The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  I begged Edgar to do the same, to detail his many remarkable feats. But he had everything burned, and look what a shabby image now sticks to him for all time.

  Peter Ruester was a very stupid and selfish man, never able to comprehend and absorb the entire floor plan of his country’s intelligence operations. It was left to the idiots Gobbel and Moose to keep his mind occupied elsewhere. This allowed Purpura to run our country. Until Deep Throat filled me in, I’d no idea she was so determined to bury UC.

  Now, where was I? I’m often amazed I can keep the shenanigans of all these assholes straight. Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Carter, our country has rarely been blessed. Ah, yes, Dredd Trish. The idiot who’s been let loose upon us now. His main talent is that he employs his manipulative talents without leaving any fingerprints. No notebooks for him! His genial disposition disguises how cunning and devious he is. We were at Yaddah together. He gave me no notice because of my interest in artsy-craftsy things. He was in Skull and Bones, of course, as was his even more manipulative father, whom he worshipped and tried so hard to please, and as will be his extraordinarily wimpy homosexual son. Between Procter and Dredd, they know every important rich man in both our country and in the Arab world. Remember, the father was a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, then the most important international money management nexus in the world and founded by one of his uncles. Procter, too, thought Hitler was going to win the war, and he and the rich sheiks invested accordingly, which made him very rich. The Trishes are still big with the Arabs. That’s how Dredd got into the oil business that made him even richer.

  He didn’t want to run the CIA. The CIA was a mess in those days. Too many mistakes in Vietnam, for starters. We’ve been in one war or another ever since. Watergate did not help. Dredd worked for Nixon who sent him to run the CIA. Being the country’s chief spy was thought to be a political plum. Dredd himself thought it was a trick to keep him out of the White House. Shovels had yet to arrive in his life to provide the spine of steel that’s upholding this ninny.

  I consider it weak to hide behind deceptions, at which he is most expert, gentleman to the outside world and vicious ambitious sneak “with clean hands” to others. I guess Bill Casey, my predecessor, loved him; you could never tell what Bill really thought about anything: he spoke so softly you could hardly hear him and he never wrote anything down. Casey got Ruester elected.

  It is now obvious to me that about the time UC was taking root, everyone in D.C. was wound up with taking sides for either Iran or Iraq. Dredd was viciously pro-Iraq and defended Saddam Hussein to the max. This had much to do with keeping his rich Arab buddies pacified.

  Yes, it is straight white men’s wars that are responsible for gay men’s deaths. With so many wars going on, and there will always be a number of them, American power is focused elsewhere. But hate is hate, whatever its source. In this particular case, it breaks my heart.

  Deep Throat has told me that for some reason Dredd facilitated the transfer via COD to Hussein of a supply of viruses, retroviruses, bacteria, fungi, tissue that was infected with bubonic plague, as well as West Nile viruses and plague-infected mouse tissue smears. All this to Saddam Hussein. Dredd was that supportive of Iraq. Others around him favored Iran, and others said, let’s keep out of this part of the world, it can only portend major warfare. I was one of these. I pointed out that Iraq was working on developing nuclear weapons. But then Dredd would not pay any attention to me. I had not been in Skull and Bones. Slowly Saddam was murdering more than one million of his fellow Arabs. His menu of torture methods was even to me quite appalling. The world has little idea of how many different kinds of Arabs there are and how hate and retribution are acceptable under certain circumstances according to their Koran.

  I discovered that bin Laden family money—and it was an exceptionally large family—financed Dredd Trish’s Texas oil company. Dredd didn’t know squat about oil but Proctor told him to move to Texas.

  The bin Ladens were, with the royal family, one of Saudi Arabia’s most important powers. Both families had heads who fathered innumerable sons by vast numbers of wives. What Bill Casey and Moose and Gobbel and Shovels (each of whom have privately profited hugely from Saudi “generosity”) did not understand about the innuendoes of this culture, which would cost America a fortune and a great number of dead sons!

