by Larry Kramer
Enter the Ku Klux Klan into a secret partnership with the Disciples. The Klan, with its own unusual attire of conical hats and long raiment of sheeting, and masks, and which shortly will claim six million members, is at present falling apart. Founded after the Civil War, the Klan targeted freed slaves and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder—thousands, many thousands of murders.
For whatever reason, toward the end of this nineteenth century, the Klan is falling apart. It may be able to claim four million members in 1920 and six million in 1924, but now its haters are too busily involved with various forms of graft in the Reconstruction period.
Enter one Nigel Rotbart, Grand Wizard of the North and South Carolina chapters of the KKK, both states holding records for killing the most Negroes in the country. Rotbart meets Ezra Jr. at a conference in Washington entitled “How Do We Rid Ourselves of Our Unwanteds?” Each smells in the other not only a kindred spirit but money willingly flowing for services expertly rendered. Nigel Rotbart is put in charge of the Tally Office.
THE CAMP AT ABBATOR, TEXAS
The camp at Abbator is built and ruled by Cord Rine, a mammoth white man of indeterminate ancestry and accent. He is said to be deaf. Sketches of him in period newspapers indicate a man with stooped posture, almost Neanderthal in aspect, with jutting brow and recessed jaw and bulging deep-set eyes.
Cord comes down to the Texas panhandle from the KKK chapter in Ogetts, North Dakota. The landscape he settles on is all long stretches of hard sand and crabgrass and nothing for a cow or anyone else to eat. It’s soil that doesn’t lend itself to growing, swept by winds whipping tiny pinpoints of sandy pain into your eyes night and day. Cord has chosen this location wisely. With the assistance of invisible financing he builds a compound of high walls capped by spikes. Inside there’s nothing but a gaping pit. He tries it out himself. No, he can’t scale the walls. No, he can’t dig under the walls. No, he can’t force the gates because there aren’t any gates. No, from inside he can’t see what’s going on outside. Yes, it’s a huge gaping hole, a yawning mouth ready and waiting hungrily to be fed.
The camps that come into existence in the post–Civil War years blend into each other as part of one long chain of emptiness. Indeterminate dates. Undetectable locations. Invisible owners. Wandering people ready to be captured. Capable criminals ready to do the capturing. Smart, greedy wastrels who have learned how not to do what is expected of human beings, especially ones who have survived a cataclysmic war or a trek across the country. Indeed, it is veterans of this war who are among the most successful at greed and anger and hate. It is amazing how a country that has just suffered so much can continue to wound itself unendingly. Perhaps it is not so surprising. Will America ever be a country that knows how to repair itself?
Cord throws his first faggotty nigger into the pit around 1870 or so. A dozen of them are delivered under guard by a Pony Express wagon. Cord’s rigged himself a rope-and-gallows affair with which he can put the noose under a young man’s armpits and haul him up and swing him over and drop him in. Inside the pit the young man, and the other young men who are regularly dropped into this hell, receive occasional kegs of water and packets of seeds. A couple of dozen young men realize they’d better plant these seeds and water them and hope they grow fast. A few of the youngest boys are eaten before any of the seeds bear anything. There must be forty or so men inside before they can stop eating each other. For a while. By the time there are one hundred there is no amount of carrots and potatoes that can feed so many, so they devise what they believe is an equitable solution. They draw straws. The loser is knocked unconscious by the strongest fist, and then his body is ripped into its various parts and those hungry enough eat them. Everyone is hungry enough eventually. Whenever the supply of flesh appears to be sinking dangerously low, another batch of what are presumed to be homosexual Negroes is delivered by another stage and posse from the Tally Office.
Cord was said to be deaf, because the screams from inside his pit must be monstrous. He sleeps in a little hut outside the wall. He never looks inside, but he keeps a detailed tally of how many men he drops in. He gets paid per body. Every so often the Tally Office sends a representative who climbs up on the gallows, makes some sort of calculation, and pays Cord cash on the spot. There isn’t a day goes by since the first body was tossed in that the vultures haven’t greedily circled the sky and swooped down for their feed. It must be difficult to count how many bones equal a body equal a payment. God alone knows where Cord hides the money. By the time Virgil Vindicator and Domna Radiance finally arrive on horseback with their own posse of armed homosexuals, Cord is dead. He must have collapsed one day and the vultures ate him, too. The vultures didn’t eat his tally book, though, so Virgil and Domna are able to figure out what happened. A few of the captors had survived and lay side by side or in each other’s arms while awaiting death.
Cord Rine’s tally book is in the Lady Jane Greeting Library in Nearodell. You can see it there, though few want to see it, it makes for such sick reading.
