The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  So Gilbert makes entry into the precious interior of one of the greatest men in America’s history. Over succeeding years they will retire many times to George’s cabin in the Virginia woods. When Gilbert returns to France, George Washington, for the first time anyone can recall, is visibly in tears.

  * * *

  By now Georgie is already infected, more or less, even though small dicks never provide a satisfactory penetration. A little penis going into such a large bottom does not allow for a complete-enough dose of ejaculate. His big bottom will also protect him when he is fucked by Jeel-bare, as it will protect the Frenchie, whose penis is not much larger than an Indian’s. By rights Jeel should have caught me from George. But Jeel was lucky, especially because he was not circumcised. In studying my success rates over the centuries, I discover that I can insert myself between the foreskin and the glans and stay there for quite a while, particularly among those who bathe so little. All American men, except the Hebrews, of course, will remain uncircumcised for quite some time. This will help me and not help them. But I am ahead of myself here, daydreaming of victories yet to come.

  The small amount he has of me inside him will not kill others. I will never be able to control how much of me I can pass into bodies. It is only when there is enough of me inside someone that I can truly claim victory. Your Dr. Omicidio will know all this. He just doesn’t want to tell you.

  I’m glad I didn’t really kill George. I wanted to spare him and I did—my gift to the birth of America.

  Alex was circumcised, being the son of a Jewess. I spared him, too, but Burr won’t.

  THE DEATH OF LOVES

  George Washington is aware that over the years of his presidency some four dozen men are hanged for sodomy. This may pain him, as it pains Hamilton, but neither lifts a finger to save one of them. Washington has worked out for himself the notion that “loving the boys could be perfectly acceptable as long as it remained within certain boundaries” (Shively). He has established America’s first version of President Boy Vertle’s twentieth-century ignominy, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

  Jack Laurens is murdered by Norwood Punic during a useless skirmish with the British in August 1782, and thus not alive to receive the latest of the many love letters that Alex, now married, has sent to him. Jack has just returned from a successful mission for Washington in Paris when Punic literally shoots him out of his saddle and gallops away. Punic has been waiting for such an opportunity. He is not seen or heard of again.

  Jack is the great love of Hamilton’s life. Alex’s passion for him exceeds by far what passion he feels for his good wife, Eliza, who bears him seven children. His own voluminous papers, which are often starkly honest (he “suffered from excessive openness,” Chernow writes), reveal numerous dalliances through the years. Many of these are with young men. According to Kenneth Anger, in one of his Hollywood Babylon series, the movie star Errol Flynn wanted to play Hamilton. “He would fuck anything in sight, and so do I,” Flynn is reported to have said to the great British filmmaker Alexander Korda.

  Alexander Hamilton commits suicide on July 11, 1804. He is either forty-nine or fifty-one years old. His papers reveal that he knew he would not fire at Aaron Burr, and that Burr, an expert marksman, would fire at him with great accuracy. (Ironically, Alex’s eldest son, Philip, had been killed in a duel in the very same spot three years earlier.) His George by now is dead some few years and Alex’s life has become more and more uninteresting. He is depressed, and increasingly so. The battles left for him are petty and boring, his life too bourgeois. God forbid he should wind up like George himself, up there on that hill with only a Martha to talk to. He has come to hate the law, which he must practice to support his large family and his wife. He is mourning not only George and Jack, but also his lack of interest in anyone and anything else. That he even bothers to annoy Burr (and the argument on both sides is about petty things) so much that Burr feels he has no option but to call for this duel is an indication of just how depressed Alex is. And what an opportunist Burr is. Alex just does not care.

  Indeed, what is left for him to do, and for whom could he do it? He’s created for his George a strong central government, an effective tax and tariff system, a national bank (because of him the country for the first time can actually pay its bills), the U.S. Mint; he’s written, with Madison, the Federalist Papers, which would mold the Constitution itself; he’s started the Bank of New York. He battled hard for every single one of these against major opposition, working day and night for as long as he can remember. Now there is no one who even offers thanks to indicate a job well done. There is no one left to do anything challenging for. Yes, he misses George, mightily.

  Several days before his death, he comes across his correspondence with Jack and his files on Maria Reynolds, the hooker who years ago had obsessed him to such a degree that the public exposure of their affair put paid to any notion he could ever run for president, even should he be able to manipulate the Constitution to make that possible. He did not want to be president anyway. George wanted him to. George had been his goad throughout his adult life, the father he never had. He loved George. Jack had been his greatest love. There had never been another like him. “Mind you do justice to the length of my nose,” he wrote to Jack, nose being code for “cock.” He also wrote, “I wish that it might have been in my power by action rather than words to convince you that I love you.” They joked about marrying each other somewhere, on some distant shore. He sent his last love letters to Jack before he knew that Jack had been shot dead. They were returned to him unopened.

  He never forgot his receipt of the news that Jack was dead. It was said that he howled so in pain and anguish it was as if the winds would carry the echo of his helpless cries throughout the world.

