by Larry Kramer
I allow the TAG meetings to take place in my loft. This old ugly Jew hosting all these hot young men. I want every one of them. I make a fool of myself over someone or other all the time. I asked Perry if they thought I was a joke. “You, Melvin?” he said. That’s all he said. I made the mistake of taking Perry down to my place in Miami Beach. Even getting us both stoned didn’t work. Melvin, he is twenty-eight years old and you are over seventy!
I don’t think hosting the TAG meetings in my loft is working for me. I think maybe I will move down to Miami full-time at last. FUQU was fun when we were younger, all of us. Now I have trouble remembering the names of the kids and all those drugs in the pipeline.
INT. GMPA MEETING ROOM. DAY.
The judge and the board facing Tommy.
JUDGE: You were directed specifically not to befriend Fred Lemish or have any connection with FUQU.
TOMMY: You know, Judge, you really have to let me run GMPA the way I think is most effective. Otherwise, why am I here? Fred is not only my best friend, but he also still cares about this place and has many good ideas of how to proceed effectively.
JUDGE: Such as?
TOMMY: We go to every gay organization we can think of and beg them to all work together and not duplicate each other’s efforts.
JUDGE: That’s more FUQU than GMPA.
TOMMY: It really isn’t. Do you know how many clients I am supervising? Ruester murdered more people than Hitler.
JUDGE: That’s definitely more Fred Lemish.
TOMMY (to the board): Who are all you new guys? What do you know about our history? Where we came from. How I fell in love with Fred and he couldn’t love me back. Just like you and me. Forget it. It’s very dispiriting. I think it’s time for me to take a rest.
JUDGE: That will be all.
CLAUDETTE
A bunch of kids from TAG and what’s left of T and D at FUQU were together on our own to start “Countdown” to set demands for meds for the five leading OIs affecting people with UC: CMV, histoplasmosis, PCP, toxoplasmosis, and MAC. It was nice being all together again while the big boys are still acting out. We even have our own little demo in D.C. when yet another “UC Official Commission Report” said Trish had failed to meet his responsibilities to the monumental suffering, etc. etc. We’re all sick of him and glad to see him go. He did bugger all for us. He even tried to take away our health insurance.
BYE-BYE, DREDD
Dredd and Taddy Trish are seen waving goodbye as they board a plane. In view are some FUQU pickets with their signs: FUCK YOU FROM FUQU!; THANKS FOR NOTHING!; YOU WANTED US DEAD BUT WE’RE STILL HERE!
THE ARRIVAL OF ANOTHER BULLSHITTER AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
After being wooed by “gay leaders” like Randy Dildough and Sammy Sircus, the first official act of Boy Vertle as president of The American People is to make it complicated for closeted gays to serve “openly” in the armed forces. He had promised us otherwise. “The destruction of man’s rights is a prerequisite for dominating him. Why do you and your chaps believe this one will be any better than his predecessors?” Hermia asks, citing her beloved Hannah Arendt. Boy also does not deliver the major UC policy speech he promised at a fund-raiser that Randy and Arteria Madeleine Dontz and her Human Universal Gay Groups (HUGG) throw for him, which raised some million dollars to hand over to him that very night. But he won’t stop promising. At gay fund-raisers he promises a Manhattan Project for UC and the appointment of a UC czar. Yes, he is such a bullshitter, Boy is. And HUGG is a useless waste of time. All it’s good at is ass-kissing in Washington.
The right-wing zealot Pat Buchanan is now declaring that because of gays “we are losing a war for the soul of America.” Boy refuses to comment. “I just got here, for God’s sake,” he says to his wife, Maude. “Give me a break.”
OH, DEAR
TOMMY
Nobody lives. In the end that is the short and simple. Nobody lives. Talbott is sick. Norman is sick. Cal is sick. Hobart is sick. Mark B. is sick. Randolph is sick. Manolo is sick. Frank is sick. Robert G. is sick. Ted is sick. Myron is sick. Alfred is sick. There are more, overwhelmingly more. I can’t recall all their names. My memory is sick.
