The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Enter young Steve Gillis. Short, wiry, scrappy, a pistol, a lethal barroom fighter who weighs 95 pounds, and Sam can’t get enough of him. He is small and compact like the Tom Sawyer whose voice Sam already heard in his head as he would hear Huck’s and Jim’s and he would show us without telling us about their love. They have barely met when Sam agrees to post his $500 bond for shattering a beer pitcher over the bartender’s head for pushing patrons around. Unable to pay, the two hightail it to Steve’s brother’s tiny cottage in the next county, where they shack up for a not inconsiderable time, and then to San Francisco, where they go from hotel to hotel, carousing mightily, even, according to one landlady, brandishing pistols. The Gillis log cabin in the woods, to which they go back again, is no doubt one of those lifetime experiences for Sam; it goes on for many months, maybe longer, when they are alone together in a tiny, two-room, one-bedded place. Yes, they are on the run from the law because of that bond money. How convenient.

  Then he is out with one Higbie, with his “brawny muscles,” camping on Mono Lake for quite some time. “Higbie and I went to bed at midnight, but it was only to lie broad awake and think, dream, scheme. Each new splendor that burst out of my visions of the future whirled me bodily over him in bed or jerked us to a sitting posture just as if an electric battery had been applied to me.” They become prospectors together. They become rich. Then almost overnight they lose it all and part.

  Then, who was “Johnny K,” the rich man’s son from Ohio? They went out to Tahoe together. He was there for recreation. He got it. They both got it, falling so in love with the experience that they jointly pledged to buy three hundred acres. Sam writes, “if there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber ranch I have not read of it in books or experienced in person.”

  Talk about truth, he knew Wilkes Booth, he’d fucked him, he’d seen his dick, he knew what he was all about, and he knew that the war, as far as Booth was concerned, was about the North not being available as the haven for hushies that he wanted it to be even as the South was on its way to becoming, with Richmond and Atlanta, like ancient Greece. Now, there’s a whole bunch of truths he wouldn’t write about, no sir. It won’t surprise him when Wilkes will shoot Abe Lincoln. Hell, Booth tried to stick a knife in Sam’s asshole when his dick got stuck in there and he couldn’t get it out. Too strange to write about that, that’s for certain. Hell, half the fairies out here in San Francisco will claim to have fucked with Wilkes, with not a one of them talking about his screwed-up dick. So much for truth. That’s why Sam couldn’t believe in it. Wherein, in all of this, lies truth? “Lies” indeed.

  Tell the truth? For what, by the end of his life, he’s discovered is this: that many men, many of the best men, many men period, are as he is, in love with other men and bound hand and foot and mouth from showing it. Who can become an honest man like this? And how? Steve Gillis let out whoops of joy regularly and Sam joined in with him, letting himself go as well. He’d never allowed himself to do that before, let go. And soon Steve Gillis was … well, after a while Sam couldn’t recall. Until he wrote Tom Sawyer.

  “What is it that strikes a spark of humor from man?” Twain is asked, or asks himself in one late interview. “It is the effort to throw off, to fight back the burden of grief that is laid on each one of us.”

  Charles Warren Stoddard, whom Sam continued to see all his life, is hardly acknowledged in Sam’s biographies, or Twain’s. Stoddard was as flamboyantly gay as they came. “I thought him sad and sensitive and he touches me,” Sam wrote at the time. He was a successful travel writer who fell in love with the young boys in the South Seas and actually wrote about it in a widely read series (especially widely read for some reason by the Disciples of Lovejoy). Once, Charles decided to try to get rid of this passion by going back there and walking alone by the water’s edge in the moonlight. He reported back to Sam of his failure to lose this ardor: “it didn’t work. I was back in their arms, which they offer to older men so profusely.” Over the years Sam would call upon him for … what? Stoddard was one of the few writers Sam listened to, though he might not follow his advice. There is no question the relationship was touchingly sexual in the midst of so much of San Francisco’s “heaving and ho’ing,” as Stoddard called it. “Charles is tender and he touches me in spirit as well as body,” Sam writes. By the time they’re aging men in London they’re really like kids cutting up as only old friends can do, comfortable in the release of feelings they could still reveal to each other. Yes, it was complicated, but no more so than any gay man will tell of. Once, Sam and wife Livvy are in England and she gets sick and Sam takes her home on the boat and the boat docks and Sam sees Livvy and the kids safely off it and on their way, only for him to immediately reembark, now with Stoddard on board, back to London. He accompanies him not only to London but on the rest of an extensive tour. Both called Stoddard his “secretary.” Both liked to dress flamboyantly in grand hotels, Sam all in white, making entrances down dramatic staircases. “I think he is the purest male I have known,” Mark writes in his autobiography.

