by Larry Kramer
* * *
At Mrs. Harriman’s next gathering, Odemptor from the Tally Office denies government involvement when questioned by Mrs. Ianthe Adams Strode, a young relative of Teddy’s married to a rising government official, who raises her hand to “modestly” say that she finds “much of what is transpiring here today distressing.” She leaves after she realizes there is no support for her position. Mrs. Adelphia Heinz, another rich woman, this time from Pittsburgh, cries out, “Whoever she is, let that heathen unbeliever go! We must not be put off our mission! We must purify our own midst.” There is much applause and Adelphia, a handsome woman beautifully dressed in the latest from Paris, actually gets up, smiles, and takes a little bow. “Thank you,” she says. “It is good to know and feel that we are all in this together.”
Then the crowded living room adjourns to the handsome dining room to partake of another one of Mrs. Harriman’s famous teas.
Intelligent people flock to jump on board with one group of eugenics “experts” or another. “Wholesale reproductive prohibition” becomes the widespread battle cry, the goal, the activity, the act.
Slowly and quietly the euthanasia of newborns has begun across the country. It had always existed, of course—how could it not?—but now physicians and obstetricians are taking the initiative, feeling more and more that right is on their side. Get rid of all those unwanteds. Kill them! Murder them! What are you calling murder? We are doing God’s will. And Teddy’s, too, of course. It is all so wholesome and wholesale.
Edwin Black hurls this at today’s reader:
The men and women of eugenics wielded the science. They were supported by the best universities in America, endorsed by the brightest thinkers, financed by the richest capitalists. They envisioned millions of America’s unfit being rounded up and incarcerated in vast colonies, farms, or camps. They would be prohibited from marrying and forcibly sterilized. Eventually—perhaps within several generations—only the white Nordics would remain. When their work was done at home, American eugenicists hoped to do the same for Europe, and indeed for every other continent, until the superior race of their Nordic dreams became a global reality.
Strummer and Evinrude get more grimly to the point:
Seventy-three male bodies were uncovered buried in a mass grave some one hundred miles north of Witchita, Kansas. Add to these the twenty-seven female bodies found buried twenty-five miles further north. These graves were staked out with visible black crosses, dated March 1, 1913, and labeled “These sexual perverts are dead courtesy of the Kansas Eugenics Institute.” Similar gravesites are found in Alabama, Michigan, Long Island, California, Washington, Oregon, and Louisiana. According to research done by the Magillis Foundation, documents found in the archives of forty-seven states indicate complicity in similar acts. In Detroit, in 1918, there will be a massive rally of more than ten thousand against “all sodomites in this city and anywhere near us.” Ten thousand!
Homosexuals probably owe their relative obscurity for the time being to the simple fact that people are still unfamiliar with this word and don’t know what homosexuals look like. Effeminate men and masculine women have been a part of the social fabric forever; everybody’s family probably has one. Up to now few have given them much notice. Certainly they have not been considered as dangerous as the descriptions now beginning to be their lot, descriptions not fit for family newspapers, though that is where they now appear. Witness this editorial from Tulsa’s Oil Derrick and Advertiser: “Now we know a lot of families have got an old maiden auntie living upstairs with her old girl friend Tess, or an old Uncle Albert swishing around the house with his old pal Buster, all of them kissing everyone ‘Hello, you cute thing, you’ with their sloppy lips. What we didn’t know is that these people are doing things with each other behind our backs that are degenerate and dangerous and we got to get rid of them fast or our city and our country is going to go to hell like our preachers tell us. They are sticking things into each other, unnatural things, and that is all we can say.”
