The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  * * *

  HETTIE: Harriett, like Tracy, truly believes people are still spying on us. And what Harriett believes, Hettie believes. Someone threw a brick through Rebecca P.’s window, and she lives in Washington Heights. Yes, the resolution was voted down, but not before the damage was done. Sparks, particularly, and Scotty, felt they could no longer put up with a situation “where paranoid dykes could get the floor to vote on destructive stuff.”

  * * *

  ANN: I definitely believe the FBI is infiltrating us to hasten our decline. I also think Harriett and hence Hettie was planted in our midst to cause damage. Maxine agrees.

  * * *

  PERRY: We may never know whether the harassment of FUQU women was the work of the NYPD, the FBI, or another government agency, or some disturbed member of FUQU. There are more than enough potentially crazy people around. Harriett and Hettie said they received many hang-up calls. Then they said they began to get bizarre phone messages, some linked to a three-way calling system that had phone sex on the third line. Other women were linked to three-way calls to which Harriett was connected. She said she hadn’t placed the calls. Then she said it wasn’t a brick, it was a bullet that was fired through Rebecca P.’s apartment window in Washington Heights. Someone left a vial of poison by Saramae’s door. Keri’s mother was told she had died, when she was actually on her way to a zap in D.C. Needle Exchange member Jane A. found a used syringe taped to her door with a note saying, “Use this you bitch.” Each week another woman tells of another incident.

  * * *

  SPARKS: I don’t believe any of them.

  * * *

  SCOTTY: UC activism was my whole life, exhilarating. When it stopped being fun, and when it became painful, it was time to get out, for self-preservation.

  * * *

  FRED: Okay. Then get out. Get out. Get fucking out! But do you have to take our heart and soul and brains with you? That seems incredibly selfish and arrogant. The least, the very least you could have done is to allow us to discuss this before making it such a fait accompli. I went to a TAG meeting uninvited and said all this to them.

  * * *

  PERRY: TAG is afraid of Fred. They think he’s too powerful and volatile. And they feel vulnerable, especially starting something new. Therefore Sparks insists that Fred’s kept in the dark about what they’re intending to do, and when the split occurs Fred’s not asked to join our new organization. Many in TAG continue in FUQU. Maxine is convinced they keep attending so they can vote against anything that would interfere with what TAG is now planning. It’s all nasty. Fred makes any number of “appeals to reason” on the floor, imploring “everyone to come back, get word to your friends to come back.” Maxine’s prediction about “our new powerlessness”—well, we see it beginning to come true. “There are no more outside-inside teams to work both sides of the street,” she warns TAG. “You will never have the power that you had in T and D, in FUQU,” she warns Sparks.

  * * *

  FRED: Everyone will have a different view of what is happening. But Maxine and yours truly will be right. The crazies will take over FUQU and TAG will become another bureaucracy. Just you wait, Henry Higgins!

  * * *

  SCOTTY: I know there was a general sense that I was responsible for taking the organization in a more structured direction than people were comfortable with. And there was a definite backlash against both real and perceived ego and arrogance on my part, that and the fact that I was the media darling of the organization and had a lot of the limelight culminating in my speaking in San Francisco and being on TV all over the world.

  I figure because of me we sold more than a million dollars’ worth of FUQU merchandise around the country. I had quite a mail-order business going at one point. In the gay pride parades we would sell twenty thousand, thirty thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise at a pop. The biggest seller was always “Read My Lips,” two guys, or two girls kissing each other, even more than our SILENCE=DEATH T-shirt. I was definitely full of self-confidence and cocky, and I was arrogant as all hell too, to the point of being obnoxious. We had two art auctions I ran. The first made about three hunded thousand, and the second one more than a million. We had real money at last! I made us rich! When I look back on myself during those days I’m a bit uncomfortable. I could have definitely used some humility then.

  Very quickly in FUQU it became very PC to sleep with somebody who was positive, as a way of saying, I’m not afraid of this, safe sex works—it was a political statement. And God bless ’em, because I was dying to get back into the ball game and all of a sudden I was in high demand and it was just fabulous. It was fun. It definitely had for me the added dynamic that I was very, very frightened of dying without a boyfriend taking care of me, so there were not many times when I did not have a boyfriend. I would latch on to whoever was showing interest at the time, whether it was a good match or not. There was desperation on my part, and I know I ruffled feathers as I sort of kept trading upward from Michael M. to Brian McN. to Carlton and a few others and eventually to Kevin and to Perry.

  At the same time Iris was teaching us in T and D about this gigantic bureaucracy, FADS and NITS, that is preventing any lifesaving drugs from getting to us. The more we poked our noses into that world, the more there was a growing palpable fear of us. You could see it and sense it and feel it. Our threat was FUQU demonstrations. We were doing quite a job on certain senior people at FADS and NITS, putting their pictures on posters, almost like branding them Nazis. We hit hard in a very personal way. We had never been violent, but there was now fear from Pharma that we would turn violent, that they were next. Every member of T and D was assigned a pharmaceutical manufacturer to get to know and let them get to know us.

