The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  FRED: Why doesn’t Jerry work faster on UC?

  DR. FALLOON: You’ll have to ask him that.

  FRED: Don’t think I haven’t tried.

  Dr. Falloon gives a package of drugs to Emma.

  DR. FALLOON: Once a day with food.

  EXT. DISCO. NIGHT.

  Hordes of guys going in. A group from FUQU holding up signs: DREDD TRISH WANTS YOU DEAD. The crowds don’t want to see them.

  FRED’S REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST AND THE HOPE OF THINGS TO COME

  For these past few years FUQU’s been my life. As in the early days of GMPA, there is such an abundance of visible, tangible love and cooperation among so many that it’s almost total joy. Each week hundreds of men and women with a shared goal and much energy and determination to achieve it come together. Finally there is visible anger. And it seems to be growing little by little.

  There are FUQU meetings every night, including weekends. There is never enough time and we are in such a hurry. We all identify with that! Planning meetings, meetings for painting and wheat-pasting posters, meetings for civil disobedience training, meetings to learn about science and treatments and how NITS works and should work and what all those other acronyms we now toss around so blithely mean and how they all operate, and chapter and verse on why they don’t work and how they must be changed so that they might … Oh, it’s all very heady stuff. Committees often meet in our first office so late into the early hours that the landlord asks us to move.

  We all plan constantly for the day when we’ll truly be listened to, when it will be our decisions that right the wrongs. Weekly meetings of often five hundred people grapple with the difficulties of controlling this while at the same time continuing to inspire many more into regular and reliable and decisive cohesiveness.

  I kept telling myself that little by little something seemed to be working.

  EXT. ENTRANCE TO HOLLAND TUNNEL. DAY.

  FUQU members are lying on the roadway effectively blocking traffic and holding mock gravestones. Standing members hold signs: YOU DRIVE, WE DIE. RIOT—UC CRISIS. RUESTER KILLED ME. TRISH KILLS ME. Other members hand out information flyers to drivers, all of whom are blowing their horns.

  THE SWIM TEAM

  INT./EXT. MARIA’S APARTMENT IN THE EAST VILLAGE. NIGHT.

  MARIA: After every successful demo, FUQU has a party.

  They’re all packed in like sardines in this tiny studio and tapping a keg for beer, which they’re drinking in paper cups and managing to spill all over each other. It starts when Perry’s beer tapping releases a stream of foam that scatters onto Maria and she blows it onto Adam, who takes his cup and pours it over the head of Jon, who turns and does the same thing to Brad and Art and Mart and Matt and Perry, and the rock music is pounding as they throw off their clothes except their underpants and form a conga line and wiggle out of the room and down the hall stairs and out the front door and across the street to Tompkins Square Park, where they throw themselves into the fountain and stand under the spray and start hurling gobs of water at each other and taking water into their mouths and spouting it up and out at each other like whales. Then they start ripping the undershorts off each other as each tries to keep his on. By the time everyone is naked they all have their arms around each other like the football team in a huddle to call the next play. They start kissing each other, all of them, one after the other, saying each to each, I love you, or congratulations, or happy to make your acquaintance, or likewise I’m sure. Finally they fall all in a heap on the ground, under the falling water, exhausted, the dripping water on their cheeks that could be tears of joy.

  MARIA’S VOICE: So that’s how all the best-looking guys came to be called the Swim Team. It was a great party. Like Fred and Maxine said, we needed to party. Come to think of it, where was Fred? You know, I think he is still in the hospital.

