by Larry Kramer
Bushwah, I say to Dr. Dripper. Bushwah! All male chimps are monsters! They rape female chimps without surcease. After they have chummed around and buddied around and copulated around with each other! They are male bonders par excellence and to the utmost sexist level. As far as they’re concerned, females are solely for the delivery of babies, preferably male ones, to add to Daddy’s voracious appetite for further buddies. And only an ignoramus would claim that a monkey’s homosexual actions and needs and deeds are not homosexual at all and let it go simply at that.
All of this has been made to sound so sweet and Bambi, and it isn’t. It is what wretchedly putrid male monkeys get away with, and I say it reeks.
And by the by, Frederick, do you have anyone considering that something predated the Everglades primates? Who is your dinosaur expert? Where did all the dinosaurs disappear to? Did Tyrannosaurus rex harbor The Underlying Condition? Surely one of these days an ambitious historian will come up with earlier chapters hitherto buried in some out-of-the-way cave. Sit tight. Someone is always finding a few new old pieces of paper that toss the previous entire course of events right out the window.
Frederick, I hope that you are not one of those who is determined to find wrong in everything, and from the very outset. There is wrong in everything. But you must give cognizance to the fact that there are always other things on the agenda (whatever the agenda is) and that this agenda is always enormous. It is always impossibly arduous to get to the head of the line. Any line. Science and medicine—coupled not incongruously as S&M—are always busy elsewhere, and to redirect them from one agenda to another is akin to personally lifting elephants.
I admire the nerve of your undertaking. I am happy to contribute to what I can already see could be a useful if overly ambitious history of your country, and of this Underlying Condition. I accept your invitation.
SO LET US WEND OUR WAY
I gather, Fred, that you are opening yourself up to the pungent presence of my cousin, Dr. Sister Grace Hooker. Although our family history is intertwined, your American Hookers are not so ancient as our British Bledds by several long shots. The English have always believed that endurance is superior to all. Like you, Grace will no doubt highlight what will be the central controversy of this plague, and that is its irrefutable bonding with the issue of homosexuality.
I must confess that up to the time I settled in America I had given only vague thought to the homosexual aspect of human nature. While I’ve since discovered that most Americans believe most British men are and always have been what we call poofters, I, who was born there, and lived there in what we may call an active fashion, never gave this aspect of my homeland a moment’s thought or notice. When an American epidemiologist at your Center of Disease first asked me, “Well, you have some cases over there in gay men, don’t you?” I had to stop in my tracks and say to myself, “Hermia, indeed you must.” As we are a much older culture, no one in England thinks much about poofters and fairies, or what you call faggots and queers. Every family has them. They are all over the place. We simply do not think about it. I say this, even though I admit I am not unmindful of an Earl of Dudley’s famous outburst to the House of Lords: “I cannot stand homosexuals. They are the most disgusting people in the world. I loathe them. Prison is much too good a place for them.”
My continuing education in these matters was really spurred on a few months ago when, upon a visit home, my director at the Sir John Greeting Institute of Worldwide Medical Knowledge of All Peoples, Sir Polkham Treadway, called me into his office.
“Lookee here,” he said. “Greeting US wants you to write a definitive history of The Underlying Condition.”
GUS is for the moment the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturer.
“GUS would allow GUK to do that?”
Greeting UK is our institute’s parent and principal benefactor. It no longer exists as a separate company, having been bought out so many times that now it is called … oh, it no longer matters what it’s called. Greeting UK exists now only on paper and only by the fact that the considerable amount of stock it still holds is what supports the work of our estimable institutes. Early in the last century Lord Greeting had founded the company with another American, Tobias Evermore. Greeting Evermore was not a happy union. Each desired to murder the other, which result was prevented by the death of Evermore, allowing Henry Greeting to become Sir and then his Lordship. And even after separation and then the split of American and British (save for the institutes, which remain a joint affair), as in all unhappy families, much bad blood remains.
“It is perplexing,” said my British director.
He handed me a letter.
My dear Sir Polkham—,
In my position as Chairperson of the Combined Worldwide Greeting Medical Trusts, and supported by our Ethical and Academic Advisory Boards, and as the Joint Chairperson with you of the Lady Jane Greeting Institute of Worldwide Medical Knowledge of All Peoples, I am authorized by my people here to put forth to the Sir John Greeting Institute of the History of the World’s Medical Knowledge of All Peoples a request for our joint compilation and writing of an unequivocal, full-out, no-holds-barred History of The Underlying Condition.
We at GUS are fully aware that such a history must of necessity uncover much that is uncomfortable. But we sense that others are sniffing at our heels, particularly one Fred Lemish, a notorious troublemaker here on our side of the pond, but smart and infamously persistent. It is, after all, a tremendous story waiting to explode in somebody’s telling. Why his? Why not ours?
Thus we deem it best to write this history now lest it be worse for our side should others get there first. We would be delighted if Dame Lady Hermia Bledd-Wrench were to be available to undertake this assignment. She certainly would look out for our best interests.
Long live your Queen.