  He must have pondered all this before he faced Burr in that duel and aimed his pistol at the trees.

  GEORGE AND THE JEWS

  The American Revolution is financed in large part by Jews. In 1789, George Washington visits Savannah to deliver personal thanks to them. In the large classical temple the Jews have built for their worship, he says to them, “I am amazed how many of you share the notion that this country will be great and rich and wide and free for every man. The belief that America is the future is the food of many men’s wishes and dreams.” He gives Jews credit for having been in one Promised Land and journeying so far to be a part of another. He talks to the Jews as if they have just arrived, when in fact many of them have now lived in America for several generations and consider themselves Americans. Some are suddenly frightened: What has their financing of the American Revolution bought them after all if he talks to them like this? He cautions the Jews against greed and urges them to control their usury. Several men get up and leave.

  He goes on to suggest that the western part of this country is where dreamers should go, that the South will fail under the burden of slavery and rigid social codes, and then, rather pointedly, he advises that “those with large landholdings in the South may find their investments circumvented by new conditions birthed by America’s new laws.” More of the congregation walks out on this.

  SLOW TOLL THE BELLS OF SEXUAL TRUTH

  Martha Washington is not a journal keeper. But thanks to excellent sleuthing by Mary Lefkowitz in a piece in The New Gotham in 1996 called “The Wandering Womb,” we realize that she did leave behind some information, in the form of her dirty linen. Many of her garments, her dresses, gowns, and underwear, are available in various collections, chief among these being the Smithsonian’s. Curators have long been puzzled by the fact that all this stuff is invariably soiled in the area of her crotch, and that these stains, when microscopically examined, are discovered to be composed of fecal matter. It is also known that Martha had a great interest in medicine, and that she made many visits to many people she’d heard mentioned as medically skillful in varying areas, including specialties of the Orient and the ancient world. Her personal library at Mount Vernon includes books on Egyptian and
early Greek remedies, one of which, as both her stained wardrobe and Professor Lefkowitz also attest, is a small volume on the use of “animal excrement” as a “vaginal irritant,” and of “dried human excrement mixed with beer froth” as a salve for women’s “affected organs.” Lefkowitz goes on, “Greek doctors, for their part, prescribed cow or goat dung, or bird droppings, often in combination with fragrant wine or perfumes like rose oil. (Cures derived from animal excrement are used today: a form of the estrogen used in hormone-replacement therapy is extracted from the urine of pregnant mares.)”

  What were these cures meant to cure? There was much fear of the “wandering womb,” which, it was thought, “could move about in a woman’s body, putting pressure on other organs and so causing serious illness, and even death.” One of the cures prescribed for diseases of the womb was sexual intercourse. Poor Martha. Her husband was unable to fuck her even if it might save her life.

  Lefkowitz does not go far enough. She fails to allow us to consider the possibility that George and Martha knew George was syphilitic, and knew that China and the Orient sometimes used feces as a protective sheath. As a condom protects modern man against venereal disease, so was earlier man’s own shit thought to accomplish the same.

  If George then was fucking Martha, it would appear that this Oriental cunning worked, in that Martha, so far as we know, did not become infected with syphilis or, for that matter, become pregnant by him. But it might be said that she never again conceived because she was never fucked. Or that shit is an even more protective sheath than even the Chinese maintained.

  Did George Washington have The Underlying Condition? On his deathbed he had very small purple spots on his face and flesh. He called them his “old spots,” because he’d had them and hidden them for so long.

  SO ENDS THIS RECONSIDERATION OF GEORGE WASHINGTON

  No. Not yet. His life cannot be told chronologically. He is a cold fish with many tadpoles swimming inside him. He is an actor who plays many parts intentionally. He knows what he is doing and what he doesn’t want you to know he’s doing. He is enormously admired from that day until this. There has never been a period when Washington Worship has been out of fashion. Nary a dissenting voice. Beyond criticism, ’twould appear. You’ve got to know that no man was as great as this. Even those Jews kept their mouths shut when George easily gobbled up every bit of new land they thought was contracted to them. That he has come to be considered a great man and a great leader and a great mind is a remarkable testimony to the vicissitudes of history, society’s need, cowardly and unimaginative historians who can’t put one and one together. There is not one single extant biography of this man that paints a convincing portrait of a person. All his biographers fall in love with what they think he is, and what they think he did. And after a few years the cement is set. He is another one called great because America has become great and this must have come from someone.