So it has not been long before numerous vicinities and states, beginning with Virginia, pass laws authorizing sterilization. Get those homosexuals while they are still in the mother’s womb. Over these years extraordinary energy is devoted to locating “the targeted.” One can do no better than to again quote the stalwart, vigilant Black:
At any given time there were hundreds of field workers, clinicians, physicians, social workers, bureaucrats and raceologists fanning out across America, pulling files from dimly lit country record halls, traipsing through bucolic foothills and remote rural locations, measuring skulls and chest sizes in prisons, asylums and health sanitariums, scribbling notes in the clinics and schools of urban slums. They produced a prodigious flow of books, journal articles, reports, columns, tables, charts, facts and figures where tallies, ratios and percentages danced freely, bowed and curtsied to make the best impossible impression, and could be relied upon for encores as required. Little of it made sense, and even less of it was based on genuine science. But there was so much of it that policymakers were often cowed by the sheer volume of it.
Thus are laws passed and acts acted upon. And many are the bodies of men hauled out of their beds by vigilantes in the middle of the night to be sterilized, or to disappear entirely. And of pregnant women, unmarried and poor, who also disappear entirely. Kill two birds with one stone that way.
What they would not know then, anybody, is that the world’s population has now reached 2 billion people, more than enough to encourage their crying out in alarm.
DAME LADY HERMIA’S RESEARCH ON BRINESTALKERS
Brinestalker, the son of Jeshua, is a big child, as he was a big baby, and then he is a tall youngster, a tall teenager, soon a tall young man. He is always the tallest in his class, the tallest among those his age, who cannot be called his friends because he does not appear to have friends and he does not appear to want them. His father, Jeshua (there does not appear to be a mother), pays little attention to his only son, whom he says he had while much too young; there are only twelve years or so between them. The son appears to like himself the best, which is perhaps a good thing because there’s no one else around to like him, including his father, traveling as much as he does for his eugenics concerns. The son appears perfectly happy by himself. The ranch does have other young boys and girls, but they are the children of the worker cowboys, and his father’s offhanded, almost dismissive treatment of them indicates clearly that they are not good enough. He dislikes his first name, Nehemiah, and so from the age of twelve until his death he calls himself only by his last name. Brinestalker he now is.
When he is thirteen, Brinestalker murders his first young man, Owen Rivera, who is his own age and very effeminate. His father has quoted the president as giving him permission to get rid of trash. He chokes the boy to death out in the wilderness where he has ridden him on his horse. They have had sex in distant Trocadero, far from the Brinestalker Ranch. “He made me sick, he was such a sissy. Why can’t I find boys to do it with who are not such sissies? I am a man! I only want to do it with other men!” He keeps notes on all of this, as he does until he dies. From this time on he wants to do something about what he believes men should be. Does he have hopes and ambitions, the son? He does know, as he realizes when he has choked to death his fourth or fifth sissy after they have had sex in the wilderness, that he cannot go on doing this to every young person he has sex with who he thinks is a sissy. There appear to be too many of them and besides he will get caught, not that anyone appeared to claim their sons. In fact, he senses that he’s doing them a favor, getting rid of what they don’t know how to get rid of but would like to. He must find masculine men. He will believe all his life that somehow, perhaps by divine intervention, he saved himself from an awful fate when he came to “my senses” and stopped actually killing the kids. He felt better about himself then, even though his father often instructed him: “Do not be fooled by a belief in the future. Remember Horace. ‘To be forewarned
is to be forearmed.’”
Horace! That is very touching. I was not shown that touching addition to our joint notes when they were redacted for my perusal. Mr. Carpe Diem Seize the Day Horace. Mr. Most Virtuous Man in the Ancient World Horace. Mr. I Owe It All to My Wonderful Father Horace. Quintus Horatius Flaccus was his real name, which of course he used while we do not. Jeshua as a classicist? Poo.
