The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  From a too early age Anthony was very upset seeing anything pornographic, when in New York City, at this moment in time (although it had been the same for many years before this moment in time), you couldn’t walk two blocks without your eyes being offered something pornographic. That one man’s dirt is another man’s art, or passion, is almost beside the point and has also never been decided with any definitiveness, which is probably just as well. (I’m not supposed to go on so. Fred told me keep it short and he’s not paying me full rate.)

  What do we know about this Comstock who brags about destroying 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates for printing “objectionable” books, and nearly 4 million dirty pictures? And don’t forget his 4,000 arrests and the at least 15 suicides of people he was closing in on. And the 60,300 “articles made of rubber for immoral purposes,” 5,500 sets of playing cards, and 31,150 boxes of pills and powders (“aphrodisiacs”). Yes, he brags about them all. And about his arraignments over the years in state and federal courts of some 3,697 persons, of whom 2,740 pleaded guilty or were convicted. Among these were a number of persons of intelligence and moral fiber concerned for free speech or the right to disseminate knowledge respecting birth control.

  How did this guy bring about this monumental change in America’s law almost all by himself, because, you know, most people don’t like to talk about any of this in public? We could infer that Anthony was a sensitive soul but he wasn’t. Women and children were to be protected from men’s lusts at all costs; their innocence was the ultimate example of God’s wisdom and grace, and must be preserved from male desire. Anthony was all about decency.

  He was born in Connecticut, one of ten children, three of whom died; his father had land, a sawmill; he also farmed and was well-to-do, until he died, when Anthony was ten, but that’s okay because his devoted mother was ready to gobble him up. She didn’t know why he went to church a dozen times a week but she approved of it. Even when he was briefly in the Army he found a way to go to church every single day. His fellow soldiers thought he was unusual and didn’t want anything to do with him, which didn’t bother Anthony, already very much in the “I’ll show them” school of American entrepreneurship. He worked in a dry goods store, which was the only regular-paying job he had. It was the only job he ever had. For forty years. A clerk.

  He certainly doesn’t know anyone in Washington. He is a volunteer for the Young Men’s Christian Association, just revving up in New York, where he corners a couple of stern-faced fellows on its board and convinces them he has something important to say. He’s prepared a full report for them on his own, you see. This is a man with a mission. (This is a pleasant irony, if you believe in any such thing, because the YMCA, whose official history claims it was formed in response to “the craving of young men for companionship with each other,” would shortly become the biggest meeting place for homosexuals in America, and probably still is, with its gyms and cheap rooms and shared toilets and showers for the traveling man on a limited budget, or rather, with an unlimited appetite for meeting other men; but that is still a few years down the road.) Anthony outlines for these YMCA board members his plans for cleaning up the city. They are not a larky group, this board; they rarely smile. They all look more or less like Anthony, tall, big barrel chest, with effulgent muttonchoppy whiskers that make their bald heads look much balder. These guys have the friends in Washington. And Anthony can be a very convincing salesman, for the health and welfare, of course, of The American People. The bill gets passed. As noted, we still live with much of it. In parts of America they live with all of it. Anthony is appointed secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. It all becomes, God help us (and of course in this area He doesn’t), very heavy-duty stuff from this moment on.

  One should always wonder, what would have happened without the Comstock Act? Kids would see a lot of dirty pictures, which can’t be all that bad for a young person starting out on the road of life, and men would be free to use condoms so that the 676,009 illegitimate babies born in New York City alone during the years of Anthony Comstock’s living there might not have been conceived.

  Let us be clear: the Comstock Act has hauled into court the likes of Shaw, Dreiser, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Joyce, Picasso, Lawrence, Aristophanes, Lysistrata, The Canterbury Tales, O’Neill, Balzac, Wilde, Odets, Steinbeck, every painter who painted, gasp, nude women or sculpted them, even worse, and me. Even anatomy textbooks were prohibited from being sent to medical students by the United States Postal Service, for which Comstock was now an unpaid director. And this dry goods salesman remained a dry goods salesman for all of the forty years he wielded his censorship power.