THE CAMP AT NANTOO, OKLAHOMA
The camp notion grows more fevered and poisoned. It is the women Disciples of Lovejoy who conserve and maintain Nantoo. The camp for women in Nantoo, Oklahoma (Oklahoma didn’t become a state until 1907), is ruled by Philice Abingdon, an Australian woman. No one knows how she got to America. A Tally Office representative at about the same time as Cord, she sets up her camp. She calls her charges, who are all lesbians, Negro and white, “pussy-suckers,” and they call her the “Hateful One.” Her population is smaller, it was originally thought, because it is more difficult to locate lesbians. However, recent evidence indicates that the Tally Office sent out female spies to visit places where women gathered: church groups, sewing circles, civic meetings, group picnics, even nunneries. It’s never clear what criteria were used to identify a homosexual man or a lesbian, or who was doing the identifying, although people like Philice and Cord always claimed, “I know one when I see one.” The financing sources of this hate are legion. There is not a religion that does not wish good riddance to those “who do not act and think as we do.” There are also Catholic and Jewish secret organizations. It is just that one does not associate such brutality with them. One is wrong.
Nantoo’s landscape is almost as desolate as Abbator’s. “You look into forever. Even the sun is unreliable. The only thing you can count on is the deep dark of night. You could probably run away in this dark if it weren’t for all the snakes, coyotes, foxes, and vultures,” one of those who did escape wrote in her diary. One wonders how she escaped: Philice has the best guards nature can provide. She also makes a point of leaving around a few dead bodies of adventurous women, bitten and chewed and poisoned to death.
Her place is evidently cozier than Cord’s. There are long bunks where the girls sleep with each other while she watches them “suck each other out,” as she writes in one of her reports to the Tally Office. She lets her charges live too long, something she will regret, but she wants the company. She kills only the ones she doesn’t like, “mainly the niggers.” When she gets tired of a girl, she has one of her big-boned lady guards shoot her in front of the others, and the next day there’s stew for lunch. One shudders as one relates this, Freddy.
Although the landscape of Nantoo is harsh it’s slightly more congenial than the Texas hellhole. “Flowers grow. The sky makes pretty colors and the clouds make pretty patterns. How can I kill them off when the sun shines so brightly,” Philice writes in her reports to Nigel.
Thus does she find herself with a population much too large to handle. “Be careful you’re not too easy on them,” Nigel replies. “Such softness can turn against the caretaker. We lost our camps in South Dakota and northern Florida. Our representatives lost control. Please get to work.” The Tally Office leaves the means of killing off the inmates to each camp’s caretaker.
One day, two new Tally representatives appear unannounced. The men look
around. They ask Philice why so many of “these hideous homosexual sinners” are still alive. They berate her for her “unconscionable breach of the rules” and add: “Clean house. We have many backed up awaiting their assignment. We shall wait outside while you do.” These two Lovejoy officials are Turpa Diamond and Eagen Odemptor, who will work with Nigel at their Tally Office well into the forthcoming century. They will both live to a ripe old age and die in office. They will claim that by then the office will have been responsible for the “disappearance” of many thousands of homosexuals, men and women, black and white.
How does one eliminate fifty women to make room for one hundred more? Philice has grown quite fond of a few of them. She is tired of killing the ones she doesn’t like, and she is tired of eviscerating them and making those stews. She writes about her growing discomfort movingly. “It is just getting too difficult for me to control, house, feed, police so many in such an isolated place. My new guards, too, are uncomfortable with shooting those trying to escape and bringing those bodies back so terribly mussed-up. And I can no longer ignore that while I am paid modestly to keep this place going, I shall be paid a great deal more for cleaning house and I should like to retire. But I grow too attached to some of them. I have been in love with several.”
Ruskin Nancey, in his Some Deranged Inhabitants of the Early West, a book that is more or less disappeared (read “purged”) from stores and libraries, uncovered some of this history. Philice Abingdon was murdered by her guards under orders from Turpa Diamond and Eagen Odemptor, made into one of those “stews” but with poison among its ingredients, and fed to all the prisoners, cleaning house indeed. Replacements followed until statehood was achieved in 1907, thus making further activities of this nature illegal. The place was burned to the ground, as were all the other camps, some fifty of them according to Nancey, when their locations became officially part of The American People.
Ben-Ezekial, the erudite and pontificating Yaddah historian of this religion and almost any other matter you could possibly want to think about, predicts, “The Disciples of Lovejoy fully intend to convert the nation and the world. They will not falter. And it will be a good thing.” Well, any group that hates so passionately and claims such hate as the word of their God must be dealt with. These new Americans who, quite literally, make up their religion themselves as they cross a country that once belonged to others, are of stellar importance.
There are certain historians who make other historians see red, or purple, or black and blue, or cause lightning flashes of anger to strike when merely in the presence of one of their tomes. Professor Ben-Ezekial is one of these. He is very special to your country. We can claim many blowhards but few who blow so hard. Be patient with me, please, as I not only summon every bit of my courage. This is too important a subject for me to be too flippant. Tiptoeing in discussing a major world religion is delicate. I have not made my name from being delicate.
WOMEN
Your Roving Historian is aware that he hasn’t dealt much with women, their lives, their specific issues, in gathering the history of this plague. This is because the plague is initially and for many years remains a plague of men. When it crosses to women it will be because men give them this plague as well. And by then it will be much too late to do anything about it beyond marveling at how much human behavior has passed under so many bridges to flow into the swollen river of cascading, accumulating, unattended-to death. As with so much in their history and development, once again women arrive too late at the fair.