I bring up this issue. Why is all this being related in such a leisurely, nay gossipy, fashion! How long does it take to cut to the chase, as you people say! A plague is growing in our backyard! Why don’t you include right now that Jeshua Brinestalker was a perverse freelance spy, for Germany, for Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, the Baltic states, for all those cold harsh countries nervous about The American People, which many northern countries are. He was planted in this country with his newborn son years earlier, probably around the turn of the century, when he was no more than fifteen, and that the wife you casually ignore was, like Benjamin Franklin’s, a perfectly fine woman who was robbed of her son and left where found, in this case some small town in Germany, and never seen again, and that Hubby, once he got to America, proceeded, out there in the wilderness, to “eugenicide” one by one every woman he ever brought there to sleep with, and he was insatiable. They are still, one hundred years later, digging up newly discovered bodies on the Brinestalker Ranch. Where are your notes that would speed the narration of this horrid tragedy along while you keep clip-clopping around without a plan of action? At this rate we shall never get to The Underlying Condition! Great-Uncle Silas insisted that one flaunt the knowledge one acquires, and I am proud to show off my Brinestalker discoveries.
It is this father who will funnel all of this eugenics information to the young Hitler! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? Hitler will be most impressed by what he learns from his friends in America, chief among them Henry Ford, who probably financed all the land acquired for those damned horses on the Brinestalker Ranch, a cover if ever there was one. God knows what kinds of experiments were being performed on those women before Daddy murdered them. Now can we get our asses in gear, as you Americans also say? These repulsive gentlemen, the killer father and his killer son, with their peculiarly repellent name, are not worthy of a quote from my beloved Horace!
Did you seek out the most estimable Ianthe Adams Strode, who knew Brinestalkers père et fils and was an attendee at Mrs. Harriman’s, proudly antagonistic in the face of so much opposition?
If we are all going to work together on this we are going to have to get our ducks in order. You do know the world has a way of ending before it begins!
OVER THERE
World War I is a waste of time and lives. “The most futile slaughter in the history of warfare,” says the historian S. J. Taylor in Stalin’s Apologist. “It was generally agreed that the press’s performance during the war had amounted to one of the most thoroughgoing cover-up jobs in the history of wartime coverage.” Millions die. Little is accomplished. Little is learned. There is no interruption in the back-and-forth flow of nasty secrets, illicit desires and schemes, bald and bold determinations to do ill. It doesn’t get us anywhere, this war, and it doesn’t help anybody. Time just stands still for the longest while, during it and after it. It is about a lot of foreigners who hate each other and can’t get it out of their system without dragging in the whole neighborhood, which just happens to be much of the “civilized” world. Many who got us into it look really stupid. Enough powerful people manage to employ enough “reputable” historians to write it their way and get them out of the mess with clean hands. The Brits are the dumbest. The Germans, no fools, are the best manipulators in all of history, and know how to play everyone else royally, as they will do yet again in only a few years’ time. Nothing that happens during the First World War, the 14–18 War, the Great War as the British still love to call it (Great for whom? Great for what?), makes the world a better place. (But then what war could?) Hate, as it shows itself during this war, is not the true hate that’s just down the road. Right now it is only enmity, to be followed in a few years by a most disillusioning and well-deserved Great Depression, which is what we love to call it. Who wouldn’t be depressed by and after this stupid, useless war?
In a trenchant article in The New Gotham, subtitled “Historians rethink the war to end all wars,” its correspondent Adam Gopnik says among many other things that World War I “was an utter and futile massacre … that indicted the entire civilization that followed it,” “meaningless horror … not worth the fight.”
Eight million lives were lost.
Seven million days of active duty were lost by the military to sexually transmitted diseases.
In his most pertinent closing indictment, perhaps against all the historians over the years who have “normalized” this war to make it sound worthwhile, Gopnik writes, “It requires a determined mental effort to recall that what happened was not an entry on a tally sheet but the violent death of a human being, loved and cared for by a mother and father, and full of hope and possibility, torn apart by lead balls or shreds of sharp metal, his intestines hanging open, or his mouth coughing blood, in a last paroxysm of pain and fear. And then to recall that any justification for a war has to be a justification for this reality.”