And now Fred is sick. Lab tests reveal there’s renewed escalating trouble in his liver. Many more liters of ascites are drained out of him. Dr. Greene said there’s more still in there but five is the limit he can take out safely.
Fred refuses to discuss any of this with me.
INT. ROOM AT TABLE MEDICAL. DAY.
Scotty is visiting Fred, who’s connected to tubes and is being drained of ascites.
SCOTTY: I bought you some soup.
FRED: Thanks. Just what I need, a little more liquid. That’s a joke.
SCOTTY: Do you really think I murdered FUQU? That really hurt me.
FRED: Well, it’s still there. And I’ll be back in a bit.
SCOTTY: Sparks and I aren’t talking. He’s such a pain in the ass. Do they know what’s wrong with you yet?
FRED: I need a new liver and they’ve never transplanted UC-positives.
SCOTTY: A bummer.
Dr. Fung enters. He wears red cowboy boots. He notes Scotty’s presence.
FRED: He can stay. Dr. Fung is the keeper of the livers.
DR. FUNG: The approval came through. They’re starting a clinical trial of transplanting people with UC. I have approval to do a bunch of them. You qualify.
Fred is so excited that he tries to jump out of the bed. Dr. Fung restrains him.
DR. FUNG: Whoa! You should know that I’ve already transplanted seven and six of them died. Your friend Mr. Boatwright is afraid you might die too and is uncertain that as your executor he wants you to do it.
FRED: What have I got to lose! I’m going to die soon anyway. Number Seven is going to live!
DR. FUNG: Hold on. You’ll probably be number thirteen or fourteen. You still have enough to hold on for a while. We’ll let you know. (He leaves.)
FRED: Our secret. Okay?
SCOTTY: Scout’s honor. (He bends over and kisses Fred.) I need a new boyfriend. You found me two.
DANIEL STILL SPYING
Jerry continues to hire gay assistants, or at least men like Bogart Neill, who is ostensibly straight, but with whom he also has a strange relationship. What do I mean by strange? Well, that they appear bonded in some way with him that I don’t. In medieval times didn’t men pledge their fealty to each other in some sort of transcendental way? Blood brotherhood, the Germans called it. I will take care of you if you will take care of me. Have I failed him and he’s now reaching out to others? There is no question that Drew Newley is gay. He’s jealous of me and obviously worried that I will harm Jerry, of whom he’s increasingly and very visibly protective. Why does he think I might harm Jerry? How? What have I revealed that I don’t know I’m showing? It’s interesting that Jerry keeps us all apart. I’m the only one who works on Jerry’s patient floor; Bogart works on Jerry’s lab floor; and Drew in his administrative office. I’m the only one who sees the patients. Jerry won’t go near one anymore. Jerry’s domain is slowly expanding. Some grants seem to have been approved after Jerry wooed the necessary congressional support. Floyd Harmish is giving him instructions how to do this. This would be great, except he doesn’t know what to do with the money. Monserrat keeps nailing him on this. Monday morning all-institute get-togethers have long since stopped, so we haven’t talked about any of our failures, everyone else’s failures, the studies, no postmortems on anything so we can learn, so it won’t happen again.
SIRCUS-DILDOUGH-GROSS
These three richest-gays-in-America are richer than ever now.
ONCE MORE, ADREENA
Is it Draft Ten, or Twenty?
She has become a bore. This idol, this voice of a lifetime, this star who never failed to entertain me, no longer entertains me. She is a pain in my ass. She can’t make up her mind about anything. I am summoned back to her lavish life to hear that the scenes that she loved when I left she
now hates. She then insists on reading them out loud in a ponderous stentorian schoolteachery way that is evidently how she thinks important messages must be proclaimed, and how Dr. Emma Brookner should sound. Once again, I don’t know what this woman wants. I have worked with difficult directors but they can usually verbalize what they want or what they feel is missing, “a little bit more of—” such and such. She has every draft of my now numerous scripts in a vertical file cabinet by her elbow and she is most adept at plucking (with her glorious fingers and nails) from each one what she’s suddenly thinking about. I am impressed that she’s absorbed them so efficiently. She’s known to be a perfectionist and a control freak (no news here), and why shouldn’t she be? But it’s painful to defend lines that are trying to convey complicated emotions. You know, the stuff of drama. “Whaddya mean here?”