  No one was listening to the likes of me. Bill Casey and Gobbel with Ruester and Purpura were in power, and most of the rest of America and its bureaucrats could not tell the difference between Iran and Iraq, including Dredd, who could be heard mentioning one when he meant the other. (Believe it or not, Edgar Hoover and I had both been warning the Kennedy brothers to beware the Middle East and stop worrying so much about Russia, which did not possess sufficient cash resources.

  By the time UC dared to appear and spread, the attention of Ruester, Trish, Hussein, and bin Laden was busy elsewhere. As America would ignore UC it would ignore the long-term implications of being in bed with an equally destructive network of fundamentalist rebels. Afghanistan took a lot of minds off a lot of other problems closer to home. Politicians always like when foreign affairs can be whipped up to disguise their more homespun chicaneries. (Foreign affairs have been my bailiwick.) Dredd Trish certainly was not going to give a tinker’s damn, a flying fuck, about some fairy problem, even though he knew his son is one of them. Russia was what everyone else in Washington, including myself and all my best minds, was convinced was the enemy, but Dredd Trish was manufacturing another enemy with this Osama bin Laden. We were and are supporting this war centering in Afghanistan into what will be a nonstop existence. Trish visited Osama, bringing a check for some $70 million. After calling Russia “the evil empire,” Peter Ruester was more and more out to lunch and Purpura really wasn’t interested in any of this. Dredd had thought his ticket to ride was via Hussein and bin Laden. And Bill Casey convinced him that the war had crippled the Soviet Union.

  I had not been the only one calling Dredd a wimp. The media was after him for befriending so many questionable Arabs. To turn that tide Dredd did what Dredd does best as he hid behind his apparent wimpiness. He turned on Iraq and Saddam Hussein, who had promised not to invade enemy Kuwait then promptly did so, threatening the entire world’s oil supplies. Dredd sent every important diplomat all over the globe to bid them to join America in ridding the world of Saddam, including our own chief enemy Russia. And the most powerful PR firm in existence, Hill & Knowlton (run by a gay man, my friend Robert Gray), created the most imaginative horror propaganda involving Iraqi soldiers kidnapping Kuwaiti babies from out of their incubators and leaving them on the floor to die. A teenaged girl told this story in tears, and those tears lubricated an unwilling America into war. (She was actually some Arab diplomat’s daughter and there were no incubators in any Kuwaiti hospitals.) Thus came and went the Gulf War with hundreds of thousands dead from many nations.

  The Trishes will be responsible for these great wars, which are still ongoing, with the aid of their Saudi friends. Both Hussein and bin Laden will be murdered on orders from Trish.

  Why were we here, so far from Valley Forge and Gettysburg? To this we’ve come. Is this how we make America great? To set up the very system of Islamic terrorism we’ll soon be trying so hard to dismantle.

  “The less anyone knows, the better.” These words are the watch cry as Washington life goes on. Deal and counterdeal, alliances of friends and foes, mysterious bank accounts all over the world in places heretofore never considered anything but podunks, untraceable only to expensive lawyers. It is so easy to hide anything and everything in this country, and this world, that it truly is ridiculous. Why bother with law and order? “Plausible deniability” is the name of every game. Well, I am expert in playing this game of hide-and-seek.

  Spies most often come from hideous unhappy childhoods and backgrounds and long to be part of a stable and paternalistic home base. I am their mother and father. They feel safe with me. No one felt safe with Dulles or Trish or Wild
Bill, or anyone really, until I came along. I have invented a new world my boys and girls can live in and actually believe in irrespective of all the available evidence. All the good ones have been able to think themselves into this other place. I believe I have trained them well.

  I feel great sympathy for the young gay men who are suffering. I was once one of them myself, facing a world I did not think I’d survive in. The Trishes of Yaddah would destroy me.

