The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  I remember when I was a kid my own father was chief of the XY Section, keeping tabs on the American First Nazi Party. After 1941. American First had more than seven hundred secret chapters there for a while. My old man figured out how Roosevelt got America to enter the war. Nine out of ten Americans don’t want to go fight—against anything. He scared them into it. Portraying Nazis as a threat to the American way of life worked pretty much like what is put out about the Commies and now about UC and the fairies.

  I remember when I was initiated into the CIA. “If our aim coincides with yours, you may enter our Brotherhood. We try to improve the whole human race by combating the evil that sways the world and that has come down to us from the remotest ages, even from the first man…” Famous writers wrote our history. I forgot which one wrote this. Whoever it was, I fell for it full force.

  Deep Throat told me of some typical Lemish rhetoric about who was the more evil, Dodo or Jerry. You’re way off track here, Freddy boy. Dodo and Jerry are small potatoes. They operate at the beck and call of others who are truly evil.

  Mother has an army at his disposal now. Top-secret, to be sure. I have special groups concentrating on the trickier stuff. They meet regularly, we don’t have uniforms, and have maneuvers far out in the countryside where they discuss our ideas on, say, how to protect homosexuals and hide them so as to prevent their complete devastation. This country has had no previous experiences with such specific targets of this sort. This is definitely a covert job. Mother mapped it all out. We’ll see what happens. Usually I have to rejiggle things around as centers of power shift and change.

  I am threatened by this plague in more ways than one. Someone inside here with me is covertly raising the ridiculous notion that I am a gay Soviet mole and must be relieved of duty. I have no idea who this person is, but it is obviously someone who desires my job. Several of my agents have died from this UC. From what Deep Throat is telling me, many in the White House and Congress are more and more out to rid the world of the gay political power now emerging. Hoover could have told me how to deal with this one, as he so successfully protected himself and for so long, not that I agreed with his manner of doing so. He knew how dangerous Dredd Trish is. “He would eat you for lunch if he knew what you were,” Edgar told me. Ruester asked me outright, “Can’t we put them all in reservations like we did with the Japs and the Indians?” That’s what I’m dealing with.

  Boy Vertle is not going to be any better. He’s too sex-crazed to be able to be much help to the gays. And like Ruester, Boy smiles too much. Never trust a constant smiler. Maude can only put so much of a hold on him.

  Of course I keep notebooks such as this one. They will provide evidence to defend me after I’m gone.

  WE GO AFTER BOY

  RON

  Membership is picking up, thank goodness. People like Maxine’s new plan, the McClintock Project Working Group. We have a daylong series of actions confronting President Boy Vertle on his visit to the city. We disrupt his photo ops by waving our posters, we stop traffic in front of his motorcade, we interrupt his fund-raising speech, and we pass out flyers pledging such disruptions until he acts to end the UC crisis. In front of his hotel we unfurl our latest creation, a big blow-up of Boy as a baby in a diaper.

  Randy Shilts, Jeffrey Schmalz, Derek Jarman, Aldyn McKean, Michael Morrisey, David Roche, Michael Callen, Clint Smith, Robert Massa, Jim Serafini all die.

  And Rudy Doodie is elected mayor of New York.

  (As Ron lists the names, we see him writing them on the blackboard at a meeting in the Gay Center. Fred and David are holding hands, very moved.)

  EXT. CONNECTICUT LAKE. DAY.

  David is showing the land and view to Fred and Tommy. It’s very beautiful.

  FRED: A fortune-teller once told me I had to do two things. One was to always wear turquoise; it would look after my health. (Holds up his arm with turquoise bracelets and rings.) The other was to live by water; it would make me a better writer.

  DAVID: Do you like this?

  FRED (to Tommy): It seems I’ve landed a very rich man. (To David:) I do. Especially when I know I am a dying man.

  Again, this last sentence sounds so pompous that they start laughing. David puts his arm around Fred as they look out at the lake.

  INT. FRED’S APARTMENT. NIGHT.

  A mixed group. Fred and David sitting together.

  ANN: The Issues Committee will come to order. Thanks, Fred, for the use of the hall since we’ve been evicted from our new office.

  AVRAM: It’s come to pass that some of us want to talk more than ever about how we want to die.

