by Larry Kramer
EXT. TOMPKINS SQUARE FOUNTAIN. NIGHT.
Handsome men are cavorting naked and in celebration of their successful little action.
RON, ADAM, AND OTHERS: Fuck You, Bowel-Muck-Shit! FUQU says, Fuck You!
FRED’S VOICE-OVER: They were the best-looking guys we had. Most of them will be dead in a year.
MINNA TROOBLE: Dredd Trish fires COD’s Dr. Perseus Wineapple for supporting abortion and stem cell research into your UC virus.
FRED: The New York Truth and its Science Department don’t deign to write about this.
FIGHTS ON OUR HOME FRONT
There were two fights on the floor tonight. Little ones. All between women and men. One between Maxine and Scotty about his meeting with pharmas without the permission of the floor. She’d heard about it from Claudette, who’d accompanied Scotty to a few of them. The other was between someone named Harriett and Sparks about his doing the same. She’d heard about it from someone she knew at Presidium. In each case all parties were defensive, felt they had been “needlessly and cruelly” “attacked,” “maligned,” and “violated.” None of them wanted the floor to vote on “decisions we are going to have to face sooner or later,” according to yours truly, who weighed in on the matter, trying not to favor either side but asking for a calm discussion. Barry from T+D came over to me after. “Who the fuck are you, Fred?” he asked me. “I thought you were our leader. Why aren’t you on our side? My side is your side, you know. I’m fighting to save your life as well as mine.”
OUT WITH THE OLD?
On November 7 a black man, David Dinkins, becomes New York’s mayor, replacing the hateful Kermit Goins. The hateful Dr. Elliott Garbantz is replaced as commissioner of health by some Midwestern bozo doctor whose first announcement is his plan to quarantine all the UC-infected. Activists unite as if our lives depend on it, which they do, and Dr. Bozo doesn’t stand a chance. Is it not a note of interest how health commissioners, here, there, everywhere, always seem to be so second-rate and disappear into the mist of historical irrelevancy? I can’t even remember this one’s name.
VITAL STATISTICS
COD estimates that one in four young men in New York City are now infected with UC.
* * *
Only one in four? Is Mr. COD on my side? He certainly isn’t telling you the truth about me.
“I THINK WE MUST LOOK UPON THESE STATISTICS AS A GIFT”
writes Rigard Noyes, Ph.D. Div., president and minister of Chicago’s God Assembled Church in American Focus on Families Newsletter. “I think we must look upon these numbers as a gift from God. He has heard our prayers and imprecations to expunge from sight these heathens who have embarrassed us for so many centuries. If we don’t get rid of them now there will be more of them than there are of us.”
THE SECOND (OR IS IT THE THIRD) PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON UC …
… issues a second (or is it the third?) hideous report: “This epidemic is like an orchestra without a conductor.” Bart Shovels from the White House angrily defends it. “That we need a national plan is not to the point. Our plan always is to act. This administration is taking actions.”
FRED: The New York Truth and its Science Department don’t deign to write about this report, either. Velma Dimley is now their “official” reporter on UC. Dearie Fault has retired.
DREDD TRISH TELLS THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ON SIXTY MINUTES
“I wish somebody could convince me that if you could only spend a quarter of a billion dollars more, we would have the answer. I must say some of the excesses of those groups who shout so much do not help their cause. We had a lot of mail saying people are quite embarrassed by that.”
TAKE THIS, YOU GROUP WHO SHOUT SO MUCH
Dr. Marie Clayture of FADS announces that all UC meds in development by every pharmaceutical company except Greeting-Dridge have been denied approval. “They just haven’t provided us with sufficient data,” she’s quoted in a FADS press release. G-D’s data on ZAP is considered sufficient?
FRED: The New York Truth and Velma Dimley don’t deign to write about this, too.
BIG FUQU POSTER:
THE WHITE HOUSE WANTS YOU DEAD!