  I am called “the theorist.” I understand the function of trivia, of miscellaneous information, and assimilate it into a coherent scenario others might miss. “The theoretician of American intelligence.” This is what I am called by the Yaddah historian Robin Winks, in his treatise on the secret wars that brought us into existence. How to penetrate the enemy without the enemy knowing? I am thought to have the greatest penetration in counterintelligence. Penetration is the key to counterintelligence. I believe in the spy as a valid, necessary, even primary and, yes, noble defender of American values. “Secrecy, silence, cunning,” as I believe James Joyce said. That’s the name of our game too. One goes to school with the poets to learn the use of language, especially the use of ambiguity. I can remember my own lies, necessary for a successful spy, at the same time as I often have affection for many who have lied with and/or for me. The nature of civilization often necessitates people to lie in order to stay alive. This wilderness of mirrors reflects our moral meaning. I believe in the highest goals for our country and am more and more truly frightened that these ideals are being destroyed by my own country’s fecklessness and we remain in a state of constant emergency.

  It all boils down to this: anything man could conceive of, however evil, men could and most probably will do. That is the base of human nature. Tom Jones, the most devious of men and the best of teachers, first taught me this. Because of him I have become head of all CIA counterintelligence. The press loves to call me “America’s legendary master spy.” How would it know? But thank you very much.

  I will continue to cultivate all my orchids, the one sustaining beauty in all my life. I’m going to die soon enough. I can smell that coming too. I will be taken down by one of my own. That is what usually happens to spies, particularly the good ones. Just like I know that UC is a plague and that Deep Throat’s suggestions will never be executed. FUQU will not save us from this plague. The homosexual population of this world is being greatly diminished.

  Should I devote some discussion of the mole hunt that Floyd Harmish is manufacturing to bring me down? He had to create his own new stories when his old truth was all used up.

  Or are there certain matters that you take with you to the tomb?

  But then, no case is ever dead. Even if we are.

  Yes, I have always kept a diary. Day by day, year by year. That is how history will know what I did and why I did it. The best record keepers were the Nazis. Immaculate, their facts and figures and directives. Amazing, the high quality of their belief in what they were doing. They obviously wanted history to know what they did. Everyone important thinks they’re right and everyone who disagrees with them is wrong. I have been right, of course.

  Fundamentally we all are liars. The better you lie and the more you betray, the more likely you are to be promoted. My boys and girls attract and promote each other. The thing they have in common is a desire for power that is useful. I was part of it and I loved it. I taught them to consider their targets and believe they were dealing with a bunch of people who would deservedly go to hell.

  We had to think the unthinkable. And fashion confusion for our opponents with cleverly packaged false information.

  With my death will go most of America’s secrets.

  Hoover and I both used secrets to keep everyone in line.

  That’s how I got along with Allen Dulles. I promised him if he left me alone I’d keep quiet about his connections with Hitler.

  Hoover, by the way, was the greatest spy in our history. He did much more for this country than he’s given credit for. His flaw was that he enjoyed the limelight too much. He loved being famous. And he does not appear to have left any notebooks. His beloved Clyde burned everything. The two of them kept more of us alive than will ever be known.

  I must make a note here to keep an eye out on young Dereck Dumster. I can smell him coming too and I believe he may surpass all his predecessors in iniquity against America. Sadly, I fear I shall not be here.

  THE SHIT HITS THE FAN

  PERRY: The FUQU Women’s Issues group proposes a six-month “moratorium on meetings with COD and NITS and anyone on the outside.” This proposal would restrict FUQU strategy “vis-à-vis women’s issues and all our other issues” to direct action only. It proves extremely controversial and is voted down at an April 8 meeting.

  * * *

  FRED: Here it is at last, bubbling up out of its cauldron of suppression, out of the women’s continuing rejection by Omicidio, NITS, and COD, and taking this out on the men of FUQU who “go inside” and talk to the pharmas, which the women still cannot do, no matter how hard they’ve tried. Each day the chasm widens between the women of the Women’s Committee and the men of T and D. Each side is convinced, and determined to believe, that the other is against them.

  * * *

  SPARKS: A small group of activists, many of them from the Women’s Caucus, are undermining T and D, breaking down trust between FUQU and other community organizations, enraging communities of color, undercutting the achievements of treatment activism, and obstructing future progress. The end result of all this activity can only be the exodus of most of T and D into our new organization, TAG, and the growing irrelevance of the remaining shell of FUQU in the area in which it had made its greatest initial impact, UC research and treatment. I have tried to negotiate with the Women’s Caucus in good faith to work things out, but I am unwilling to give up the still nascent access to various pharmas that we in T and D are so recently and arduously winning.

