The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

THE HUSHMARKED SOCIETY

  The Hushmarked Society is officially established in Los Angeles, or rather in Pacific Oranges, a small village twenty-seven miles to the north, on January 8, 1938. Five men are its founders, only one of whom remains with it after its first harrowing year, during which all five of them are arrested several dozen times. The lone stalwart’s name is Virgil Vindicator, which of course is not his real name, nor, as we have seen, is he the first to carry it.

  The beginning of an official and organized homosexual movement in America is currently dated from this event at this moment in time, though there have been numerous earlier events that might quite as correctly claim the honor. Such being the vicissitudes of homosexual history and its record keeping, it’s the Hushmarked Society that now wears the mantle. It won’t last long.

  Not much is ever known about this Virgil. He writes a lot of pamphlets and he hides behind a long beard and in front of a ponytail. He always wears dungarees and boots and he chews tobacco. He has a high-pitched voice that diminishes the effect of the wardrobe. People know what he is the minute he says hello. He gets beaten up a lot, particularly when he gives out his pamphlets, which are all about male love. He looks different in different photographs, probably because there are different Virgil Vindicators the way there are different Betty Crockers, except that the Virgils are different because different men of that name keep getting murdered. And no Bettys are known to have been murdered.

  One or two gay histories list this Virgil Vindicator of 1938 as “the true founder of the American homophile movement,” which is what it’s called for a while. Homophile is just another ugly word for homosexual, itself not particularly sonorous. Throughout history homosexuals have had bad luck with what to call them.

  PETER IS INTRODUCED TO ADOLF

  In 1939, twenty-eight-year-old Peter Ruester becomes fascinated by Adolf Hitler and the methods that have taken him from obscurity to growing notice, even among a few in America. Ruester, soon to become an important Hollywood union leader, wonders how this was accomplished, how an unknown bumbler becomes a national leader, a man of whom people are frightened. Who is this man? How does he create this fear that he is hearing about from a few of his Jewish friends? Ruester comes across remarks by Werner Walter Willikens, secretary of the American-Prussian Ministry of Friendship, made to his fellow members in 1934.

  “It is not always possible to wait for orders from the top. Too many bureaucrats are unable to obtain decisions from an all-powerful but absent chief. It was discovered quite by accident that if the workers are deliberately set in competition with each other, each would struggle to fulfill the chief’s desires, unspoken though they might actually be, and it soon becomes the duty of every person to attempt, in the spirit of the chief, to work toward him.”

  This will be elucidated more clearly in coming years by the British sociologist Zygmunnt Bauman and the British historian Ian Kershaw. This process of “working toward the Fuhrer” becomes the leitmotif to explain, during the entire grisly era beginning, the mass obedience a willing German society shows to its new Fuhrer as the Third Reich progresses.

  Before Hitler, bureaucrats usually reined in politicians. But under this new, Nazi system of government, ambitious bureaucrats in no time flat begin to fall over themselves to be even more ruthlessly radical than their boss. Launching spies and counterspies against each other seems to be the trick. And pretending you never knew anything or ordered anything at all. Get them all to spy on each other! And to turn each other in! Naming names is always All, or at least a wonderful place to start.

  “That is what we feel the Fuhrer desires whether he has actually voiced it or not.” Functionaries of all kinds in defense of their actions make this statement, in various versions, when the time comes for them to explain themselves.

  “I have been sent here again to talk to you, my Deutsche Brethren in America, and bring you the news that you need no longer be ashamed of your homeland, which perhaps you left too early. Our new Fuhrer has commenced a methodology that will reunite us and give us back the world.” So sayeth this Werner Walter Willikens.

  Peter Ruester, long before he will need any of it, or really comprehend it, senses that “methodology” will become useful to him sometime, somewhere.

  HANDS ACROSS THE OCEAN

  Since the Great Depression, more and more is smelling really awful. Too much of the air blowing through the world is foul and curdling. Who smells it? Where does the stink waft from? Why is it vague and faceless? Well, we do know where it wafts from. And it isn’t vague and faceless if you have the kind of eyes that can see.