Mt. Vernon Pugh
Chairperson
Combined Trusts
Nearodell, South Carolina
Well, we shall see.
Upon my return to America I found another offer awaiting me.
My dearest Hermia—:
I have the perfect assignment for you! One that I’ve been searching for forever! It is challenging! It is controversial! It will make everyone hideously angry! And jealous! And you a household word in this country and at last! Which is of course what I have been longing for you! I cannot wait to tell you about my new endeavor! Ring immediately upon receipt and/or return, whichever occurs first!
Eternal love!
Hadriana
I must confess to a certain fondness for this silly woman so many Americans find so fascinating. I’ve known Hadriana Totem since she was a student, and a most promising one, at Lady Mary’s Hospital for the Infirm, where I was on the board. Like so many impressionable girls, she was interested briefly in nursing, before she ran off to marry Lord Totem, rather much older than she. Lord Totem is what we call a “press baron.” His many newspapers and magazines are a wretched, tawdry lot, and read each day by a depressingly large percentage of my countrymen. Hadriana, who edited the British This & That for him, was offered the editorship of The New Gotham, in New York, of course, a particular favorite plaything of Totem’s American counterpart, Mr. Swift Merchant. She undertook and proceeded to make it into a rather lively journal, if not as distinguished as it was before Mr. Merchant’s purchase of it. When she sensed it was time to move on, she embarked upon the establishment of her own publication, which she insisted upon calling Scream and Shout. This enterprise failed. She misjudged by a wide margin America’s skills in either activity. There is word that Swift misses her, that he is unhappy with The New Gotham’s current editor, Byron Remnant, who has turned her rather jolly effort into a rather bloodless one, and stodgy, quite stodgy. I told you I knew everything worth knowing! I suspect, though, that she had become too full of herself, a quality not unknown in her class and upbringing, and her husband’s.
When we met (in the quite splendid Park Avenue pe
nthouse she shares with Lord Totem, who, after attempting several histories of America himself, is now, I am afraid, rather tottering about), she challenged me to write a history of The Underlying Condition that proves it to be intentional genocide, my account of which she would then publish in “its perfect media home, which I am in the process of setting up.”
Well, we shall see.
I go into such detail to warn you there are wolves in the hills and we’d best proceed apace and with speed.
Yes, I prefer you, dear man.
You have told me, dear Frederick, that you question my undeniable connection with Greeting Pharmaceuticals, against which you seem to have sworn a very great revenge. Allow me to suggest that this connection may prove of some considerable use to you, especially given the offer I have to write the Greeting History of The Underlying Condition, as well as Hadriana’s desired exposé, which does in fact appeal.
Yes, we shall see. Together.
I’m grateful, as I indicated, that you ferreted out this member of the Empire. Challenge is my middle name! I shall try to provide you, to the best of my ability, with the best bang for your buck. Show me a plague and I’ll show you the world! It will give me great and inestimable pleasure to prove that your country caused this one.
Again, let us wend our way. Forthwith!
DAME LADY HERMIA TALKS ABOUT PLAGUES
I have been in love with plagues for as long as I can remember. Plagues were the most formative subject of my young life. All that death and destruction seemingly out of nowhere! Could it have been stopped? I devoured all I could learn. All the great books about plagues—Trondheim’s Filth Through the Ages, Desredorer’s Diary of an Incessant Scavenger, Knorr and Pugit’s While the World Sleeps, Peliculosa’s Encyclopedia of Dangerous Diseases and Discordant Deaths, Irving’s Rambles in Ancient Infected Byways—were all written by Englishmen. The more recent have been insistent, in dissecting the origins of so many of the world’s ills, upon blaming them on others, including you. We have never stopped being sore losers. It’s easier to blame others than to face up to how we brought things upon ourselves—for instance, why was there ever an American Revolution?
England has always been the center of the world’s knowledge of plagues. Since Britain has been exposed to “every poop and pisspot on the seven seas,” as my old sailing great-uncle Silas Wrench-Fergit described the world he’d sailed, it fell to us to flaunt this knowledge. I studied under the renowned Sir Godfrey Klingdot, later Lord Gwelph, at his iconoclastic laboratory at St. Simon’s on the Wharf. Among the first to join together the study of social behavior and disease, “attempting,” as he put it, “to keep God and the Bible out of it,” Sir Godfrey encouraged my love of plagues and made me unashamed of what I’d been afraid was an abnormal absorption in what the rest of the world was avoiding like—well, the plague. It was he who taught me that society and plagues go hand in hand, the latter often springing from an exuberance of what the former is up to and should not have been up to. Additionally, hard as it is to believe, medicine can sometimes actually cause what it’s pledged to assuage. Medicine can be very sloppy, inexact, a cesspool of both germs and carriers, its practitioners, in their quest for knowledge, plunging their arms right down to the bottom of vats and pits and bringing forth yet more infectious glop and grunge. Many a medicine man can be a very participant in the illness he’s tracking, like a Sherlock Holmes. Grace’s Hermatros is certainly one of those, though do not dare to quote me.