  MARIO: We should make a movie about us. (He starts shooting the group with a movie camera.)

  BRADLEY: Not now, Mario. We’re talking heavy-duty confidential.

  MARIO (turning off his camera): I definitely do not want to die in a hospital.

  MOSES: I don’t want to die period.

  MEMBER: I want to be burned on a pyre.

  ANOTHER MEMBER: What’s a pyre?

  EIGO: Enough of this death shit.

  LIAM: Well, I don’t want to die. There’s too much left I want to learn.

  DOROTHY: Like what, Liam?

  LIAM: Why am I positive and so healthy and feel so great? (Looks at Roberto, who looks close to death.) I’m sorry, Roberto. I mustn’t brag. I went through a horrible bout that suddenly lessened and went away.

  ROBERTO: I felt good. Then one day … I’m ready to die now. I choose sleeping pills. I’ve had enough. (To Liam:) Don’t worry. You will be sick again soon enough.

  David is very moved by what he’s witnessing.

  INT. FRED’S BEDROOM.

  Fred and David are naked in bed.

  DAVID: Everybody’s dying. It’s like Mungel all over again. At least you guys are fighting back.

  FRED: Not enough. It’s not getting us anywhere. I’m sorry you have to face so much death again.

  DAVID: But somehow we’re both still alive. Why, do you think?

  FRED: A perverse kind of luck. It’s got to run out soon. At least we have each other until …

  David puts his hand over Fred’s mouth.

  DAVID: All the years, in Mungel, in Partekla, I never thought I’d die. Was that luck, too? Now death is the main thing we think about. We are lucky: we have each other. Most people don’t have anyone. I did have love at Mungel. Grodzo loved me. A Nazi loved me. He probably saved my life when I was back with Daniel. My own brother couldn’t save my life.

  FRED: You’re still angry about that, aren’t you? We should all talk to Daniel.

  DAVID: Not yet. I’m having too much fun with you! (Suddenly thinking:) You go after all our presidents. But this Omicidio, he sounds like a kind of Nazi to me. He tried to do experiments on me when I was at Daniel’s that would have murdered me.

  DANIEL THE SPY

  The chief biostatistician of NITS (and my patient), Dr. David Byar, who was sick himself when he was brought into the fray by some FUQU members, looked at Levi Narkey’s secret trial numbers and realized that there was “no statistical barrier to the simultaneous participation of all kinds of patients in multiple trials.” He argued against excluding potential subjects simply because of results on their lab tests. “It is important to study patients with abnormal baseline values as well as ones with normal ones,” Byar said. Of course, this pragmatic perspective makes sense to activists, if it doesn’t to any pharma or to FADS. This is a big-deal statement from a world expert and Jerry won’t go along with it. What Byar is saying is that clinical trials are experiments, but they are real-world experiments with real-world implications. “They should therefore be designed not to answer ivory-tower theoretical questions but to help doctors make meaningful treatment decisions.” But NITS’s UCCTG, FADS regulators, academic researchers, and researchers for drug companies have all been brainwashed to adhere to archaic rigidities because that’s how they’d been educated and trained.

  Brandishing Byar’s analyses as published in The N
ew England Journal of Spots, activists are now demanding major modifications in trial design, and announcing that they will protest until they see them implemented. “We are demanding the use of broader entry criteria of more diverse subject populations,” your Eigo has written. What Dash Snicker had demanded is now considered murder. Jerry goes nuts. He won’t tell me his reasons. Why should he care? He should be thrilled too. Snicker moves to Florida with a big payoff from Greeting-Dridge. Why was he rewarded? Word is out that the international ZAP trial is another inconclusive bust. We’ll find out once and for all at the Berlin conference coming up.

  Of all people, your Sparks Puffington goes nuts too. He writes an angry public letter saying that trials should be larger, longer, and more controlled than ever. “Do we want another ZAP carnival on our hands?”

  Byar further said, after studying Levi’s results, that they proved it was absolutely possible to obtain perfectly adequate conclusions from trials with far fewer enrolled in them, even half a dozen. NEJS refuses to publish this part.