I finish yet another draft for her and she goes off and makes another lousy movie of something else. “I had to do it! Jeff Bridges was on a pay-or-play!” I ran into Richard Dreyfuss, the male star to whom she’s offered the part of playing me, and he said to me: “Have you read the newest script she had written? She has taken every major action and motivation for herself. There is no motivation for Ned Weeks to do anything. I repeat, anything. She is the hero of this movie. I can’t play this.” No, I am not angry with her. Nor will I be angry with her when she and I go through several repeat performances of the above. By the end, she will have had my play tied up for a dozen years and walked off at each draft’s completion to make another stinker. No, I have never been angry with her, though many a person in and out of the business has said I should be. “How can you not be angry at her?” these friends have asked me. “She has silenced our message for how many years of your life?”
At mealtimes she picks from my plate the food I haven’t eaten. She is lonely and speaks often of her longing for a fellow. She never once asks me a personal question about myself or my life or any life of any of the characters who populate my screenplay.
My hopes and dreams for the great Adreena Schneeweiss changing the course of our tragedy into worldwide anger and action lie scattered like rejected balled-up pages of my many draft screenplays in the wastebasket.
GUESS WHO’S IN CHARGE OF FINDING A VACCINE?
“The UC vaccine field suffers from disorganization, fractiousness, sleazy politics, sloppy science, a shaky marketplace, greed, unbridled ambition, and leaders with shockingly limited powers.” So writes the award-winning reporter Jon Cohen in Science. In a personal communication, he conveyed to me that Dr. Jerrold Omicidio, putatively in charge of this search, is inept as a leader of men. “He believes in compromise. He refuses to take a stand.”
KRAFKA SPEAKS!
Dear Asshole Lemish,
Before it’s too late in your crappy uncharitable inconsequential hodgepodge of vituperative contributions that don’t amount to a hill of sneezes, let me say a few words for your “history” that you blab about all over the place. After all, all sides must be heard. Your side should be flushed down the toilet. Along with its constipated “history.”
In a few years’ time, one two three, you ungrateful fucks are going to have not one, not two, but three proton-alphas to gobble down your gullets. Two years after that, the death toll will be diminished.
We discovered these PAs. Not you, you sex-crazed shits.
Which one of your little terrorists with his cock up his schnozzle worked around the clock in a lab anywhere? Which one of your muscular black-booted show-offs did one fucking thing beyond make our lives and our working conditions and our bosses tortured beyond belief? You think that it was you that whipped us into discovering this shit for your shit—which shit, I might add, you deserve—not our shit but your shit, your repellent lives of filth? You got it wrong, my buster-buddies, way, way wrong. We did it because we are good Christians and God-fearing and believe in helping our fellow man. The Hippocratic Oath and all that shit. The Lord’s Prayer and all that shit. “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” and “America the Beautiful,” and the “Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America” and all that shit. We believe it all and we didn’t want you to suffer even though we felt in our heart of hearts that you deserve it.
So don’t give me that not one treatment is out there that is not out there because of FUQU shit.
What will be out there will be because of me, Bernhardt Krafka, and all the many companies he had to work for because he kept getting fired before he could zero in on the magic bullet, which we finally did at Presidium. They won’t be out there because of ZAP from Greeting-Dridge, or ZIP from Bumstead-Muck-Squish, or ZOK from Interswiss. They will be out there because of a hundred-plus virologists and molecular virologists and medicinal chemists and structural biologists who were all out there screening a million-plus compounds without success. They will be out there because the head of Squish said so many times “Our business is not about saving lives but making money” that one of his crazed overworked staff tried to murder Mrs. Squish to shut her husband up and got nine years. They will be out there because one of our own got blown up by a terrorist over Scotland carrying top-secret formulas that every lab in every pharm has now worked day and night to replicate in honor of him.