  FRED’S STATE OF THE PLAGUE

  The secretary of Health and Happiness, Dr. Louis Sullivan, is a useless, faceless cipher. Dr. James Mason, his assistant secretary, is yet another Lovejoy who hates homosexuals. There is no director at COD. Pewkin’s gone into academia. The co-director of FADS, Dr. Norman Joe Triffid, has been fired. It will take at least six months before new FADS and COD directors are chosen and approved. There are now forty unfilled research slots at NITS. The PIs who run the trials blame activists for their poor-to-no-patient enrollment; few want to take such high doses of ZAP. NO NEW PROTOCOLS WILL BE COMMENCED ANYWHERE because of that NITS decision to move its database from one center to another. When the new center (in Cambridge) is up and running, it will take another year to organize. The horrid possibility exists that the main reason for changing database centers is that the one they have been using at Greeting-Dridge (in Research Triangle) has been unable to adequately process or interpret (or reveal?) all the data collected so far. This means that THERE IS A GOOD CHANCE THAT EVERYTHING NITS AND THE PIs HAVE TOLD US ABOUT ALL THE UNAPPROVED TREATMENTS THEY ARE FINALLY SHOVING INTO OUR BODIES MAY BE BASED ON USELESS OR FLAWED DATA. Dodo’s crappy blood test has contributed to this. This means that AFTER NINE YEARS OF A PLAGUE THEY KNOW ZILCH. PIs still don’t like FUQU because they are jealous of our success in obtaining conversations with several pharmaceutical companies, which threaten their ivory tower where they play Frankenstein, still pumping ZAP down the throats of UC patients like they were Strasbourg geese being fattened for the kill. The murderous dosage of 1500 mg daily of ZAP has still not been reduced. Our Drs. Levi Narkey and Newt Grossvoll present Jerry with data they collected from their own patients that shows without any doubt that 500 mg of ZAP is much more effective than the 1500 mg Snicker is still demanding patients take, which continues to make them very sick. Dr. GARTH BUFFALO AND DR. DODO GEISERIC HAD EACH said UC can be cured. Yet every impediment imaginable is being placed in the way of our receiving this cure. WE MUST REFORM THE UCCTGs. They aren’t working, we know how they can work (Tommy has been especially helpful in showing us how they could be effectively reorganized), and if they won’t listen to us we must take our bodies away. Meanwhile, would you believe that as more people get sick, more people now suddenly clamor to get into a ZAP trial!

  * * *

  “Tough titty,” I hear one person scream at another. What, please, is titty?

  FRED’S VOICE (over scene below): But is yelling at people enough? Nobody high up is really afraid of us yet. What could we do that would really attract attention? FUQU had a lot of Catholic members who’d lived their entire lives being told they were shit. They finally got it together to fight back.

  STOP THE CHURCH!

  EXT. ST. PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL. DAY.

  Big crowd, posters, Fred and Tommy dressed in suits and ties walking the periphery of the group, checking it out, greeting friends. Many posters held by many members: PUBLIC HEALTH MENACE—CARDINAL BUGGARO. STOP THE CHURCH. KNOW YOUR SCUMBAGS. STOP THIS MAN. CURB YOUR DOGMA. PAPAL BULL. CARDINAL BUGGARO IS DEADLIER THAN THE VIRUS. And of course: SILENCE = DEATH. Ray, thin and dying, dressed like Jesus in white shorts and with crown of thorns, carrying a wooden cross on his frail body, walks among the crowd, blessing them with his free hand.

  RON (leading chant): “Suck my dick, lick my clit, Cardinal Buggaro’s full of shit.”

  Then Fred and Tommy go into the church. Fred stumbles and Tommy steadies him.

  INT. ST. PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL. DAY.

  FUQU members have stationed themselves around the worshippers. Some are lying down in the aisles. During the service they start calling out from all directions, one at a time. The cardinal, on the dais, has his head bowed in prayer, with an expression of disbelief. Undercurrent heard from outside and in: FUQU FIGHT BACK FIGHT UC, FUQU, etc.

  FOTIS (stands up from a pew and screams): STOP KILLING US!

  From various different places in the church come similar shouts: STOP THE MURDER!

  At the front, communion wafers are being placed on worshippers’ tongues. A priest holds up a wafer to the tongue of Patrick.

  PRIEST: Bo
dy of Christ.

  PATRICK (nervously stuttering it out): May the Lord bless the man I love, who died a year ago today. (He then spits the wafer out onto the floor. People move away from him.)

  Cops start hauling FUQU members out one at a time, up the aisles, which are soon clogged. More and more shouts of STOP KILLING US echo from various parts of the cathedral.

  INT. FUQU MEETING. GAY COMMUNITY CENTER. NIGHT.

  A madhouse. Much rancor and negative reaction to their St. Patrick’s demo. Attendance is even more packed. A table selling FUQU T-shirts is doing big business, Scotty collecting the money. Ann and Donald are the two facilitators; Donald, handsome and butch, wears a skirt.