  “What liberating personal magnetism did he possess that moved his contemporaries to forgive him for traits and tendencies that biographers of a later time have found deplorable?” This query goes unanswered by he who raises it, Ron Powers, in Mark Twain: A Life (2006). What indeed? To what traits is he referring? Is he suggesting he knows all that’s been divulged above but found too deplorable to include in his well-received book? Powers, needless to say, leaves out the most powerful “liberating personal magnetism” of all. Yes, Sam’s undoubted homosexuality has never been explored by any of his biographers. Powers can somehow still locate other “liberating” experiences, including Sam’s presumed besottedness when he was twenty-two with fourteen-year-old Laura Wright, whose disappearance into “the vagaries of fate” is “crushing” to him. This nonsense is not dissimilar to the sudden appearance after Lincoln’s death of a presumed broken heart over one Ann Rutledge, which bears no truth in actuality and was indeed launched by protective friends of Lincoln who knew he was homosexual and felt compelled to disprove it for all time. “The Lincoln of our literature,” William Dean Howells claimed Sam to be, in his own influential My Mark Twain.

  Yes, Sam Clemens changed his name.

  Mark Twain means “safe water.”

  FIRST AMERICAN HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS?

  That first spate of homosexual exterminations (yes, there is already a gay grapevine) inspires a young Sault Ste. Marie man and his “beloved friend” to travel around the country delivering what are believed to be the first public speeches in America in defense of homosexuals. Their real names are unknown; at first they go by Peter and Paul Ulrich, in honor of Karl Heinrich Ulrich, a German who delivered and published in Munich in 1867 what are believed to be the first public speeches in defense of homosexuality anywhere in the world. Wherever in the country Peter and Paul go, they stand in public squares and attempt to present their message: “We are homosexuals and we have come to introduce ourselves to you and show you that we look just like you.” They seem to have instinctively grasped that the perceived legitimacy of nonhomosexuality is based on the unquestioning acceptance of its universality. (The use of the word heterosexual is not noted until 1892, in Psychopathia Sexualis, that book again, by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, that identifies everything imaginable that can happen to the mind, soul, psyche, and sexual organs, including heterosexuality, to be something that is sick.) Their appearances, mostly in the central portion of the country, from Milwaukee to Chicago and environs, and in Buffalo, are met with discomfort at first, and then with growing hostility as their notoriety grows. It is not long before they are both found dead, floating in the Erie Canal.

  Were the Ulrich Brothers, as they briefly came to be known, the first two identifiable gay activists in America?

  There has also been talk of a man in the West who went by the name of Virgil Vindicator.

  * * *

  The “germ” th
eory of disease is discovered by the German physician Robert Koch in 1882. He demonstrates that a particular bacterium can cause a particular disease. I am just such a particularity. This should be a very important discovery. But it is discounted or ignored, particularly by American medicine. I am having such increasing luck in your country!

  THE CAMPS OF AMERICA

  It behooves me, my Frederick, to take us down the road I am now compelled to follow. This is a crucial marker in the wretched history of your country, shocking and painful, and to my knowledge never revealed by anyone heretofore. That it takes a Brit to be the one to uncover and unravel this deep vein of your poison says more than enough about a basic understanding of history that you and yours simply do not share. It is the placid, some would say boring, nature of our personalities that allows us to perceive with a clarity, indeed an honesty, that does not come easily to such a frenetic land as yours.

  I talk of camps, of the camp movement, because it is a movement, an ardent activity that is now growing in size and taking hold of a certain part of the American imagination and landscape and that will prove unstoppable: the “putting away” of those who are troublesome, or unwanted, or considered in some way unhealthy, and therefore deemed “un-American.” The world has never been at a loss to have such imaginings, or indeed such locales, flourish secretly. My chum Anne Applebaum, in Gulag, has written magnificently about the history of encampments. But these are later camps established by Russians and, as she tells us, Germans, sometime before the Nazis, who will become their prime facilitator in the twentieth century. In all cases people are rounded up primarily because of who they are and secondarily for what they might have said. In an almost copycat manner continuing until today, camps take root in locations all over the map. It is as if, once a camp is heard about in country X, its very nature excites duplication in somebody’s perfervid imagination in many a country Y, transcending boundaries with amazing celerity. I don’t want to say that you are first, but you do predate Applebaum’s amazing discoveries. Indeed, The American People are continuing on their roll, their nonstop and never-ending revelation of the sorry state of human nature and behavior, particularly but by no means exclusively toward those who love their own.

  Various groups of self-appointed and almost always secret vigilantes, most often in isolated areas of the country where they can operate as they will, begin more and more to take control of local “law and order.” Secret documents certainly have turned up: tallies of inhabitants, instructions regarding their treatment, advice on to how to perpetuate the place and its activities when a current “administration” has passed on. Many little black notebooks are found in basements and boxes and trunks, filled with not always decipherable scribblings (but clear enough), and are duly turned over to historical societies, which of course don’t know what to do with them but throw them into other basements and boxes and trunks. Timid historians—almost all historians are timid (and/or, for the sake of this history, heterosexual)—are loath to document such horrifying discoveries; they write history so they can hide behind it, in their own closets. Yes, many are the historians who shrink from writing about certain activities, even when they are known to have transpired. This is always history’s greatest failing, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.

