The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  FUQU at Yaddah. A couple dozen of Yaddah’s own FUQU chapter. I had no idea they had their own group. We make it impossible for Dr. Sullivan to speak at Battell Chapel. He has continued to block any progress out of vengeance for FUQU’s screaming him off the stage in San Francisco. He’s surprised to confront us again. He is a vengeful, stupid man punishing and murdering his own people. These Yaddah kids will get into trouble with Yaddah’s president, Bentley Belly, to whom I write, trying to save them from the expulsion he’s said is coming. He is a double asshole, Yaddah’s president, to quote Claudette’s now-famous description of Jerry.

  Beautiful, wonderful, inspirational Leonard Bernstein is dead. Lennie, who tried to pick up young Fred in London a hundred years ago, a Fred too frightened to say yes. Lennie, who played Brahms for a bunch of activists from Monserrat’s organization in his Dakota living room, saying, “Listen to this music. Johannes Brahms was a gay man. Listen to it! Can’t you hear it! Can’t you know it!” Lennie, who came to Madison Square Garden to lead the Ringling Brothers orchestra in “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the first GMPA benefit almost ten years ago now. Shmuel told me, “The one thing in the world most important to Lennie was to write his Holocaust opera before he died. He didn’t get to write it. Let that be a lesson to you, Fred.” Shmuel, my old shrink, now a famous expert on death and dying, came to Lennie’s side these past months to help him die.

  ALMA MATER INDEED

  I went up to Yaddah to talk to the business school about the evil attitude of the pharmaceutical companies in ignoring us. Perhaps one is inextricably bound by some sort of blood ties to a place where one’s attempted suicide. Call it love-hate, call it corny, call it Ahab, but I’ve never got over the place and probably never will. The Truth once photographed me outside the freshman room I chose for my attempt. I have that picture always inside me. That I tried to do something so decisive makes me always fearful I might try it again. Yes, there’s a lot of Yaddah’s history in these aging bones.

  I visit the shrine. I stand outside Standing Hall and just look at it, at that left-hand set of windows on the ground floor. I hope you remember, though I suspect you don’t. There’s always too much to remember in histories.

  Bentley Belly is Yaddah’s current president. He is Yankee family rich. His daddy made a fortune doing something. I’m uncertain how Belly got to be president of Yaddah. I know his wife because she made a documentary about homosexuality for ABC that was awful and I told her so. She filmed me speaking somewhere. She’d asked me lots of questions about homosexuality, indicating to me how little she understood. That was in the days when we still had to be called sick on prime time.

  Bentley Belly is about to expel those three gay kids from Yaddah for protesting with FUQU and me at that appearance by Dr. Sullivan. This is against the rules at Yaddah. Free speech must in no way be interfered with, and violators are punished by expulsion. Pretty strong stuff.

  I had written an appeal on behalf of the Yaddah students—Patrick Greaney, Sam Zalutsky, and Eva Kolodner—who faced expulsion for joining with me to protest. I’d been in the vicinity coincidentally: Dr. Sullivan was just a bonus. I had no idea he’d be there or that there even was a Yaddah chapter of FUQU, and with so many vocal members. And they all wore our T-shirts and our caps, emblazoned with SILENCE = DEATH.

  I wrote to Bentley Belly.

  I don’t understand a Yaddah that could do this to these three young people. I cannot believe that official university reactions are so extreme, against what we did and what we stood for and what we stand for and what we are trying, so desperately and feebly, as activists, to accomplish against a governmental bureaucracy that does nothing to save us. How could Yaddah and Bentley Belly, in such a haughty, condescending, condemning fashion, be so far away from the reality of the lives gay kids must live with now?

  One of your professors wrote, anonymously of course, in The Yaddah Daily News, “Someone has figured out that it’s cheaper to let these misfit perverts die rather than try to save them. I say a Nobel Prize to this person.”