  * * *

  MAXINE: Bill M. tells me that T and D is meeting with pharmaceutical companies about taking money to conduct research in community-based environments. They had not talked to the floor, to tell us, to ask for FUQU’s permission. More and more it is apparent T and D believe they can do anything they want to. Bill had wanted me to bring up a proposal that would not allow this to happen. We are not only talking about this betrayal of our principles. We simply do not take money from the enemy, and the drug companies are our enemy!

  * * *

  SCOTTY: We decided last August in T and D that we would seek a million dollars from pharmaceutical companies. Why not? Rebby’s CRI community research initiative had gone belly-up. The reaction from the pharmas is actually pretty good. Fourteen of them came to our meeting to discuss this. A few want guarantees that if they fund us we would not picket them, and we turned them down flat on this. I gave them the example of our working with Starlight on their Gavcon formula during the day and picketing them in the evening over their ridiculous price for their Vent, for which I spent the night in jail. The floor is in an uproar when they hear about our meeting with the pharmas. “We’ve got to stop Sparks and Scotty!” Maxine is telling everyone. I am more and more amazed that there are so-called UC activists willing to expend so much energy to win a perceived power struggle with their very own.

  * * *

  MAXINE: Policy is made by the floor, not by individuals or a committee, no matter how “good” the idea is. I am neither psychologically nor personally terrorized by Sparks’s name in large print at the top of his letter to us, nor by his attempt to paint himself as someone I am trying “to get.” Scotty and Sparks, your arrogance and egotism are amazing—I would not waste my time trying to “get” you. That you think every issue has you, personally, at its center is your problem, not mine. And whether or not we ever get to discuss and vote on the particular issue of taking money from pharmaceutical companies, I will continue to raise these issues as long as I am a member of this organization.

  * * *

&nb
sp; FRED: There was a smoking gun. I had smelled the smoke. I didn’t recognize that it stank as much as it did. I knew it meant trouble but I thought I could talk them out of it. But when I tried, they weren’t listening. No one was listening, T and D kids especially. The floor of FUQU didn’t care. “Let them go. Snits and snots, uppity beyond belief, let the selfish bastards go.” There are a lot who feel this way. Oh, I’d sniffed discontent in the ranks—it would be hard not to in an organization this size—but in any case, my paternal feeling about FUQU wasn’t acknowledged by a lot of them so it wasn’t as if I could do much more than shouting FIRE! Of course I’m weaseling out here: I could have done something! I could have! I should have! As Tommy has told me more times than I care to hear, I’m a great idea man but shitty on the follow-through, the details. I don’t have the patience for that. So now FUQU is dying. I call them all my children in my heart, and many of my favorite kids are leaving home.

  * * *

  PERRY: The background to all of this included that T and D, all white men, objected to the women, both white and of color, who objected to their not objecting that the UCCTG Trial Seventy-six endangered the lives of pregnant women. This trial gave ZAP to pregnant women to see if their babies would be born uninfected and, again, COD, FADS, and now TAG, ignored input from women. Women of color in many chapters get incensed. How dare a trial that endangers our lives be something that any part of FUQU can support! That is too much to ask pregnant mothers to do: to possibly sacrifice their newborn infants in this way! I don’t care if the bastards leave, they said; let them go play tag with their tiny pee-pees somewhere else. But it got even more complicated. Women of color who weren’t in FUQU and weren’t activists started screaming that all of FUQU should keep their noses out of it—these women wanted the drug and were willing to gamble and told us to all go shove it and mind our own business. This was the first time anything like this happened, and there was far from any consensus on the floor or off it of what to do. T and D of course had helped set up the trial’s parameters. I wrote an article for the first TAG newsletter pretty much like what I’ve written here, and Sparks killed it. He didn’t think it was “politically appropriate” at this moment.