  We see more people at the blackboard writing names.

  KELLY: We went too far!

  KEIRAN: We’ll make nothing but enemies!

  O’MALLY: Every newspaper and TV crucified us.

  TERENCE: This will be the end of us! We might as well pack it in.

  GERRI: My mother saw me on TV and won’t talk to me.

  FRED: That demonstration …

  SHEILA: Fred has not been recognized.

  DONALD: Fred, you should know better by now …

  RAFSKY: Even Dredd Trish said nasty things about us. It’s the first time any president even acknowledged that we’re alive.

  FRED (weak and trying to fight it): This demonstration wasn’t the death of us, it was the making of us! It will make us be seen as a threat. Now we’ll be seen as warriors, an army in black boots and Levi’s, and not the limp-wristed fairies they always show on TV. This is the beginning of our being taken seriously! Congratulations! (Applause builds.)

  TONY (sweet kid, pulls Fred aside): Have you heard of anything to save my life? I don’t think I have very long.

  FRED (giving him a hug): Hang in there, Tony. We’ve got to have hope.

  FOTIS: We’re fucking warriors and we’re going to scare the shit out of everyone we can!

  ANN: Ladies and gentlemen, let’s all come to order!

  TONY: But what’s next?

  MARCUS: We have another party to celebrate another great demo!

  EXT. TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK. DAY.

  The Swim Team is celebrating in the fountain. Posters from the church demo are lying on the sidewalk along with their clothes. Among the onlookers are Fred, Tommy, Maxine, Maria, Gerri, Eigo, Ann, all cheering the team on as they start ripping off each other’s underpants.

  WE MUST REFORM THE UCCTG

  From the Treatment+Data Committee of Fed Up Queers United to Dr. Gerrold Omicidio

  Re: The UC Clinical Trials Group

  We hereby submit the following standards of care that we are fighting you for:

  Unless every arm of every clinical trial is a viable treatment option, that trial is fundamentally impractical and unethical and we will publicize same.

  Unless a clinical trials program invites dissident scientific opinions into the process, it invites ultimate failure.

  Unless a UC-related clinical trial obtains answers to its real-world questions in a short time, that trial is effectively failing us.

  Unless a clinical trials program is responsible to the symptomatic people outside its trials, providing them investigational treatment as early in the process as possible, it commits malpractice.

  Unless a clinical trials program invites community participation in every stage of its development, it will fail itself & those it’s charged to serve.

  Unless a clinical trials program eliminates internal impediments to equal access to its trials, it is fundamentally unjust.

  Unless the leaders of a clinical trials program publicly address the inequities within the overall health-care system that contribute to their trials’ inaccessibility, they collaborate in an injustice.

  Unless clinical trials’ investigators proceed as if they can treat (save) all participants in their trials, they also commit malpractice.

  And we shall continue to publicize all of this.

  You would think you would know all this. It all seems so obvious. But you don’t.

  We feel more than a little used by you.

  FRED

  Dr. Omicidio, what is it you do all day when you go into your office?

  THE RETURN OF DEEP THROAT

  James Jesus assigned me to my next adventure. “This UC plague is going to get much worse. It’s slowly happening all over the world.” He wanted to know what was going on in Trish’s White House. “Dredd Trish is an old CIA buddy, not that I liked him very much. He was a wimp traipsing around with that unattractive biddy who wasn’t his wife. But I fear he’s a wimp no longer. He has Shovels to manufacture him into someone dangerous.”

  Mother doesn’t want it known that he’s interested in Trish. He told me that thanks to me he’d had enough of Jerry. “I get the picture,” he said to me, as, certainly, had yours truly.

  I cite but one example of my new assignment.

  Via the White House, thanks to Gobell and Shovels, a Dr. Donnston Privvy is put in charge of UC “coordination.” His office is “downtown,” meaning away from the NITS Franeeda campus. There are now so many cases that someone decided it was time to open a separate administrative office for it to coordinate with what all the other nitpicking, bits-and-pieces, here-and-there offices and divisions and bureaus are also not doing or should be doing. So now we have sort of an interagency agency for UC. The government is filled with these. Presidents love them because now they don’t have to answer anything. My office is now here.