  Do you have any idea what it must be like to never love again without this sword of Damocles over your head? To hold another person in your arms. To live in a relationship. To be free from the fear that death will come with each kiss. With each lovemaking. Can you possibly imagine what that is like? That you would never be able to kiss Nola. Or make love to her. Or be free from concern that some of your saliva or some of your semen or some blood in your mouth after you brushed your teeth might infect her with this deadly virus. Or your children. You would be afraid to kiss your children. Can you imagine any of this? Can you imagine all of this being dumped on your head when you were still a kid in college? Before your life has even started, before much of what you’d hoped would come to you no longer can.

  I wrote all this to Bentley Belly.

  Belly’s response is terrifying. Words like fact finder make me tremble that the thought police are indeed taking over. Bentley has appointed a Fact Finder, the dean of one of the residential colleges.

  The Fact Finder’s Wife, Mrs. Lytton Goldsmith, asked an openly gay professor, Dr. Alvin Novick, if he knew the names of others involved in this protest. He said of course he did. She asked him to tell her husband these names. He said of course he would not. What kind of place has Yaddah become where professors are asked to name names and professors’ wives become spies to help their “fact finder” husbands? These are the tactics of a right-wing-religious-fundamentalist institution. I have gay friends who were expelled from Lovejoy schools in Utah when they were fingered for being gay. But at Yaddah? All this got in my letter as well.

  You have singled out three students for investigation. You have only been able to identify three and accuse them because their names were in the New Godding newspaper. Patrick was quoted in an article and Sam and Eva wrote and signed their names to an editorial. You are, in essence, punishing them for practicing their right to free speech. Had they not spoken to the press, you would have no names to send before your Executive Committee. There were some fifty protestors involved. But you have been able to identify only three. So you will pillory them anyway. I believe I was probably quite the noisiest protestor inside. As I was sitting beside Sheila Wellington, the secretary of Yaddah, she can certainly attest to this truth. Should Sheila Wellington have whispered into my ear, “Fred, you are going to get them in trouble”? That would have been a kindness for her to perform. But then perhaps she is a member of your Thought Police too.

  Do you know that this Fact Finder, the Master of Jonathan Edwards, Dr. Lytton Goldsmith, invited the three youngsters to tea “to discuss” the protest, and they went with the hope they would be permitted some sort of audience, that they could somehow at least be heard, and he heard them not, he yelled and shamed them during their entire visit to him. This appears as just another in a growing list of examples of how a university cares so little about our deaths, about gay deaths, about black deaths. Did you know that the real Jonathan Edwards, one of the “founding fathers” of Yaddah, was one of early America’s great slave owner-haters? Along with a few others of those after whom Yaddah residential colleges are named: Calhoun comes also to mind. These two men turn in their graves that here on earth black students sleep in “their” dorms.

  The kids get off. Why? Because I sent a copy of my Bentley Belly letter to Bishop Paul Moore, a Yaddah trustee from way back, the much-loved Episcopal bishop of New York, a friend to GMPA, and, though it will be many years before it’s known, a closeted homosexual his entire life but one who before his death somehow managed a few happy years with another man. He chaired Yaddah’s Executive Committee, summoned to adjudge this mess.

  I’m happy to say Bentley Belly didn’t last long. He went off to rehabilitate America’s educational system with the first of what became “charter schools.” I believe he and his partners lost a fortune. I hope so. He does seem to have faded from view. I hope for that as well, although it’s become my experience that you can�
�t keep a bad man down.

  When, if ever, am I going to have a satisfactory relationship with my alma mater, the mother to the education that put the cherry on top of the person who compiles this history of The American People? Why do I care for someone that doesn’t care about me? Is that the true definition of being a son? They make you feel that way, you know. They inject Yaddah-love in you whether you want it in your veins or not. Why is that? How do they do that? Even my unloving father said, “Just get that diploma with Yaddah on it, boy. No one will ever care how well you did.”

  INT. TOMMY’S APARTMENT. DAY.

  A West Side apartment Tommy once shared with his younger brother, Johnny Boatwright. Johnny is sick and looks terrible. A box labeled ZAP is on a table by his bed. He has just thrown up and Tommy is cleaning his face. Fred watches.

  TOMMY: I found him sitting in a pool of vomit. Just staring into space and whistling “Dixie.” It’s time for your next dose.