Learning all of this, little by little, is what inspired me to add historical epidemiology to my repertoire of expertise. The history of epidemics. The history of plagues. Epidemiology is the study of how disease affects groups of people. It is both dreadfully challenging and, as Grace would say, and indeed has said, and will say again, I am certain, dreadfully full of s——t. It’s another one of those “What is truth?” activities so likely to come up with the wrong answers. Like numbers. Numbers are often no more than a pile of rubbish. You can make numbers tell you anything.
But it has become increasingly clear to me that paths of right have most often been walked by the solitary individual, usually when nobody else speaks up. It has also become increasingly and uncomfortably clear that it is not necessarily good history, or better science, or the best mathematics, to believe something to be “true” just because a path has been walked by a group or stampeded by hordes. Ten people can say the same thing or ten people can say ten different things. The conclusion that must be drawn, hence, by any intelligent person (but has yet to be made by even the laziest intellectual) is best stated in these words of Dr. David Byar, the maverick NITS statistician, in The New England Journal of Statistical Intervention: “Ten people can lie just as easily as one person can tell the truth.” This of course calls into question the very heart of epidemiology, the very methodology of every study—scientific or medical or statistical or what you will—whose author feels it imperative, indeed feels commanded by tradition, indeed bound by it for fear of excommunication, to cite at least several sources for every fact in search of a perfect pedigree. Dr. Byar’s calculations are hot stuff indeed, received most frigidly. As I know he has recently died from UC and that you and he were friends, you and I must do him proud in promulgating his revelatory results and following our own parade. If you take the murky essence of what Dr. Dripper has whined on about and add to it the unwholesome nutrients of what Grace will shortly try to feed you, you can see how someone can come to have an intellectual constitution as strong as mine. I believe it’s all about that fighting back you Yanks showed me. From the very beginning you have been so good at it! One must say what one must say! One must not be passive and colonial!
Well, we shall see.
Or I must append here, we won’t.
Onward!
America has been plague-ridden from the get-go. America has always been extraordinarily deficient in looking after its health. So many of you are sick with things you shouldn’t be. I have never been in a “civilized” country where so many inhabitants are suffering from something they can’t name, don’t know anything about, and refuse to find any help for. You don’t like to talk out loud about what pains you, only what bothers you about someone else. Disease, illness—the more serious, the more so—is grounds for the Whisper. “He’s got shhhh!” “She’s got psssst!” Our noble English language, which we handed to you on a silver platter, doesn’t work well in your country when it comes to your health. Most foreign indicia go denied for way too long. No wonder something naughty in the bloodstream such as appears to exist at the present time can spread so wildly unattended to. We Brits are just the reverse: the moment we smell a skunk we raise the alarm. We are a very suspicious people. That is why we have survived so long.
True, doctors everywhere form the principal population of those in denial. God forbid doctors should take sides and render strong opinions out loud. A doctor must always hedge his bets. Just in case. Mind you, the singular lack of curiosity on the part of most people everywhere is distressing, although Americans in particular, and on the whole, are a most incurious people. You consider curiosity impolite. How curious. You stuff yourselves with facts and starve yourself of the truth.
We are dealing with Big Questions here. Your country is not very good at Big Questions. They tend to become little questions after Important People, like presidents, get to work on ignoring, nay denying, them. You’ll see.
Yours is a country of death, you know. You’ll see.
A few words on “contagious” vs. “communicable.” Much has been made down through the ages about the distinction between these two presumably differing modes of transmission. You’re supposed to be terrified if something is contagious and only concerned if it’s just something you might catch. I have difficulty seeing much difference. Definitions, like statistics, like numbers, are the most malleable of tools and are most often bent out of shape by those with the most to hide (such as their ignorance), or gain (such as from their manipulation of truths).
A particle of death is a particle of death, air is air, touching is touching, and the rest is luck. And history. History is really nothing but a history of good luck or bad luck. God forbid anyone should admit this. We would all be out of work.
There have been many plagues of communicable contagion. There have been plagues spread via lessards, and nostremes, and redaltase (all technical terms for conveyance mechanisms). Plagues of dirt and mud and, of course, sex. Most plagues, though, are usually defined by location, which gives us both a certain amount of and not nearly enough information. More and more we can now plot arrivals and (it is to hoped) departures geographically through the centuries. The great plagues of northern Greenland, of the west of Nepal, of the Outer Banks of Upper Volta, of medieval Bruges, of Renaissance Italy south of the river Debbo, these are just a few identifiable plagues that come to mind which are still attributed to unknown causes. Lisbon-outside-the-walls sometime in the fifteenth century, eastern Yorkshire and western Scotland not long after, could these two have been connected? You see what I mean. Indeed, one of these days we may find a way to connect all of these dots. Indeed, dear Dr. Dripper would have us believe that no plague ever ends. And much as I dislike the man, he cannot be completely refuted in this thinking. Everyone has been infecting everyone else since the Garden of Eden. Of course we are all connected! Alas, it is up to us to figure out how and why. And few of us really want to sort all that out. It behooves me to say I have no notion why.