  These camps are filled with people who are forced to stay there, a device that will be most successfully put into widespread utilization in Russia after their revolution in 1917, when that country is overwhelmed with too many people and not enough food to feed them. Starvation and freezing to death are the chosen methods to deal with them. Camps are hidden away on land so remote as to be unblessed even by the weather necessary to keep living things alive. Many great Russian writers have told this awful history, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, to name but a few. No newspaper of that time, and few afterward, would write about it. Indeed, The New York Truth’s reporter in that country won a Pulitzer for not writing about it.

  The incarceration of those one doesn’t like is, of course, an old and dishonorable calling, but it did not take firm root on an expanded scale in America until the nineteenth century. Very distant outposts do not bless this country; Russia has a vast and endless wasteland to its north, replete with far-flung islands where church and state send many a dissident to this day. Britain and the countries of Europe also have many possessions where they secret their unwanteds, without note or notice. People get shipped away into oblivion. But America is wide open. How could so many shards of your unwanteds get lost here?

  Herschel Mentone, in his classic Unkind German Behavior Around the World, 1875–1945, a groundbreaking work that remains unnoticed, corroborates Applebaum’s reference to the early British concentration camps in South Africa, which were based on camps set up beginning in 1895 by the Spanish in colonial Cuba. Applebaum incorrectly names these as “the first modern concentration camps.” She can be forgiven if only because of what she then tells us, which is quite a shocker. In 1904, according to Applebaum,

  there are a number of strange and eerie links between these first German-African labor camps [that the Brits set up in South Africa] and those built in Nazi Germany three decades later … The first imperial commissioner of Deutsche Sud-West Afrika was one Dr. Heinrich Goering, the father of Hermann, who set up the first Nazi camps in 1933. It was also in these African camps that the first German medical experiments were conducted on humans: two of Joseph Mengele’s teachers, Theodor Mollison and Eugen Fisher, carried out research on the Herero, the latter in an attempt to prove his theories about the superiority of the white race. But they were not unusual in their beliefs … the notion that some types of people are superior to other types of people was common enough in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. And this, finally, is what links the camps of the Soviet Union and those of Nazi Germany in the most profound sense of all: both regimes legitimized themselves, in part, by establishing categories of “enemies” or “sub-humans” whom they persecuted and destroyed …

  And so was it to be attempted here.

  It is disappointing that Applebaum did not look farther west for antecedents and accompaniments to her findings. It is Mentone’s belief that Germans in America would have known about all of these efforts in South Africa that Applebaum details. Incarcerated people freeze to death in the snows of Nantoo, Abbator, Partekla, and other such camps in America before they freeze to death in Kolyma and Siberia or are gassed in Auschwitz.

  “In certain … camps, at certain times, death was virtually guaranteed,” Applebaum tells us.

  Here, too.

  There are not-yet-states in America, territories they were called, that are vastly underpopulated and unguarded, with enormous stretches of unoccupied, unfriendly terrain. These house many unfortunate secrets about their past, waiting to be believed.

  DAME LADY HERMIA MAKES A BIG DISCOVERY

  The Disciples of Lovejoy have been in the Utah territory since 1847. For some time it was uncertain whether they were in fact in Utah or in Idaho. Idaho did not become a state until 1890. Utah did not become a state until 1896. Ezra Furst, still in power at this juncture, still mighty in his determination to make the Disciples of Lovejoy the biggest religion in America today, and tomorrow the world, will shortly be summoning into Secret Chambers the Fifteen Men of Superior Wisdom to elect his replacement. Ezra is very old. His son, Ezra Jr., covets this leadership, though he knows he is still too young. Old men rule this religion. Ezra’s refusal to step aside is reaffirmed by the Fifteen Men. Ezra Jr. must find another path to climb to the top of a mountain, so impressing his elders that he can one day run what is legally named the Princely Bountiful Pearl of the World Trust.

  Tom Lovejoy had written polygamy and the physical love of man for man and brother for brother into the catechism of his religion. Incest was added by his son Jared, whose first son, Aaron, married his own sister, Gibbonette, who died bearing him triplets, all of whom died during their delivery. To see to it t
hat he would not have a lonely old age, Jared, at eighty-four, impregnated a young cousin, Deirdre, who bore several of his children. She took them with her, however, when she ran away from Oxonia—which, finally, was what the Council of the One Hundred Holiest Elders determined to call their Holy City—in a successful attempt to prevent any more Disciples from, as it were, screwing her, one way or another. They are a fecund lot, which is their stock-in-trade, although in these early years they murder each other a lot, which I am not going to go into here. They break off into sects, which for brief periods loathe and kill each other, only to regroup and pledge eternal love. Year by year the Disciples of Lovejoy becomes an increasingly complicated religion, filled with much mumbo jumbo, unusual undergarments, and new “traditions” they claim have been dictated by God. It is not surprising that it’s difficult to trace a good many things, which is just the way they want it. At present they are stuck with all those wretched physical acts that Tom and his son ordained, homosexuality, polygamy, and incest, which turn off not a few prospective converts. How to proceed?