Such reasoning won’t sit well with my two principal fellow female contributors, I know. But as neither of them has stepped forward to contribute anything toward righting this balance, let me once again try a bit myself.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, friendship among women was an accepted and increasingly fervent activity, commencing when the women were still girls. “Such friendships were viewed as an innocent outgrowth of the emotionality of adolescence and as a way of preparing girls for the emotional bonding both of the adult female community and of marriage,” says Lois Banner, the eminent University of Southern California professor of women’s history, in Intertwined Lives, her riveting dual biography of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, two exceptional woman anthropologists who changed the twentieth century while married to men and yet committed to each other as lesbian lovers.
Banner describes a “vast expansion in interest” in spiritualism and Romanticism following the Civil War, as a result “of the deaths of so many young men on the battlefield.” Yes, people were still in grief from that war, now so many years ago, or so many historians find it convenient so to state. Long before the war and emphatically after it, girls and women were encouraged to form special and deep friendships with other females, friendships considered healthy and harmless and actually beneficial in shielding them before marriage from the hungers of men, or from the memory of loves now lost. This “passionate emotionality … could be expressed through sexuality or be channeled into spirituality or a drive for material or creative achievement.” Such bonding could easily lead “to genital sexuality,” or simply to a preference for female company over any further interest in men. Physical affection between girls was not only not frowned upon, it was encouraged outright. Vassar, the first college exclusively for women, was founded in 1865. It was by many accounts (particularly Nutritia Evens-Bell’s Vassar, My Heart, My Home, 1875) a hotbed of a place. Banner quotes from Cornell and Yaddah college newspapers: “When a Vassar girl takes a shine to another, she straightaway enters upon a regular course of bouquet sendings, interspersed with tinted notes, mysterious packages of ‘Ridleys Mixed Candles,’ locks of hair perhaps, and many other tender tokens, until the object of her attentions is captured, the two become inseparable, and the aggressor is considered by her circle of acquaintances as—smashed.” Smashing also involves much lolling, leaning of heads on shoulders, clasping of each other’s hands by the hour, and often fondling and kissing and, one can only assume, much else.
All in all, though, Dr. Banner’s work and the work that has been done to claim a lesbian past is remarkable, although preachers such as Jonathan Edwards convey more about sex lives in earlier America than does much that was promulgated afterward. Black and white lesbians continue to fall in love with each other and to be butchered because of it. On another front, I was recently forwarded an excellent college thesis on the tragic story of one Elizabeth Muhwezi, an immigrant from an African country who managed somehow to gain both passage to and disembarkation at New York in 1890 with another black woman, thought to be her “sexual poopsie” because they were holding hands. Immigration authorities conferred and, rather than refer the case for adjudication to any superiors, took it upon themselves to direct the two women to the rear of their boat and throw them overboard; they made certain they drowned by holding them under with paddles from a lifeboat. The two black men there to meet the two women, naming themselves as their husbands, were told that no such passengers with their names appeared on the boat’s manifest.
The student who wrote the above thesis is at the University of Oklahoma. Across the front page her instructor had scrawled in huge letters “Not acceptable for credit! GWS.” I sent the young student back your Tarpoo section as above. “Give this to GWS with my love! FL.”
Ladies, is it not time for all of you to put your houses in order!
FROM GRACE, OF COURSE
Freddie, I shall surprise you by finding your distress with us touching.
It is very lesbian what we do, we ladies.
Let me define what I mean by this expression, “very lesbian.” I mean divergent answers being a very lesbian activity. There’s a whole line of lesbian jokes that begin with “How many lesbians does it take…” “How many lesbians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Two: One to screw in the lightbulb and the other to sing a folk song about it.” “How many lesbians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three: One to hold the ladder, one to screw in the lightbulb, and one to p
rocess the event.” “How many lesbians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three: One to screw it in, and two to talk about how much better it is than with a man.” “How many lesbians does it take to change a lightbulb? None of your fucking business!”
You get the idea. I cannot believe that you are not confronting similar behavior across the board, across the wide Missouri, as that fucking folk song goes. Houses are rarely ever ever ever put in order, by anyone.
I know GWS at Oklahoma U. She’s a closeted bitch and shouldn’t be allowed to teach anyone!
I cannot wait for Hermia’s exegesis on Harold Ben-fucking-Ezekial. He is a macho pig of the first order. He once made a pass at me at a conference and I was in full drag, i.e., my nun’s habit. I was going to say re: Hermia, “I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick,” but I don’t think she would get the joke and anyway, dare it be intimated from her words that she might at last be moving toward our Fuck Central?
You fuckster! You are so fucksome. I love you very much.
FRED UNCOVERS THE LEGEND OF PETER POWER
Domna Radiance is born in Alhambra, California, of slave parents who have spent their lives one step ahead of danger, from the white man bosses, from the white man rapists, from the white man murderers. In Alhambra, Negro women are raped regularly by white men and thrown dead into ditches to await consumption by the ever-present circling buzzards, hawks, eagles, and, a West Coast specialty, the occasional alligator. Domna does not want to live such a life in such a place.