  The first homosexual prisoners were taken to Dachau starting on July 7, 1934. Edwin Black tells us that in Germany, in 1937, according to IBM’s man in charge, one Brinestalker, the production of punch cards for the Hollerith machine totals 74 million per month, production of horizontal scanners would double from 15 to 30 a month, tabulating machines would increase from 18 to 20 per month, multiplying punches would double from 5 to 10 a month, and counters from 200 to 250 a month, and that by 1939 Germany is covered by 750,000 census takers to use all this.

  By May 1939 virtually every Jew and homosexual in Germany has been located, registered, numbered, surveyed, and sorted. Each can now be located on a moment’s notice.

  “At the height of the Third Reich, IBM was leasing, servicing, and upgrading two thousand sorting machines across Germany and thousands more across Nazi-occupied Europe, and manufacturing 1.5 billion custom punch cards each year in Germany alone” (Brad Thor, Black List, 2012).

  By September, World War II has begun. The ovens are on the drawing boards.

  Yes, the American eugenics program is being appropriated in Germany.

  Brinestalker is in Berlin, in charge of IBM’s European markets.

  Yes, this is still the history of The American People.

  * * *

  Adolf Hitler did not have sex with his roommate from art school, August Kubizek, in 1909, even though Gustl, as August was called, clearly desired it. He idolized Adolf and knew he would go far. But August was shy. He did, however, warm Adolf up for someone else. They lived in a bohemian rooming house where many of the inhabitants were homosexual. Gustl and Adolf of necessity slept in the same bed, and warming up Adolf meant just that. It was a cold room and Adolf was not interested in Gustl’s body although he was interested in Gustl’s friend, one Josef Neumann, a dark and handsome young Jewish art dealer, who bought several of Adolf’s watercolors. They disappeared, the two of them, Adolf and Josef, in Vienna, for the five-day period June 21–26, 1909. Hitler was then twenty, without that mustache, and not bad-looking at all. When Hitler reappeared he was a changed man. And Josef Neumann was never heard of or from again.

  According to one of Hitler’s major biographers, John Toland, these five days are the only days in Adolf’s entire lifetime that are completely unaccounted for. Toland, in a personal conversation with YRH in 1974, confessed to “not disbelieving” the “possibility” that Hitler was or had been a homosexual.

  In the summer of 1934, Hitler disposed of Ernst Röhm, who had been his friend and a top officer. He was also a raging homosexual queen. Shortly thereafter a terrified man comes to America. His name is Joe Newman, and he goes to live, first, in Milwaukee. He travels over as much of the country as he can gobble up, riding freight trains, hitching rides, learning English along the way. Because he is handsome, he discovers his body can feed him. Many a man who picks up a hitchhiker is willing to pay for a meal or two, and often more. Joe is not greedy or sinister. He wants love like everyone else he meets.

  It is important to him to keep on the move. He can be a hobo or a dishwasher or clean libraries or clean anything. Just don’t expect him to stay put in one place. Because of his accent, the law eventually catches up with him: war is approaching, posters are everywhere warning everyone to beware of the person next to him, and he is “offered internment.” In one of a growing number of internment camps (inhabitants are shuffled a
round in case they form dangerous alliances) he meets many Germans, including another immigrant, Henry Gerber, a budding homosexual rights activist who attempts to give Joe a better sense of himself, and to try to keep him from shaking so much when he hears anyone speak German. “Can’t you see how lucky we are to be in a camp,” Henry says to him in German; “we get three square meals a day.” Joe’s terror has of course returned in these camps: What if another German recognizes him from the old days? Hitler is now Reichschancellor, the Führer. Joe has never forgotten Adolf’s lustful bragging that “I am going to rule Germany,” and the streak of terror that swept over him. Adolf has now been capturing and exterminating homosexuals. Joe reasons quite understandably that the one person Hitler does not want alive is a man who has had sex with him. Names of homosexual friends in Germany who have disappeared reach Joe. Soon his fear becomes so overpowering that it’s difficult for him to get a sentence out without shaking and stuttering. So marked is his behavior that it is not long before he is indeed recognized by a fellow inmate, who informs the camp’s director, an assimilated German American, of his suspicions. “The man was Adolf Hitler’s boyfriend.” Rather quickly Joe Newman is disappeared from the camp.