You are, however, right—and you can tell I don’t like giving you credit for dipshit—that they are not out there because of any of the dumb assholes at NITS or because of cheesy Jerry, who takes credit for them when the NITS program is totally run by laggards as bad as the virus infecting the world. We started our work before they’d even gone to the toilet. We didn’t need all their clinical no-show UCCTG trials. Omicidio Fraud. Geiseric Fraud. Ol’ Jerry gets his puss on TV every ten minutes. You ain’t seeing my face or Pizzutti’s face or Dienstag’s face or any of our Jap and Chink docs’ faces, no sir. History always rewards the wrong shits.
We didn’t need anything after Geiseric or Jacquie or Nappe or Pewkin or whoever the fuck really discovered the virus. Then we went to work on our own. We saw what it looked like and started to look for ways to disable it. You fuck-you guys crap all over all our progress. Yeah, it helped. It’s hard to look at so many good-looking young dying perverts without it touching you a little. If you hadn’t taken the engine out of my car I probably wouldn’t have got angry enough to finally write this to you. I give you that.
My son dying from this shit got me off my ass. Nelly little FUQU fairy he was. I beat the shit out of him all his life. I miss him. I didn’t save his life. We were too late for that. Just you and lots of his and your sissy friends will be helped. If you can hang on a little longer. I read somewhere that every family is going to be affected by this shit. I didn’t believe it. I believe it now.
INT. GAY CENTER. NIGHT.
Attendance is getting sparse. Pile of copies on table at back of FUQU meeting: A LETTER TO ALL FUQU FROM FRED.
FRED’S VOICE: My comrades in activism. What once we were is tragically evaporating. We created the greatest gay organization ever in gay history. I was given a gift. And it was all of you. What can we do to save it while staying true to our democratic ideals that bonded us for so long and successfully? Why aren’t we trying to save ourselves as well as those we have been fighting to make well? Perhaps when we are completely crumbling you will come to your senses. I hope it is not too late.
HERMIA TO FRED
Hadriana Totem at The New Gotham is euphoric with the material I am showing her, after all. “ALTHOUGH YOU ARE WAY BEHIND THE DUE DATE, DEAR HERMIA, THAT I HAD HOPED FOR.” Quite frankly, I’d forgotten her and was surprised she still wanted it. “‘OF COURSE, YOU SILLY BILLY, THIS IS THE PERFECT WAY FOR WE BRITS TO FINALLY SHOW UP THESE YANKS!” She has taken to writing in all caps, I suspect because no longer is anyone paying any attention to her in lowercase, or her magazine. It’s beneficial she’s so rich. She’s taken to dropping pesky little questions of concern, unlike her, like “WHAT SHALL WE DO IF AFTER ALL OUR YEARS IN THIS COUNTRY NOTHING PANS OUT? MY HARRY’S ALL WASHED UP. I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH HIM
. NOBODY ON EITHER SIDE WANTS AN EIGHTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD PRESS LORD. AND WHO IN HIS RIGHT MIND WOULD WANT TO GO BACK TO MERRIE OLDE ENGLAND.”
I have felt so alone in my pursuit of our cause. I have been abandoned. No Grace. No Daniel. No Fred. You have left me with nothing else to do but to contemplate my own history of evil. I gave you the opportunity to get yours out first.
FRED TO HERMIA
The third president in a row is full of shit. None of his preelection promises has he kept. Anything, everything, I’ve written and said and done since 1981 might as well have been flushed down the toilet. Toilet has become the metaphor of our lives.
I do so want to have some love and recognition for my people before I die. And not from Hadriana. She’s a cunt. I forgot the British slang for cunt.
HERMIA TO FRED
Stop feeling sorry for yourself! Why must you yanks always wear your hearts on your sleeves? This is no time for love, only for anger, retribution, and stark-naked honesty.
ALONG THE JOURNEY OF HATE