  JOHNNY: None of this shit, bro. No more ZAP.

  TOMMY: This is all there is. Your brother is not going to sit and watch you take nothing.

  JOHNNY: Well, your brother is just going to lie here until they find something that doesn’t make me feel dead already. It’s a good thing I’ve maxed out my credit cards. I saw Paris and Rome.

  TOMMY (to Fred): From as far back as I can remember, our mother, who had been a World War Two flight instructor, would punish Johnny and me by holding our heads under water or slapping our faces until we could take it without whimpering. We grabbed our ankles while she beat our behinds as hard as she could with a three-foot length of one-inch black rubber hose. Then she would sit on the toilet seat while she painted our naked butts with witch hazel while she cried, “What have I done to make you a fairy?”

  Johnny starts whistling “Dixie.” Then:

  JOHNNY: The crazy bitch did me a favor. I learned how powerful people could murder me. (He goes back to whistling “Dixie.”) They’re the ones who make fairies tough. (More “Dixie.”)

  TOMMY (taking Johnny in his arms, both of them crying): Oh, my dear darling brother!

  Fred’s eyes are filled with tears too.

  MAN IS CHARGED IN ARSON AT ACTIVIST OFFICE

  THE NEW YORK DAILY JUICE

  A man with two prior arrests for arson was charged with setting the fire that caused more than $50,000 damage to the building where the gay-rights group, Fed Up Queers United, has its headquarters in West Chelsea.

  The man, Esquino Facundo, twenty years old, who has no known address, had volunteered to do chores for the group, a member said. He was charged on Friday with arson and burglary for the September 21 blaze, said Bill Fincke, a fire marshal supervisor.

  The blaze was set three days before the group, the prominent and militant advocacy group to combat UC, was to open its new headquarters.

  “Esquino was someone who showed up at a couple meetings and then went up to the administrator and said, ‘Can I help? I want to volunteer,’” said Frank Smithson, the group’s coordinator. About fifty sets of keys to the new offices were made and Mr. Facundo apparently took one of them and let himself in to set the blaze, Mr. Smithson said.

  “He came up and did dirty work, painting and sweeping and cleaning. We had no reason not to trust him,” Mr. Smithson said.

  Mr. Fincke said, “It is not being considered a bias crime.”

  Fed Up Queers United has demonstrated on Wall Street and has interrupted services at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  INT. BOARDROOM. PRESIDIUM PHARMACEUTICALS. DAY.

  A group of stern-faced men, including Gobbel, Shovels, Dr. James Monroe, and Arnold are watching a TV. Eigo’s face fills the screen. He is identified as “UC ACTIVIST.” Minna Trooble is taking notes.

  EIGO: So the answer to the first question of this session (who owns the product?) is this: since it’s a health-care product, we the people do, as surely as we own the law or speech or the stuff of any basic right. And my answer to the second question (who controls the pricing?) is similar: we the people should.

  This does not go down well with the viewers.

  GOBBEL: I think we must call in auxiliary forces. Don’t you agree? It’s your money.

  DR. MONROE: I’m only the brains behind the drug. You guys are the muscle.

  Shovels turns to address Scotty and Sparks, who are sitting to the side with Perry.

  SHOVELS: You’re not going to get anywhere working with us if you don’t shut up people like this.

  SPARKS: He’s not speaking for all of us. A bunch of us are taking power into our own hands.

  SHOVELS: Ms. Trooble, are you getting all this down?

  MINNA: Of course, Mr. Shovels.

  GOBBEL: Be sure to get it to President Trish.

  SHOVELS: And to our friends in Saudi Arabia to let them know we’re watching out for them.

  DEEP THROAT: TOP-SECRET TO FRED

  You think your secret comrade and admirer has been completely excised from this wretched health-care system? You think Omicidio the Ogre has had me put out to pasture to graze too far away from him? Well, I had been put on duty at the White House.

  Let me pause to say that, in addition to my growing depression, utter sadness, and despair, I am fed up, not only with myself but with you. I am sick and tired of your feeble “Reports on the State of this Plague.” Do you know what the word turgid means? Swollen. Distended. Bloated. Full of shit. This disease is out of control. This country’s attempt to deal with this engorgement is full of shit—a lot of idiots on board gleefully watching and helping the ship going down. That is the state of this plague. There is no upside. FUQU is turgid when it should be lean and mean.