  For me the cornerstone of FUQU was the fact that we were not willing to be wedged into one standard idea of what an activist movement is. We had this level of desperation that permitted us to try any and all techniques at the same time, that ultimately came down to this inside-versus-outside approach. You sit down with them, and the very next week you punch them in the face. Marie Clayture at FADS wasn’t evil to me. She was just playing a very predictable role, and we had to tell her what we wanted from her and FADS in very clear terms and then apply the external pressure to make her do what we wanted. But we weren’t going to get her to do exactly what we wanted unless we did both things—the external pressure and sitting down and talking it out with her, and making her realize that she was dealing with highly motivated, highly rational and intelligent people who had something to say, not some screaming raving idiots who were calling her a murderer and marching outside her front door, which of course was us, too. It was that combination that I thought was our power. Fred had explained very early to the floor how all the big movie companies he’d worked for did a version of this. Good cop, bad cop, it’s called. Marie Clayture quit because of us.

  T and D greased the wheels to make it so that drug development could happen more quickly, and even though FUQU was raking companies like Greeting over the coals until they were one of the most disrespected corporate names in the country, by the time the ’90s came around there were two or three times the number of companies involved in UC research as there were in the beginning, which really goes to show you how practical our approach was coming along.

  FUQU went from someplace that was my family, it was everything, to a place that was just very painful. There were these two gigantic camps. One that wanted the organization to be solely a traditional civil disobedience group, and one that wanted it to be both a civil disobedience and really smart lobbying group. And those two camps started really butting heads. And it got down to a point where FUQU was trying to cut off the inside work. T and D was definitely working very independently. We were acting very elitist. It was a fair criticism. We felt like we knew what we were doing. The debates we were getting involved with were very complex. (We were kind of our own little enterprise, but we weren’t the only splinter group in FUQU acting independently,
as became very apparent at the church action, which became a definitely unchoreographed-in-advance extravaganza.) Then Maxine proposed that we should no longer be able to meet with the government or pharmas. It didn’t pass, it wasn’t even close, but it was frightening and it was a defining moment for T and D.

  A few years earlier I had filed papers, and now I was ready to put it out: the Treatment Action Guerrillas. Did I smell anything that early? I think what I smelled was something I could be in charge of. I just kept waiting for the rest of T and D to get to the emotional place where they were ready to walk away as well. We formally split. Sparks and Gregg and Melvin and Barbara and Claudette and Spud and Barry and of course Perry—it was originally about ten to fifteen of us, maybe more. In no time flat we had thirty, forty, fifty at meetings in Melvin’s loft. It was all by invitation only. Eigo wouldn’t come. Fred wanted to be part of it when he finally heard about us, but Sparks said no.

  FRED: Scotty, you do know that you are murdering FUQU?

  SCOTTY: Fred, you’re full of shit.

  * * *

  MAXINE: Fuqu had been listened to because we have been smart and can call out hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people to back up our demands and ideas. If we do not find a way to continue to do that—in actuality and not only as a threat—we will soon find out that we have no clout, no matter how smart we are.

  * * *

  SPARKS: Knowingly they sought to divide us. Their function is as destructive as if they were provocateurs sent in from outside to weaken us and divert our energies away from our proper goals and into FUQU’s growing division. Our critics refuse to let us develop our new methods, which they claim lack the ideological “purity” demanded of “the movement,” but which stand in stark contrast to their repeated failure to budge NITS. FUQU’s ability to influence the national debate on UC has now been eclipsed by FUQU’s own internal paralysis. This proudest and once most effective UC organization now finds itself involved in vicious cycles of self-recrimination, periodic orgies of attacking its closest allies, leaving the true antagonists unscathed. FUQU is now so bitterly factionalized it rarely rises to the occasion to mount more ambitious campaigns. To make matters worse, those of us who actually continue to focus on UC work are regularly vilified and held up to collective abuse. I am not interested in belonging any longer to a frustrated legacy erected over a pile of our corpses so that lifelong movement parasites can deny my agenda. Adherence to collective procedures can, in the hands of a practiced crowd psychologist, be as crushingly oppressive as an old-style oligarchy, churning up a series of blatant lies, enthusiastically spread. FUQU must take its directions from people with UC, and not from these parasites whose primary stake is only in political agitation and often over specific non-UC issues. At its best FUQU moved from opposition to constructive involvement in changing things. At its worst, it has been reduced to negating itself with intrigue and infighting.