  In 1937, in the first part of a three-part profile of Adolf Hitler in The New Gotham, Janet Flanner (a lesbian) will write, “In spite of the worldwide rumors to the contrary, there seems no reason to believe that Herr Hitler is homosexual, outside of the fact that, until he finally had most of them shot, there were pederasts among his Party friends and file. But in Europe, where, as one of the frantic postwar phenomena common to capital cities of both the Allies and the Central Powers, homosexuality paraded in all walks of life, that is not sufficient reason to substantiate the charge. There is a rumor that Hitler was wounded genitally in the war. Whatever the cause, his real abnormality apparently consists of the insignificance of his sexual impulse, probably further deadened by wilful asceticism. Emotionally, Hitler belongs to the dangerous, small class of sublimators from which fanatics are frequently drawn.”

  * * *

  The three-nun shit fucking freaked me out. There is no answer to the many fucked-out questions it raises. The “official” numbers of UC cases are said to be pig-ass males. But in nuns—that is, women pledged to celibacy—in what way did the fucking virus (I am the only one bold enough to call a fucking virus a fucking virus out loud) participate in its transmission? My class-act nose smells something and is twitching to tell me so.

  I am bored. I have been prized to death for my various discoveries. It is not that I can think of nothing Superwoman to do. But these are all minor-league out-of-town white-trash time killers not up to my par. When I know going in that I am already better than any result I can suck from what I am engaged in, I am not frigging, rat-fucking interested. I am hugely rich (doesn’t that sound like a prissy pussy) from Hooker shit and Vel, my poison detector, which Greeting markets desultorily. Money is not a motivating force for this Sister to get up off her fat ass and waddle forward. Sir Henry, his stiff upper lip more encased as he ages in a turgid personality akin to cement, implores me to change sides and hop over to his shitty side of the fence. He said to me, “In my humble opinion some of these ideas on your list look to me to be possible reapers of interesting returns.” He was talking about a facial skin cream I dreamed up that peeled off dead turdy skin and refreshed the complexion with the smile of beauty and the glow of health. Sir Henry has discovered advertising can sell his roster of wretchednesses. Greeting has no major product or lifesaver. The Dridge Ampule is what keeps them up and at ’em, but they can hardly sell these to soldiers. He has nothing for Greeting to market during this coming war. “It makes me feel rather unpatriotic,” he uncharacteristically announces.

  Mother Superior has already turned down my request to use Mater Nostra’s girls for researching my nose twitches. “I think, dear Grace, that you’d best seek out women who live more varied and active lives.” Then she added, holding my hand, “Stay with us, dear. Stay close to home.”

  Fred and Ianthe and, yes, Hermia, I have followed with vivid interest all of your contributions, many of them good and gutsy. None of them quite ring my bell. It isn’t so much that Fred has logorrhea, as it is that science is less interested in history than all of you are. But you are evidently writing a very long and involved mystery story, and I do like mysteries. But I prefer them when they involve spies.

  So I went off and made the skin cream and Henry marketed it with Mr. Walter J. Thompson and it has made me an additional fortune and I can’t recall what we named it. A piece of cake. A fucking piece of fucking cake. As Mother Superior then said, “Next.”

  Dear friends, send in your shit-spitting spies!

  MASTURBOV GARDENS

  AN AMERICAN BOYHOOD

  OK, Fred, here goes.