  There is, yet again, as you know, no head of FADS. What’s-her-face resigned. You challenged her to put up or shut up and she chose the latter. That’s fine but you did not get inside, as I did, to discover that her entire agency does not have one single computer. All reports must be written by hand. And you have wondered why its approvals take so long! We now have no official government agency to approve any trial, any treatment, any progress. Our chief turgid asshole, Dr. Jerrold Omicidio, and Linus Gobbel, and the departed Purpura Ruester, couldn’t be happier. Wait until you watch Bart Shovels.

  DOT and DIP flunked out. ZIP and ZOK are in the wings waiting. Jerry refuses to test them. You haven’t heard of them. You haven’t heard of Presidium or what they’re up to. Pharmas who own anything are each determined to win a race that hasn’t been sanctioned by FADS. I have seen both the D drugs and ZOK. Each is just another analogue of ZAP. But that makes ZIP a little safer because, with ZAP’s half-baked personality, it’s time for combo trials with something. Gobbel and Shovels and Greeting want things just as they are, retesting ZAP. No one is happy this country is spending so much moolah on the sissies. Whatever Purpura wanted and set in motion, Linus concurred, as does the latest idiot inhabitant, Dredd Trish.

  I know all of this. All your energies are on behalf of drugs that are full of shit. I thought your T+D smarty panties were supposed to know more than I do.

  There are some two dozen potential treatments for UC-related illnesses that won’t be available because Jerry won’t test them and there’s no FADS to approve them. And they are all categorized as “Top-Secret” by HAH, the kiss of death. Gobbel and Shovels are this country’s Public Health Service.

  I must now confide in you with one last “state of the plague” lest I don’t live long enough to tell you later. I have not requested you call me Deep Throat without having due reason.

  Why was I at the White House for almost a year?

  The Whore of Babylon did not want the world to get even a whiff of whatever her hubby’s got. His country had seen very little of him. He never knew enough about anything except what Purpura whispered into his ear. His staff were too busy competing and manipulating each other over everything. They treated him like he’s one of the cowboys or soldiers he’s played in his movies. She refused to accept that it’s Alzheimer’s settling in. While she’s be
en running the war against Iran.

  As a famous pathologist I’d been summoned to come up with some other diagnosis. She wanted him tested every which way possible, even if it’s invasive. Well, I was not going to cut into a president of the United States when it’s so obvious to me what’s happening to him. So I am called upon to dream up skin tests and blood tests and scrapings from under his finger- and toenails, testing his urine, testing his shit—the poor bloke does not know what to make of me. I went so far as to perform a colonoscopy, which brought a wisp of puzzled sadness to crease his enduringly smiling face. When I kept telling Purpura what she doesn’t want to hear, she dismissed me as an incompetent, only to summon me back in a few days to try something else her astrologer recommended. Enemas with prune juice. Some herbs flown in overnight from Russia. Something called a brain massager, which I said I refused to mess around with.

  She has now had me reassigned to her staff in Los Angeles. That is why you have not heard nor seen me. My charge is now to just keep the old Ruester crowing.

  She continues to be in constant communication with Jerry. She is determined there be no UC treatments to protect her son and his friends.

  I promise you that before I die—and my liver, like yours, is caving in—I will tell you more about my boss James Jesus Angleton and our own relationship.

  WEST COAST EAST COAST

  There is a rift between West Coast and East Coast UC treatment activist organizations.

  Marty Delaney, the respected West Coast activist, has no doubt what he wants. He wants anything and everything and he wants it all approved quickly, particularly stuff only scantily available on Extended Access (a.k.a. Parallel Track). A number of Easterners (whose new spokesperson is Sparks Puffington, who certainly is a turncoat on this issue), announce they’re increasingly less ready to gobble down just any (legally or otherwise) available anythings blindfolded, just as the West Coast seems prepared to swallow and/or inject anything at all.