  His best biographer is a historian few have heard of. His name is Charley Shively, and he labored for many years at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where no one paid much attention to him or his remarkable work. He made his great discoveries about Washington (and Lincoln and Walt Whitman) and wrote them up only to discover no one would publish them because he said these men were all, distinctly, homosexuals. So his stuff was published by a little rag in San Francisco called Gay Sunshine, which was happy to have it. He was the first person to claim Whitman was a gay man, now widely acknowledged as such, and of course he was much maligned for saying so. Indeed, there are still academics who refuse to admit that Walt was gay. “It is so fucking hard to tell the truth,” Charley wrote to your present historian. As for his claims about Washington and Lincoln, well, not even malignity greeted them. They were completely ignored, perhaps because of shock. How do we know that Shively’s biographies of these men are accurate? How do we know that Gibbon’s or Herodotus’ or Thucydides’ versions of all their men are accurate? “It’s only by being shameless about risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative,” said Eve Kasofsky Sedgwick, an interesting straight woman who wrote much about people in the closet hiding their homosexuality.

  After George Washington dies, in 1799, there is no outpouring of support for him or his city, in which no one wants to live. So certain has he been that his people would flock to join him that he’d bought options on much of the land. The American People do not wish to acknowledge him. At least not in as celebratory a fashion as he would like to be remembered. He had not touched anyone’s heart. That would only be manufactured later.

  Yes, the remote hero dies. “My success came because of silence, pride, and wealth. No one shall ever know me and that is as I want it. Let them think me cold and distant. That is true. Although there has been more than that, no one is to see it.” He sounds like an early version of the alienated man, something out of Beckett. You remember his face until you see a different portrait of him. He is carved in stone, but what were those eyes like?

  He is remembered, of course, but strangely absent from anyone’s memory.

  The Great Man dies with but two additional beside him, his two favorite Seneck braves who have lived on his land since youth. They who bathed our first dead president remark, yet again, on his most large and hanging sacks.

  * * *

  I can see that you don’t like each other as much as you should.

  I guess we are all having what you call growing pains.

  I need you all together! In every way that you can.

  Poor George.

  Well, I loved him.

  THE SONS OF THE POCAHANTI

  After George Washington’s death, Baron Steuben, whose idea it is, and a number of Washington’s officers come to John Adams and suggest that a society be formed, one that will last through time and tide, and that the membership in this society be restricted to those who knew George or served under George, or knew Martha or were related to those who knew her. Rather than call this society after the Washingtons, for there are already a growing number of those named after one or the other or both of them, Washington This and Washington That and George This and Martha That and George & Martha This and That, it is suggested, quite amusingly it is thought, and seconded and ratified by the officers in attendance at the first and founding meeting, that the society take its name from an earlier moment in American history, as a joke really, because she was a joke, a coarse Indian woman who took off her deerskin and put on a dress and went to visit the king and appeared at pageants and opera houses all over the world to show herself off in brocade: Pocahontas.

  “But let us masculine be, as well as plural,” General Kurtzbogg further suggests. “Let us call ourselves not the Society of Pocahontas but the Society of the Pocahanti—no, even better! the Society of the Sons of the Pocahanti—and let us as our annual rite don deerskins with beads and war paint and feathers. And let us call each other ‘Corn Huskers,’ one hundred Corn Huskers, because that is where she came from, the cornfields on some old plantation. And let one hundred comprise the total membership of the Society of the Sons of the Pocahanti, now and forever.”

  And so it was. And is.

  Thus comes into being America’s most elite gentile male secret society. One hundred founding members start it up and one hundred members only is it to this day. Presidents, Supreme Court justices, military brass, governmental bigwigs, millionaire and soon billionaire tycoons, flagrant heteros and closeted queers and queens flow through its ranks until they die and are replaced by more of the same. It is a much-coveted membership. It brings with it much power.

  When the papers are drawn up for final ratification, Lieutenant General Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin Baron von Steuben is excluded from membership. Some say it is because he is foreign-born. But everyone knows it is because he was an Alte Maria. Naturlich. He dies shortly, still full of amazement about these Americans and their hypocritical ways, so like everywhere else he’d ever lived.

  THE END OF AN ERA?<
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  We have come to the end of an era. Of sorts. We have been born. We have had a period of youth. We have won our freedom from a domineering parent. We have started our own country. We have elected our first president and watched him die. We have grown enough in strength to carry on.

  We want to learn.

  Don’t we?

  I wonder. Hermia has been chiding me lately. “I am annoyed to note that you believe that almost everybody is either a homosexual or a repressed homosexual or a homophobe. Is this what your history of The American People is to be? Surely heterosexuals have a more central and forceful and guiding position in the world. Your world. My world. Any world. The world. How dare you be such a usurper.”

  Although Grace’s response to this is “Shut the bitch up,” I think I must never lose sight of this question. Am I writing the history I want to write? It is certainly history as I am coming to understand it. I claim time is short. I claim I miss retiring in these possible final days to my lover, Edward’s, arms. I claim a lot of things, but now that I am actually collecting the evidence, is it sufficient to convince? Is it building to what will be an undeniable and airtight case that will hold up in a court of reason? After all, straight people never do understand gays. The Bible, the most beloved story ever told, is far-fetched. Wasn’t it given to us somehow as a kind of novel, with a beginning, a middle, and an end? Whether it was true or not, wasn’t it accepted as a believable story? Eventually.