  STEPPING-STONES TO …

  SPARKS: When I first met Fred he was screaming about studying the guys who were lovers of those first guys who were dying but who stayed healthy. That’s when I liked Fred and wanted to be like him. I don’t need to be like him anymore. He can no longer dictate our development. We’d have been much further along if it hadn’t been for Fred, directing the arguments, trying to control … well, everything. He’s one of the main reasons we broke off from FUQU to start TAG.

  * * *

  FRED: And then, out of nowhere, TAG succeeds in removing Jerry from being in charge of UC at NITS. This is a mighty accomplishment for a bunch of kids, to topple this man from his throne. Monserrat joined forces with them. They went to her friend Ted Kennedy and talked him into sponsoring a bill. Behind everyone’s backs, a bill is passed in Congress that says Jerry is now forbidden to run both NITS and the UCCTG and his own research (such as it is), and to approve any expenditure of funds. As Science’s Jon Cohen put it, “The era of Omicidio, leader of the largest research program in the world, is coming to an end.”

  This bill takes away from Jerry any authority over any money. He can’t spend a dime of what FUQU managed to shame out of Congress. He has no hiring authority anymore either. All that is left to him is his lab and his lab staff and their work in his lab. I wish this had happened years ago.

  David says not to count our blessings yet. “It’s never that easy to get rid of the ‘death-bringers,’” as he calls them.

  It must be noted sadly that this new bill has put paid to the Barbara McClintock CURE UC NOW project, into which Maxine and Donald and David G. and Doris and Suzanne and many others have poured so much energy and hope. One hundred thousand copies for this proposal to restructure the national UC research effort had been sent all over the world. They had lobbied Congress. Nadler introduced it on the floor of the House. But TAG has now beaten it all back and down. “It broke our hearts more than anything,” cried Donald to the floor of an FUQU meeting. “TAG’s really stuck the knife in all our backs once again. I hate them. We’ve got to fight back!”

  * * *

  DANIEL: I don’t feel any sadness for Jerry. He’s already pretending that this new law never happened, that he’s still in charge. And there’s no one to dispute him except a declining bunch of once noisy activists who’ve been against him all along. Jerry will be just fine.

  * * *

  FRED: With David and Tommy, I go to Washington with Charlene from FUQU. Charlene is one of the few still angry and active. She’s a fighter and thrilled to do what I outline. She’s over six feet tall and stacked, a gorgeous Hispanic. Boy Vertle’s new head of HAH Donna Do-Nothing is speaking at a dinner for hundreds of big and important bureaucrats in a huge government hall restored to its post–Civil War glory. We stand beside Donna D-N, Charlene on her right, me on her left. And we hold up big signs, blow-ups of the flyer that has also been distributed to all the tables by several members of FUQU’s Washington chapter, such as it is. Donna Do-Nothing ignores us. She speaks on and on about what she’s doing, about what Boy Vertle is doing. How wonderful it all is, and Boy is. I know I look awful, which is a plus for this performance. I’ve been tapped too many times and none of my doctors want to do it anymore. I weigh one hundred twenty-five pounds. My new liver hasn’t shown up. Because I am so happy with David and he is frightened for me I am trying to not think of death. Good for me. Whoopee for me. I am usually such a kvetch. Tommy and David have become friends with each other. If I’m going to die I feel much safer with them in my life. I’m actually not frightened. Me the constant kvetch is not frightened. David and Tommy are more frightened of my dying than I am.

  * * *

  INT. OLD POST OFFICE ATRIUM. DAY.

  David gets up from a front-row seat and stands beside Fred confronting the crowd. At the very rear of the room, Daniel has been watching.

  CUT TO:

  The huge atrium is empty of its audience. Workers are cleaning up. At the end of one table, Fred, David, and Tommy are eating dinner. Fred looks up and sees Daniel standing there staring at David. Fred motions to Tommy to leave with him as Daniel approaches David.

  DANIEL: Hello, David.

  DAVID: Hello, Daniel.

  DANIEL: It’s good to see you again. You look well. I’m happy about that. I’m sorry about a lot of things I couldn’t do for you.

  DAVID: This building … It’s quite magnificent in its restoration. What’s its history, do you know?

  DANIEL: I think it goes back to after the Civil War, a post office or something like that.

  DAVID: The mail was treated so … preciously?