  He may be laughed at but his picture is in a newspaper regularly, which pleases his mom no end. He has married his “Wifey,” quite a bit taller than he is, as well as ten years older, and she weighs only 65 pounds but Mom is in residence too. Mothers are very important to crusaders. Wifey bore a child who shortly died and from a dying prostitute Anthony stole a newborn baby just for Wifey; she wasn’t very bright or healthy and eventually they had to put her in a home.

  Before his death, Comstock attracted the interest of a young law student, J. Edgar Hoover, interested in his causes and methods. Hoover asked for a meeting and tour and pointers, “any help that you can give me because your heroic stands in New York should be followed across the nation,” he wrote to him. One wonders where Anthony took him? Perhaps they discovered a shared interest in beating off. Hoover is cut from the same cloth as Comstock, only nastier. Interesting how all these guys find each other.

  At this point, classy historians like Bledd-Wrench reach for a final “summing-up” containing a major statement about history and life. The Comstock Act as “a great dividing line,” that sort of thing. It certainly succeeded in making the federal government an intrusive oppressor of the personal lives of The American People in an unprecedented way. It would be particularly hard on males. Private life had been much simpler before it. Male sexual outlets would come increasingly under assault: prostitution, pornography, age-of-consent laws, same-sex relations—all were areas where males up through Lincoln’s time had an easier time of it. Yes, indeedy, something happened to men by the twentieth century that altered their relationships with one another. Anthony and his harsh “morality” put the nail in the coffin of the “after all, we’re all human” outlook on life that some people, who one day I guess will be called liberals, were just beginning to speak up about.

  He died in September 1915. No one remembers his name.

  Me, I’m not a major-statement person. The astonishing fury of this man’s creation is a major statement on its own.

  So long, for now. I wasn’t really all that boring, was I?

  YRH PIECES TOGETHER THE LIFE OF “MARK TWAIN”

  Mark Twain wrote the first gay American novel and nobody paid any attention to him. “I wrote this book and tried to tell the world about where my heart resided. I thought long and hard about doing this because I knew not all would want to hear it or have sympathy for it. But I also knew by then that my words could change people. That was the most exciting discovery I ever made. I told them all about the Bible, how it is full of interest, it has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. They slapped their thighs in laughter and agreement.”

  I can’t be the only homosexual writer who at some time has felt the same cleft into two, the same “I will write this and not tell you that,” the identical fear that Sam Clemens has, that if I tell you, the world out there, too much, you’ll punish me for my thoughts and deeds.

  If ever a great writer put one over on The American People it was Sam. He changed his name to get away from us. He thought it was because he didn’t want his momma to know some stuff. He was what some guys he hung out with called “a real pisser”; in his exuberant needs he pissed every which way on truth. He recognized he was getting away with it. People loved it. They laughe
d and laughed. This made him frightened. It did not make him laugh. But it made him rich.

  All the others his age went off to fight in a war. Well, war was not for him. Two weeks and he left it, just walked away. They want to go and knock each other’s brains out and kill each other, just shows how stupid man can be. He felt lucky that he discovered early enough how stupid they all were and how smart he could be not to be like them. It probably saved his life. And Sam liked black people, especially if they were young boys. Young boys had a mystery for him, and always would. It was a way for him to dream about the youth he never had. Yes, he dreamed. Sam’s first pseudonym, which he dreamed up while still a youth in Hannibal, Missouri, was “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Bab.” Well, Epaminondas, for real, ruled Thebes with his male lover, and they maintained their power through a fighting unit called the Sacred Bond, 150 pairs of warrior-lovers. How in the world did Sam know that?

  He thought he could live as two people, but you really can’t, you know; two people are twice as hard to live with as one. Harder, even. But if his momma never knew the pisser of a life he was leading as Mark Twain, then he figured that was the main thing. And the money pouring in would impress her mightily, which it was meant to do. She never thought he’d amount to much, running off so young and uneducated. He sent her money to shut her up. And so his path was clear then to love all the men he wanted to. In his own mind he fucked as Sam Clemens and wrote as Mark Twain and it would be like that for his entire life.