MORE PUBLICITY
John Leo, in U.S. News and World Report, describes FUQU as “the No. 1 loose cannon of local politics, now powerful and feared … ‘Brownshirts’ (à la Mussolini). Support for the dignity and freedom of gays does not automatically mean overlooking the threat to our freedom by gangster groups such as FUQU.” Ray Kerrison’s column in the New York Post: “… while reserving for themselves the right to use any defamation, insult, outrage, ridicule, or mockery…” Paula Span in The Washington Monument: “… disrupting meetings to scream at public officials, pelting opponents with condoms … leaving the chalked outlines of bodies on sidewalks and streets, plastering cities with ‘bloody’ red handprints, employing the whole panoply of loud and sometime illegal protest…”
Fred loves it all!
DAVID’S BACK
I was being followed. I recognized the feeling. Fear. I think this time it started with reading about the head chopping in Idaho at a place called the Kursie Foundation, a division of Partekla. I discover this by reading a British newspaper, about a scientist at Oxford who has uncovered this atrocity, “perpetuated as part of America’s ongoing trials into germ warfare.” Patients had been fed a drug to erase memories and feelings. It was a crystal meth developed by Hitler so his soldiers could win the war. It was developed by Dr. Muck and by Mr. Bayer, the same man who gave us aspirin. It brought back memories of what might have been done to me at Partekla, to me and my back. No wonder I had no memory of that. All I remember was an extreme euphoria. I had never felt so good. To read that now this crystal meth is being snorted by gays in America, “of a strength stronger than that used by Hitler,” brings tears to my eyes.
Who do I think is following me now? I am getting very frightened.
What were they trying to learn from my back? Was it to see how much pain I could endure?
$$$SCOTTY$$$
I arrange the first FUQU Art Auction. I know a little bit about this world. My folks are collectors and benefactors of the Met. So I know how to get to prospective purchasers to both give and show up. I got stuff by David Hockney, Keith Haring, Annie Liebowitz, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel. I made us $500,000.
I wish I could say I heard any gratitude from the floor. To most of this group I’m the rich kid who takes cute members out on his brother’s yacht. It even takes a while for me to find a boyfriend. I sure like to have a boyfriend to cuddle with and watch TV. Fred had fixed me up with cute Kevin, who actually wanted to meet me. Once again the big problem is that we both are bottoms! Working night and day on Wall Street, I’d not had much experience in the gay world. I never thought something like that would be a problem!
Oh, well. At least I got all of us a big wadge of cash to fight with. I just wish somebody had said, Thank you, Scotty, you did good.
A number of the pharm reps I invited came to the auction and a few even bought some stuff!
INT. BLOOMINGDALE’S. DAY.
Fred, Tommy, Mario, Moses, Spencer, Gerri, Maxine, Photis, Dobbson—all wearing SILENCE = DEATH T-shirts—are covertly putting small stickers on various items of merchandise, including mattresses and expensive dresses. The stickers read: VELMA DIMLEY OF THE NEW YORK TRUTH IS THE WORST UC REPORTER IN THE WORLD.
GERRI (smacking down a sticker): And this is for my brother Terry, who died two weeks ago. (Another smack of a sticker.) From ZAP.
MARIO (speedily smacking down one sticker after another): Best results come when you’re less cautious.
A guard is heading toward them. They disperse in all directions.
EXT. NEW YORK TRUTH BUILDING. NIGHT.
Fred and Tommy and Perry are plastering the stickers on the building.
FRED: For Felix.
TOMMY: For my Bro.
PERRY: For Francis. (To Fred:) How are you feeling?
FRED: Fine.
; PERRY: You don’t look fine.
TONY’S LOVELY WOMEN
Around Manhattan perhaps ten, perhaps twenty-five, there is no way of telling, affinity groups of FUQU are meeting and executing awkward, obnoxious, disruptive, probably even illegal zaps to bring “uncomfortable attention to our hideous situation as total outcasts from our country’s health-care system,” as Tony S. liked to say, total being a favorite word of his, as in “total all-out war,” and everyone knows what he means, in feeling if not specifics. That is one of the things about FUQU: we sit around brainstorming total feelings until total specifics eventually emerge. It is totally amazing, how well it works.