  * * *

  MAXINE: I do not recognize the organization Sparks lambasts so. Scotty and Sparks are succeeding in dividing the world into the infected vs. the uninfected, even though both TAG and FUQU are peopled with each, and into treatment activism vs. social activism, the latter anything to do with women or people of color or drug users. I believe they are so successful because anyone who disagrees with them is too afraid to speak out publicly. TAG members keep coming to FUQU and voting against anything that might be against their plans. It’s all increasingly nasty and escalating. This group, our very comrades-in-arms! A coalition can’t work if we don’t admit that in every category the world uses to describe us and we use to describe ourselves (UC-positive, women, men, Afro-Americans, Latino/a, white, gay, lesbian, trans, straight, and so on), people within those categories do not always agree with each other. We have to get past the idea that things we disagree about can’t be discussed, even when there are passionate feelings on all sides of an issue, a discussion that TAG is stonewalling. I did not propose the moratorium on women’s issues re. meeting with the government and the drug companies. I did bring that proposal to the floor for discussion on behalf of the FUQU Network Women’s Issues Committee, which was concerned because of all the rumors that were creating so much underground dissent. I thought it was important for it to be discussed and voted on in a timely fashion, and a lot of new points of view were raised. I have been a longtime activist because there has been longtime injustice in the world. I did not come to FUQU opportunistically or to preach any particular line. I came to FUQU because I am a lesbian and because people in one of my communities, the lesbian and gay community, are dying as a result of government homophobia and criminal neglect. In the course of being in FUQU I learned more about the crisis and became even more committed to doing the work to stop it. Like Eigo, I believe that FUQU is the only organization doing the work we do, and I worry about us not being around anymore in full force to do it. And like Eigo and Fred, I hope we can find ways to bring back those who have left and to keep new people coming to a welcoming environment where they will take initiative to work on any and all issues of concern to all of us and that will contribute to our goal of saving lives.

  FRED (confronting Scotty and Sparks): YOU ARE MURDERING US!

  SCOTTY: Stop saying that!

  FRED: You are taking away our brains and leaving us with only our bodies.

  SPARKS: Don’t be such a drama queen.

  FRED: You will never have as much power as you have here with us all working together.

  SPARKS: Your buddy Maxine said the same thing. Well, you’re both wrong and we’ll prove it to you.

  FRED: Yes, but at what great cost to us! Shame on the lot of you!

  SHAME

  Yet another heartbreaking scenario playing out on our field of battle, the number of them growing, lessening, then expanding, like an accordion trying to squeeze air into its lungs, but in the end collapsing in disjointed disharmony as all the players playing are canceling each other out. Can facts among this debris be accumulated, sifted, whatever it takes to overcome the shame of it?

  Fred Lemish has been told many times that shame is a shameful word to use when talking to gay people, a hateful word associated with too many traumas that plague memory with dense layers of unremovable gunk. It’s called plaque when it sticks to your teeth and it’s called shit when it comes out of your gut and it’s called a smelly mess after you’ve farted out clouds of it with your compacted stored-up gas. You never can shit it all out. Or forget. Well, more and more shame is beginning to run through FUQU’s History of Unremovable Gunk as all the once mighty rivers in this world of ours engorge into one.

  T and D is having especial success in its endeavors to break down walls and open doorways into a system that many other FUQU members, particularly the women and the very sick, have been powerless to breach. But the women have been unable to force an officialdom to change the definition of UC to state unequivocally that UC indeed infects women. Such a stupid and unnecessary fight, and it has gone on for so very long. Pewkin had given many reasons, including that it would be too expensive to change all the paperwork. Dr. Paulus Pewkin, then in charge of America’s Center of Disease, actually said that. He did not mention that it would greatly increase the number of Official Cases of Record (OCR), thus upsetting insurance companies no end and increasing disability benefits and such. Dredd Trish, of course, hates us as much as Ruester did. He’s even heard off camera referring to us as “those fairies.” Omicidio was by his side. Jerry’s often invited to the White House.

  Maxine has her own fervid group of devoted acolytes who are as one with her and the philosophy that she has made her life, through all her years of activist experience with every possible path and byway with which the left has flirted. She has lived through it all, and she has seen that ruptures are usually inevitable. Deference is based on the respect most feel for her. She does not like to think she sees the beginning of FUQU’s end, as Scotty and Sparks do and desire. Yes, a good case can be made that they actually desire it, and the qu
icker its demise, the better.

  T and D is another country where the language has been difficult to learn. It is a different jargon. It is a different rap. Eigo’s Reports to the Floor, brilliant in concept and content and prose, are Urdu to too many. Non-T+Ders sense they are being talked down to by a very elitist bunch. While Fred is implored weekly by a growing group of the desperate for any information on treatments—“When is something coming along to save me! I don’t have much time left!”—too many with UC are not being attended to, anywhere at all. T and D’s progress reports do not yet translate into action, much less hope. ZAP and combo trials are now fully enrolled by more and more desperate guinea pigs. Word is out that ZAP’s a crap shoot. But nothing else is forthcoming.