  DANIEL: I don’t think there was very much of it and it was all from one rich person to another who could afford it. Are you happy?

  DAVID: Yes. Fred makes me very happy. Are you?

  DANIEL: No. Not really. It’s hard to be a doctor today and happy.

  DAVID: I’m sorry for that. I understand. I don’t understand why no one in our family came to help me.

  DANIEL: You ran away from me.

  DAVID: But that was later. Our very own father put me in a concentration camp. Did you know that?

  DANIEL: He and Amos were spies for the CIA. Did you know that?

  DAVID: I was told after they were dead and I was infected. Were they responsible for that, too?

  DANIEL: That I don’t know. Lucas, Stephen, and I had very little use for Philip. What happened to your infection?

  DAVID: Mr. Hoover saw to it that I was given lots of shots that I guess must have worked. How strange to hear his name. Philip. Philip and Rivka and J. Edgar Hoover.

  DANIEL: That part I don’t know about. You knew Hoover?

  DAVID: He was very attentive to me. Like a father. Over many years. Affectionate. Caring. He was very grateful to Philip for the work he did, for our country, he said. He said he was educating me about the ways of the world. He put me to work in a male whorehouse.

  DANIEL: I wish I could have known. Why didn’t you tell me?

  DAVID: You had already abandoned me. As had all the Jerusalems. And what I had to tell was too awful to tell. Even to those who had caused it, like our father.

  DANIEL: You knew about what he did to you from the beginning?

  DAVID: Amos told me as he rescued me from Berlin when it was being bombed.

  DANIEL (with tears as he reaches over and takes David’s hand): I’m so sad and sorry for …

  DAVID: Both of us?

  DANIEL: Yes.

  DAVID: How could you not have known some of it at least?

  Daniel can’t answer. Then:

  DANIEL: There are too many cogs and wheels in our history. I think at some point I just … closed myself off. I have always felt quite … powerless to do much except what I’ve been told to do. Philip called me a sissy. Still am.

  David reaches over and takes Daniel’s other hand. At this moment Fred and Tommy return with a bottle of champagne, from which they all toas
t.

  THIS IS WHAT IS HAPPENING TO VON GREETING

  A senior trustee of Yaddah University who had been under pressure from students to step down after his company admitted cooperating with both an illegal Arab boycott of Israel and the construction of plants for the manufacture of heroin in Syria, has resigned from the university’s governing body. The trustee, Vonce Greeting, a member of the Yaddah Corporation’s board for 13 years, is the chairman of Greeting-Dridge International, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of medical pharmaceuticals and supplies. In March, the company agreed to pay a $500,000 fine and $6 million in penalties for cooperating with the boycott of Israel. Greeting-Dridge also faces charges in France for knowingly selling their DridgePlusOne Factor VIII product for hemophilia that is infected with the UC virus. Greeting-Dridge also controls ZAP, the only UC treatment drug in circulation.

  “This man Greeting was a role model of corruption,” Alan M. Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard, said. At Yaddah, its new president, Richard Levin, said, “I have not really had time to look in detail at the Greeting situation, so I haven’t really formed an opinion. Von is a really great guy who has been most generous to us with his many financial gifts.”

  —The New York Truth

  DANIEL THE SPY IN BERLIN

  The TAG boys are here at this conference, the seventh or eighth of these things, and evidently TAG’s debut in public as a separate entity. Nothing but bad news is expected. But TAG is celebrating, here in Berlin. “We pledge that we will see to it that progress is made forthwith,” TAG’s flyers announce. Like you, they have totally convinced themselves that Jerry has stood in the way of everything. Sparks Puffington is particularly pleased with himself, the expression “shit-eating grin” coming to mind. He in essence engineered the palace coup. Jerry lived in that palace. It doesn’t occur to any of you that Jerry has no intention of moving out. He’s still the director of NITS, with or without budget oversights, and has tenure in the Public Health Service. For all their bellyaching that he and we “don’t get it,” TAG don’t get it themselves. Maxine, in her obvious despair about being so brutally hurled with her group into the ashes, sent out a memorandum that was picked up everywhere, including at this conference. It said, “Dear Sparks Puffington and TAG Associates, You will never again have the power you had while you were in FUQU.” It means nothing to most of those here.