Tony S’s group, Tony’s Lovely Women, because he is the only male in the group, go to Bergdorf’s, where the dozen women all try on very expensive designer dresses and pin to their innards notes that say things like, “Your son or husband could be infected with UC and you don’t know it. FUQU.” In Women’s Wear Daily, Gretchen Himmelstein, the chief buyer, estimates that “over $500,000 of our most precious garments have been damaged.” When Tony S. dies, his twelve lovelies won’t let anyone else touch him. They bathe him and wrap him in a shroud of $500-a-yard Scalamandre silk from Brunschwig et Fils and take his body all beribboned with their sashes and tassels, also purloined by members who worked there, and in the middle of the night deliver it to Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy on Fifth Avenue, with a note, “Please help us! Oh you who should have been mother of us all. Love from Fed Up Queers United.” Tony S. had adored Jackie. The women stand vigil by the coffin outside her apartment building. The police would take it away but Jackie hears about it and insists that Tony be given a proper cremation, which she pays for. We are told his ashes were scattered in the ocean at her home in Martha’s Vineyard. The twelve Lovely Women write a letter of “deep thanks and reverence,” and Jackie acknowledges “your sadness, which I understand.”
No media outlet picked up this “human interest” story.
How can it not occur to me more and more that we’re not really getting anywhere!
HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD!
I am back in L.A. finishing yet another draft for Adreena in her very ultra-elaborate new Malibu estate. The woman has enough money to personally finance “our” film a thousand times over. She keeps telling me that all the studios have turned her down. “I couldn’t do that,” she responds to my repeated possible solution of financing it herself. “They must fight over me to get me. I need to be wanted.” We’ve just had another fight over showing two men in love with each other having sex. “I couldn’t do that either,” she said, making that face again to convey her disgust at the very notion. What is it about this town? It doesn’t seem to have changed much since Rust Legend and his tales about Jack Warner murdering James Dean.
In one of Adreena’s many many toilets I find a copy of the current issue of Sexopolis. Dorita Helen Schwartz is advising “more than ever we must blaze new pathways in this increasingly complicated world.” What the fuck does that mean? She certainly isn’t talking about safe sex or mandating condoms. Mordy himself has grown into an international icon, always pictured, as here in my hands, with several big-breasted sexmates draping from him as they overlook madcap celebrations of the only partially clad. Doesn’t he ever wear anything besides pajamas? This month’s spread is of some holiday celebration at his new L.A. Sexopolis Palace, displaying “another of our vivid demonstrations of healthy heterosexual desire and lust and possibility.” It’s all decorated to a high pitch of excess, like Adreena’s but without her better taste. It’s obvious that his enormous readership has yet to detumesce. His sales figures certainly bear this out.
I decided to try to talk to him. He was a few years older, so I didn’t play with him much growing up. When I tried to tag along with the older boys on one of their escapades I’d get shooed home. Once Grace Hooker babysat the three of us, Daniel, Mordy, and me, and took us all to the zoo. Also, Daniel had filled me in a bit about their own tortured interactions. In any event, it was time to talk to him and I wonder why it hadn’t occurred to me before. So I leave a message at the magazine’s office that “Fred Lemish of Masturbov Gardens would appreciate a return call at my hotel.” Within hours a messenger delivers an invitation for me to come to a party this very evening.
Mordy greets me immediately, even kissing my cheeks in that effusive California fashion.
“So this is the famous Fred Lemish, loudmouthed gay and UC activist troublemaker.”
“So this is the famous Mordecai Masturbov, head of the Sexopolis empire.”
“Yes, I remember you from Masturbov Gardens.”
“You are familiar with FUQU?”
He laughed and then I for some reason followed suit.
“Some of my girls think you’re a very adventurous band. Like Robin Hood. I’m quite amazed that you and your merry band haven’t picketed Sexopolis.”
“We’ve been considering it, now that we have an L.A. chapter. I thought I’d talk with you first.”