  The rationale always presented to the press is that such an arrangement “coordinates” all the wonderful efforts being expended on all fronts by so many courageous and sacrificing American people. What it really does is save putting anyone with any power in charge. No, instead of appointing someone with leadership qualities who might have a desire to do something egregiously right, some real second-rater like Donnston Privvy is easily found and since he’s put at the same pay scale as all the other “coordinators” in all the other offices, no one has to make any major overriding decisions.

  Donnston Privvy would never do anything so bold as making a decision. It’s no secret that no one makes a decision when anything controversial is involved. If anyone should happen to make a decision about anything controversial and it got in the paper, then his or her coordinator would be in deep shit with his or her supervisor, who would be in deep shit with his or her coordinator—and on up the ladder to the White House, where the president is not making decisions about anything controversial himself. It’s much more expensive, of course, to have so many offices and agencies, each doing more or less the same thing, which isn’t much anyway, but bureaucracy doesn’t think this way. And as everyone knows, who’s to know? Who’s to figure it out? By the time The New York Truth or The Washington Monument do find out and indulge in their moments of high dudgeon, another president’s been elected.

  The first time I figured all this out and ran to James Jesus to lay it all out on the table as if I were Columbus, he just looked at me, then grinned, then actually laughed, and finally slapped me on the back. “I’m assigning you to UC full-time,” he said. “It’s going to be a pisser. Lots of laughs.”

  It’s been a Ruester-maneuvered—i.e., Gobbel—regulation that all UC deaths must be reported as quickly as possible. No one’s paid much attention to this before the arrival of Trish and Shovels, because of the fact (there are others, like confidentiality, not the kind protected by law but the kind paid for by rich patients) that any doctor with UC cases has too many of them to report them right away. But someone at the White House was rumored to have died from UC and President Trish had been terrified he might have picked up the fatal It from being anywhere near him (like his son). So Code 45, Section IX, Subheading Q-23—known as Q-23—was drafted, submitted, passed in committee and on the floor, and put into effect so fast you would have thought the life and salvation of the entire universe depended on it. These guys always think everything can be changed by just passing a new law
.

  Under Bart Shovels, Q-23 is “firmed up”: not reporting a case now is a federal offense. Before it was just another regulation. Now it’s a decree.

  At the citywide monthly meeting of all doctors treating UC cases (attendance is very slim when everyone knows some sort of shit’s about to hit the fan. In this town you can smell shit coming before anyone even farts), Q-23.1 is introduced and everyone sort of titters when Privvy reads it aloud to his staff, raising his voice in trembling emphasis at the part stating that “failure to adhere to these requirements can lead to incarceration.”

  From Shovels to presidential proclamation to the first arrest doesn’t take very long.

  Harry Straddler at Montezuma will be the first arrest. Montezuma is this city’s main shithole hospital. It’s like being thrown into a dungeon. They do so much patching of the already brutalized that there’s a permanent bunch of cops on staff. Harry’s a good-enough doctor, not the most motivated, but taking care of the entire poor section of the Southwest, as Montezuma has to, must make it pretty hard to stay motivated on a daily basis. You’re lucky if you don’t succumb to despair and take an overdose or steal some money and run away to an island that doesn’t extradite, which acts are also said to now be happening. Because Harry’s a joking sort, very happy-go-lucky, and lays a lot of the nurses, who enjoy him just because they don’t have to take him any more seriously than he takes himself, he’s kept himself going somehow, surrounded by nothing but UC cases as he now is.

  Wouldn’t you know it, Dr. Donnston Privvy from downtown HQ is doing a look-see at Montezuma with yours truly and Senator Perz from the Subcommittee on Disease escorting a bunch of ladies from some Hispanic charity that pretends to look after the indigent and the near-dead (at Montezuma one and the same—Death stalks these corridors like reruns of Desi and Lucy on the ward TVs). A set of quints is about to be born, which is big news any day, and Donny hears the buzz and troops us all off to take a look at the cute tots-to-be. In the space of the twenty minutes or so that Donny is gowning and masking himself and his excited and similarly attired entourage before being admitted to Operating Room 12, where Harry’s preparing to birth the babies, the Hispanic mama-to-be, an illegal alien, pregnant with those quintuplets, right here in the corridor on an approaching gurney, pops out three dead and two diseased wretched bambini and then pops off herself.