D-drug trials have been slow to enroll because of bureaucratic delay. Now NITS needs six months to transfer their data from Chattanooga and Natchez to Boston. PIs blame everything on Parallel Track. OI committee has protocols ready to roll but PIs won’t approve them. Velma Dimley writes an article exposing lack of people in trials and blames Parallel Track and us. Hube blames Marie Clayture and FADS and us. Sudden shit is brewing: Women’s Committee opposing T+D’s unauthorized strategy of “going inside.”
Fred isn’t looking so hot. He won’t talk about it with me, though.
KAFKA LIVES!
TOMMY: Have you ever heard that Kafka was gay and closeted? Living with Mom and Dad and so neurotic? In The Metamorphosis, the son doesn’t know how to act or manage his body in his regressed state; obsessed with his fragile sister’s music lessons (so Tennessee Williams); father’s trying to kill him; mother’s an insipid mess; he must be kept secret from the neighbors; is fired by his employer and appalls the lodgers. If The Metamorphosis ain’t about a very different kind of son, I don’t know what it’s about! Sounds gay to me. Just finishing one of those great-masters courses, reading things I’ve only heard about or didn’t grasp the first time, my gaydar was set off over and over. What about Jack London? So gorgeous and tortured. And spent all his time running from/to something to such extreme lengths, and always, always in the company of men and always high. Like Fred says, they don’t teach any of this in the schools.
MINNA TROOBLE TELLS FRED ABOUT BART SHOVELS
I had a mad crush on you in high school. All the girls in the Jew Tank did. You would sit and talk to us all the time! You didn’t seem to have any boyfriends. You and I may have edited the school newspaper together but that was it. I went to Swarthmore and you went to Yaddah, and that was the last time I saw you until we ran into each other at our high school reunion.
I’ve worked for Bart Shovels since Dredd came in with Ruester. I went to Swarthmore with Bart’s daughter. He is pure and simple and 100 percent a shit. I stay because it’s so fascinating. I can’t believe I’m seeing so much evil. I figure someday I’ll write about it. But I don’t. Everyone in this town writes a book and nobody believes them unless they’re Woodward and Bernstein.
Bart’s the power behind the throne. Every high official has one—the one who’s really turning the evil deeds into action. The secret to success in this town is that no matter whenever anyone says anything negative about you, you call them a liar and a fake. Dredd Trish is too cold to care much about people as human beings. He’d been a CIA spy for long enough that I think his brain’s been fried. Like Ruester, he looks good in a suit. And he, too, has a bitch of a wife who pushes him relentlessly. Bart makes Purpura and Moose and Bohunk and Gobbel and that gang look like the seven dwarfs. Gobbel and my boss are big buddies. They are plotting things all the time. They not only want to get rid of all the homosexuals, even though Dredd has a gay son and Bart has a gay daughter, but immigrants and poor people and anyone who’s costing the government money. You name anything noble, decent, humanitarian and it’s on their agenda for removal.
Bart Shovels manipulated the election to get Dredd elected. There’s a lot of new Arab and old Nazi money at play here. I’d get murdered if they knew I said any of this. Thank God, Dredd thinks I’m cute. He pinches my ass every time he’s near me. Even Taddy sees it, but she ignores it. They even invite me to dinner lots of times in the White House to celebrate “our new home.”
HERMIA: This woman is recognizing evil, Fred.
INT. BART SHOVELS’S OFFICE AT THE WHITE HOUSE. DAY.
Dr. Sullivan with Bart Shovels. To the side, taking notes, is Minna Trooble.
DR. SULLIVAN (reading from a piece of paper; he is black): “There are certain times in history, when the goals of science collide with moral and ethical judgment, when science has to take a backseat.”
SHOVELS: Well, done, Lou. Keep it up! Write more shit like that. I’ll have my office whip you up some longer versions for your forthcoming public appearances. I’m sending you out on the road. Keep your bags packed. Minna, get me the president and Dr. Omicidio on a three-way.
INT. HOSPITAL ROOM. TABLE MEDICAL. DAY.
Fred is being drained again. He’s connected to various tubes and bags. He doesn’t look so hot. Tommy is with him, holding his hand. Emma comes in with another woman, Dr. Falloon.
EMMA: This is Dr. Falloon. She works for NITS. They’re enrolling … You tell him.
DR. FALLOON: A new company named Presidium is testing a new drug that Dr. Omicidio thinks might be helpful for your liver.
FRED: How does he know about my liver?
DR. FALLOON: I believe through Dr. Jerusalem on his staff.
FRED (to Emma): Okay by you?
EMMA: There isn’t anything else to try. All the other stuff we’ve tried isn’t working.
FRED: You work for Jerry?
DR. FALLOON: We’re in the same institute. But I’ve been working mainly on children’s health. We’ve used this Presidium drug on kids, and it seems to be having some effect.