The First World War, the Great War, can in no way be justified. Perhaps the only “positive” note that might be entered on the ledger is that it kept the Germans busy enough, for a while, to stop their forward march in partnership with America to killing the world eugenically.
Your Roving Historian points out that for the first time American homosexuals who are in the fighting forces overseas experience the freedom of enjoying each other. It is as if, in leaving home and all that, they are set free. There’s no one to stop them from that “on-the-job training” (as the Army will come to call it in its enlistment propaganda by World War II), “where our fighting men learn by doing.” You bet. If it meant risking your life to get laid at last, well, since the beginning, life’s been a crapshoot for hushmarkeds, hasn’t it? When Philip Jerusalem, who will father Daniel and David and Lucas and Stephen, hits France for the war’s last year, he can’t believe it. No man could. Even for a shy man, it’s a movable feast. Whether they were homosexuals or not, sex was everywhere—in the barracks, in the streets—and with everyone and first come first served and all that sort of thing. In this case, when the end of the world feels definitely closer than it does in Oshkosh or even Manhattan, what’s the expression? “Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.” For the first time Philip likes getting fucked. Amos was never as gentle and loving as all the warriors wandering the Paris streets looking for love. He almost doesn’t want to go home. He has no idea what he’ll do. Here he knows what to do, and is doing it.
* * *
It was certainly a waste of my time. I tried my best to suck up their poisons into my poison and spew them back, everywhere from Flanders Field to the Maginot Line. Couldn’t do it. This war was a major disappointment. I had to travel so far to come back with so little. Why aren’t I infecting more of them? Is it me? Am I doing something wrong? It’s just that they were being mowed down so fast!
A TOUCH OF FLU
“Twenty million people died during the flu pandemic of 1918. That figure is still used in classrooms and textbooks, but as John M. Barry tells us in The Great Influenza, it’s certainly too low. Modern experts say that 20 million may have died in India alone, and they calculate the total number of victims at somewhere between 50 million and 100 million worldwide” (The New York Truth Book Review, March 2004). It reached America last, where an estimated 25 million people, a quarter of the population, contracted the disease, some half a million fatally. On October 1, 2005, the Truth pinned the worldwide figure down a bit more: “the 1918 pandemic of Spanish flu … killed 2.6 percent of those who got sick, or about 40 million people.” Among those it took were people we’ve already met, albert briefly: Mrs. DeWitt Waldschein, the enthusiastic e
ugenics crusader from Milwaukee; seventeen young men working on the Brinestalker Ranch; Noramae Petrie, who worked at the ritual baths for the Orthodox Jewish women in Washington; and two social workers—Edna Squats, now working in the Midwest, and Rose McPherson Reddicher, just settled in on Park Avenue from Staten Island. President Woodrow Wilson wondered why NITS “let us down; it must not happen again.” His implication, which he spelled out to his wife, the stalwart Grace, was “If they could all live through it, why couldn’t we do better than we did?” Instead of increasing the NITS budget, he saw to it that they were penalized for their “less than stellar record,” as he quietly told another new NITS chief, Dr. Alden McDonald, who promptly handed in his resignation, telling the Monument, “If that’s the kind of faith our president is going to display toward us, I thought it best to quit while I was ahead.”
Velma Dimly, also in The New York Truth (this newspaper dauntless in getting “facts” on record even after Walter Lippmann’s eventual exposure of extreme ineptitude in this paper’s history, see below), will write in March 2006, “It was the worst infectious disease epidemic ever, killing more Americans in just a few months than died in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. The virus arrived at even the most improbable places, like isolated Alaskan villages. In one such village, 178 of its 396 residents died during one week in November, after a mailman arrived by dog sled, delivering the virus along with the mail.” The flu “struck the United States and parts of Europe hard and traveled to every corner of the world except Australia and some remote islands. A few months later, it vanished, burning itself out after infecting nearly everyone who could be infected … [particularly] young adults in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.”