“I am relieved,” Mordy says.
“Don’t be. I believe that what you’re doing is wrong and what you’ve done is wrong and what you’ve created in this world is very wrong.”
“How so?”
“You have changed the morality of this country. That change has helped to violently overhaul the way Americans have sex and hence infect each other without responsibility. I’ve actually written an article about how Mordecai Masturbov is as much to blame for the cause and spread of The Underlying Condition as anyone in the world.”
“I must have missed that. Where is Daniel Jerusalem?” Mordy suddenly asks.
“Daniel is a doctor in Washington, working at NITS, on UC clinical trials, for Omicidio,” Fred answers.
“For Omicidio?” Mordy is impressed. “I saw this documentary about him on PBS. Daniel must be a very smart doctor, then.”
“Omicidio is an evil prick.”
“Ah, that I didn’t know. He appears on TV so often. Here we think of NITS as Lourdes. I have my girls tested regularly.”
I am older by the day, Fred thinks, much older than even one more yesterday would allow, and I am getting nowhere, while this man has conquered the world that he wished to conquer, and in so doing he’s changed it.
“We should have been lovers,” Fred says. “Daniel and I. We still should be.”
“Then why aren’t you?”
Fred shrugs. “The way of the world.”
Mordy nods.
“You must help us now that you have made so much money from us,” Fred says.
“Who is ‘us’ and why have I made money ‘from’ you? I don’t like the language you use,” Mordy says.
“Why do you, how can you, put out this stuff? Are you really interested in it at all?”
“Of course I am. I describe myself as a hopeless romantic looking for the perfect woman, which of course I know doesn’t exist. I love to remind my readers how many beautiful women I’ve ‘dated.’ I try to be their role model. It makes me feel desired. I like the drama. It’s a game. No different from betting on a stock or a horse. I bet on appetites being awakened because I couldn’t get a hard-on much as a kid. Daniel will tell you that. I still can’t much. My magazine is filled with articles of advice for people like me. I felt deprived. You would too if you couldn’t have all the hot men you must have access to.”
“I scare everyone away.”
“Well, same here. All these beauties around me want something from me. That I will make them a star. When I was a kid it was just my father’s fortune that scared people. I’ve thought about this from every angle, and I’m bored with the subject. Maybe this UC shit reflects that, reflects how people so don’t care about the seriousness of sex that sex is striking back. Do me right or I’ll punish you, it seems to be saying. Doing it right should of course entail love. That we don’t write about. Anyway, it’s thoughts like this that go through my head. What about you? Why do you care so much?”
“Don’t you know anyone who’
s died?”
“No. Not that I know of. I don’t have many friends.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“I parade all my girls around to make it look like … That I’m busy. That I’m a stud. That I’m the role model for each average reader I send each issue to. I read every word. I write most of them.”
“Haven’t you ever been in love?”
“I started all this when I was … I never went to college. I thought I fell in love with … Do you remember Claudia Webb? But she went to work for my mother. You know about my mother?”
“Yes.”
“Then I fell in love with Velvalee Peltz. She wouldn’t give me the time of day. I made an asshole of myself over Velvalee Peltz for many years. Do you remember Arnold Botts?”
“The schmuck.”
“I spent a lot of money suing him for trying to take Velvalee away from me. In the end the judge ruled I had to pay him a great deal of money. It’s the last legal fight that I’ve lost.”
“You must have a very good lawyer.”
“Sam Sport. You must have heard of him.”
“Millions of people are dying because you’re helping them to fuck themselves to death. You’re worse than I thought. I’m sorry.”
“I married Jinx Seeley, one of my mother’s girls. We watch a lot of old movies. We both love old Hollywood movies. Black and white. That’s my sex life.”
“Can you imagine Velvalee being dead from some dread disease?”
“She is dead.”
“Most of my friends are dead. I read the columns you wrote about Korah Ludens. She’s a big deal. I read her book about the neurotic personality. I think I underlined every sentence in it.”