  But it wouldn’t take long before he could see there would never be any freedom. Well, Mark Twain would make them all laugh about that.

  The biggest pisser is that Sam lived his life in the open, right out there in front of them, in front of whatever world he happened to be lying to at the moment, and that no one’s ever noticed, then or now, this life he really lived. He lived his life right out in front of all of us! He took his men with him. Every single one of them. They boozed and fought and fished and even dug for gold together, side by side. They slept each night together, side by side too, from north to south, from west to east and over the oceans. He took them where he found them, or when and where he wanted them. Abe Lincoln had that gift too. Funny how, as with Abe, of all the people who’d write about him nobody noticed a bit of this when it was as plain as his face.

  He was to make a fortune writing about how America and Americans didn’t see a thing. Didn’t see that Huck and Nigger Jim were lovers, that Tom and Huck were his country’s first gay rock stars, and that the only love men really ever had was for each other. Huck and Tom and Jim were forged from the love Sam had for the boyhood of men, for the young flesh of men, for the sad innocence of youth that made men men. He would never write a woman, not because he didn’t understand them, but because he didn’t care about them.

  Oh, he settled with a nice young rich wife, the emphasis on rich. Many great men marry for richer, starting with George Washington. Sam loved most people who adoringly took care of him; he wasn’t so dumb as to bite that hand. That all his living children turned out to be girls, well, he figured this was his punishment from some unholy god he didn’t believe in anyway. So he adored these little girls as if they were precious gold, as unrepentant sinners often do, in case there’s a God up there after all.

  He had never seen so many men in his life. Well, that is why he went west. For once, what he’d heard was no exaggeration. He was already a big believer in exaggeration. He was just finding out what he wanted to write about, and discovering what he had to write with. He’d never dreamed particularly of being a writer and never knew, or thought, much about it. He just started doing it. The people he and his brother mixed with out west read and wrote for newspapers, so it might just have been the company and the first men he bedded down with there who got him to do it.

  This much he knew already. He didn’t much believe in truth. And his life had been too hard to want to remember it or honor it for real.

  The men appear to start in earnest around 1862 when Sam lives in Virginia City, Nevada, and then in San Francisco. Between 1862 and 1865, Samuel Clemens engages in a series of numerous wild romances with men. He is twenty-seven years old in 1862. He’s a late bloomer, that’s for sure, but most people were, if they ever bloomed at all.

  San Francisco during this period has a population of about 100,000. Over 90 percent of it is male, all on the whole remarkably well educated, half of them in their twenties, many of them from wealthy families back east. Like Sam, more than a few had left the Civil War by moving to California. It was all the rage, from New York to here, to be “bohemian,” to find a place with much drinking, much dressing up, much pretense, and a high tolerance for sexual ambiguity. Men often walked around dressed as women (“Puddy got a job selling men’s clothes in Gramp’s and he was told to wear a dress to do it”), as did Sam upon occasion, or the men he was with. The Left Bank of Paris, already the model, was extending itself to San Francisco, which was happy to follow suit.

  Virginia City had 2,500 women to 45,000 men, and it was also wild, but for twenty-four hours a day instead of just the nighttimes.

  The two places weren’t all that far apart, and Sam and his friends went back and forth, often to get away from someone or other.