  I was born on the wrong side of the District Line. The District Line is what separates Maryland from Washington, D.C., which is as far away as the poor are from the rich. D.C. means District of Columbia, whatever Columbia means. Everyone knows that “The District” is another name for Washington, which is over there. Across that line. It’s just a line on a map, but it’s very real when you live on the wrong side of it. Nobody wants to live on the outside looking in. Washington may be a sleepy little town on the other side, but it’s Washington and it is the capital of America and that makes it a bunch of things that Franeeda County isn’t. Even buses didn’t cross over until they had to. Until Claudia’s father bought both lines and put them together, Maryland and Washington had separate bus lines. You had to get off at the end of the line in Washington and change to another bus to take you home. Washington cabdrivers used to say, “It costs extra over the District Line.” I was born in the still-smoldering embers of that Depression, from which The American People were told to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again. I was born in Masturbov Gardens, in the town of Punic, in Franeeda County, Maryland. Washington is divided into four quarters and Punic is like leftover intestine from the Northeast quadrant.

  The building of Masturbov Gardens begins in the mid-1930s when few have the money for even the low rent it costs to live here. Abe Masturbov worries he’s committed one of his rare errors of business judgment. He impatiently awaits the housing shortage that he alone is expecting and that has found him, in preparation, ordering new brick tributaries to flow over this hill and that. This place is some kind of dream come true for him. Lucas says this is because Abe proves himself right again. Tenants are moving in and he’s building faster. No sooner are families living in what was only a hole the week before than another hole is dug for us to play in. We play constantly in these excavations. With such a canvas for our imaginations, we kids, and there are soon enough of us for me to be part of a gang, create new games, of hiding, of domination, of inspection, of capture and victory. New families arrive every day. New playmates to love and hate. Everyone’s background is as modest as my family’s. Poor is not a word anyone uses, even if it applies. But where we are living now is new, and there’s a sense in the air that there’s beginning to be work, and hope, for all.

  When asked about his youngest days, Lincoln curtly answered, “It is a great piece of folly to make anything out of my early life.” When pressed for a more definitive answer, he said his entire youth could be condensed into one line from Gray’s “Elegy”: “‘the short and simple annals of the poor.’ That’s my life, and that’s all you or anyone can make of it.” He was asked if that meant he had been unhappy. “It is not easy to be both poor and happy,” he replied. “Why does everyone always want to know if someone is happy? Is it that rare—happiness—that a person who claims it is like a talisman others need touch for good luck? Yes, I suspect it is.” I know you’ve researched Lincoln, Fred.

  There was a battle here, in Masturbov Gardens, on a hill so low and little that a battle on it of any size and importance seems unimaginable. The hill was called Fort Drue, and it was down the street from where we lived. Th
e battle was part of the Civil War. Not much happened, no one was killed, no victory was claimed. Evidently a bunch of lost, straggling Union troops found themselves commingling with lost Confederates. Maryland was a no-man’s-land then, between Pennsylvania and Virginia. Abe Masturbov, who knew little American history and cared less about it, nevertheless put up a commemorative marker and refused to dig any holes on this little hill. He said it was an important place, an auspicious place, because neither side attacked the other. The sign still stands, though now it is more elaborate and bears an official government seal. There’s no record in any history of any Fort Drue or of any altercation taking place so far out of the way. Abe, who was the least religious of men, said he had put up the sign so he could kiss it for good luck, like a mezuzah, every time he passed it. “I think he might have made the whole thing up just so he could say he owned some land that Lincoln walked on,” Lucas said. The most violent thing conclusively known to have happened on this hill was the suicides of Grace’s parents. She laughs when she sees the seal.

  Yes, I played constantly in these new excavations of Masturbov Gardens.

  Why, from the very beginning, did I want to be somewhere else instead? How did I know that I have always wanted to be someplace else?

  Masturbov Gardens was and is a vast sprawling warren of two- and three-story apartment buildings snaking over the low hills of northeastern Franeeda County. On the other side of the District Line, in Washington, there’s finally a housing shortage. In Masturbov Gardens there was plenty of room. Here our father, Philip, housed us in a “development” built and owned by our cousin Abraham Masturbov.

  I want to describe Masturbov Gardens by saying it was like an organism, an amoeba slithering under a microscope that’s slightly out of focus, an amoeba sucking all things in its path indiscriminately to its membrane as it ingests their exudations and excretions, every bit of the pus of life. That’s what it seems like now. We all lived in some kind of pus, and we all lived in it together. And we didn’t know it.