  Sam writes this about the mining country: “It was an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men—not simpering, dainty, kid-glove weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and magnificent manhood—the very pick and choice of the world’s glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans—none but erect, bright-eyed, quick moving, strong-handed young giants … It was a splendid population…”

  It was in San Francisco that he learned about men, about men’s bodies, about his own body, about what men’s bodies could do together. At first he would go home from walking around the streets and bars and he would masturbate. It was not long before he went home with another fellow who told him, when he started jerking off, “Here, you don’t have to do that by yourself.” And so begins his education. “This is a real man’s world, out here,” another fellow tells him when they go to his room. The city is filled with small rooms that are rented to the many men who parade around looking for each other. Yes, there are jobs some do to feed themselves, but he cannot feel any sense of ambition parading on his strolls. That kind of ambition is over in Nevada. Here he feels only the ambition of men to grab on to other men, much of it for sex, but not always just that. There’s an almost tangible feeling that they’re in on the beginning of something out here, no one could tell you what it is, but it feels different from back east, that’s for sure. Here, quite simply, men are men, and they all seem to know it in a way he’s never seen before, and to somehow glory in it, in the sweat and the grit and the hard labor of finding themselves and each other, even in dresses. Sam understands.

  No, he doesn’t know what he is going to do yet, for real. He noodles with lots of thoughts and he makes notes of—for him—perplexing incomprehensibility. He does not know that he’s forging a distinct style in what he’s scribbling about what he’s seeing, although he does not think he’ll write about what he’s really seeing, and he knows, already, that this is dishonest. What’s the point of writing anything if it isn’t about what you’re really seeing? He hears voices like this as he looks down at his hand full of semen from jerking off while thinking of that young guy he wants. He looks at his hands, all sticky. He looks at his hands all full of, well, nothing yet. At least he knows it’s all complicated, and that’s a start.

  But you can tell he loves all this, those gold and silver fields of the West. When he gets around to writing about it, you can taste and smell it just like he did—that is, if you understand the lingo. No Twain scholar has ever understood the lingo, not this lingo, not Mark Twain’s lingo. Those many men who wrote and still write about Clemens never see the Twain.

  These are some of the men Sam gets involved with: Clement T. Ric
e is a rival reporter in the Nevada towns, from whom, for a year or so, he is never separated; indeed, they go to San Francisco together, shack up in the same room, upsetting one Don De Quille, an earlier bar buddy with whom Sam was involved. Something happens between them; Rice upsets Sam and Sam cuts him out of his life completely and returns to De Quille; the two move in together, furnish their two rooms lavishly, with only one bed, “the snuggest little bedroom all to ourselves,” Don writes; “here we come every night and live, breathe, move and have our being.”

  A threesome develops with the arrival of Artemus Ward, a successful columnist of humorous pieces who influences Sam and falls for him as well. These guys drink an awful lot; “this place is a wild, untamable place, but full of lion-hearted boys,” he writes to Sam. But he must return east, and Don and Sam continue their constant companionship. “My life was so full of stuff I didn’t want my Ma to know that when I turned in my next piece to The Enterprise I named myself Mark Twain. I had been looking around for something to hide behind; I’d earlier used ‘Joshua’ (not certain why) but it hadn’t set quite right. They all say that I hid behind my new name to run a bar tab or a gambling debt but it was because of Clement Rice; we had been inseparable for unto a year, starting out in Virginia City, coming here to run away from ‘Dan De Quille,’ which wasn’t his real name either. I don’t know why I ran from Dan except that Clem was more fun and Dan wasn’t anymore. But Clem got to be a handful and annoying and Dan was back, and so we hitched back together again, in a two room apartment but one bed for the both of us, like we liked it, except when Artemus joined us. Artemus wasn’t his real name either and I missed him when he died young: he taught me how I could be, like him, a writer and do a comedy show as well. He was more courageous than I, sending up Walt and writing right up front about counter-jumpers, which is what they called us queer ones. I got to say I was nervous when I read that piece. I had given Mother a subscription to Vanity Fair where this appeared as he is its editor. His letters to me always started and ended, both, with, ‘My Dearest Love,’ and I miss him mightily. He made Dan jealous though, which I enjoyed to watch. By now Dan and I were always moving from place to place and raising hell. The News, up in Gold Hill, ran a piece, ‘Dan De Quille and Mark Twain are marrying shortly. About time!’ I roared, but I was glad it was Mark Twain and not Sam Clemens. I made that name change just in time.”