The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Hitler by now has invaded Russia. Does anyone in America know that Hitler invaded Russia with more than four million soldiers, the largest invasion in the history of warfare? No wonder the Monument doesn’t report this; it’s difficult enough when Edward R. Murrow broadcasts for CBS from London for many to figure out where such places as “the European theater of war” are located.

  At any rate, in plain English, there is no money for “supererogatory budgetary items,” meaning the Jews, who already want their people rescued and they don’t even know yet whom they’re missing. So pushy, the Jews. So expensive, rescuing them. Homosexuals, who are also missing, of course do not exist, and you cannot rescue people who do not exist, can you? Hence the only thing to do about them is to continue to collect their names, which, as we have seen, a number of you are doing.

  Who has noticed that for the first time an explicit prohibition against homosexuals is inserted into an official government regulation? “The entitlements of the National Abundance Stipulation, and any of its current or future Perdist-Phail-Dridge extensions, shall not apply to those who traffic in hushmarkedry” (Footnote 21987, Appendix G). That this by now archaic word for homosexual is deliberately utilized conveys one thing: someone used it knowing full well it would go unrecognized and unchallenged by the majority of people reading the regulation, if any. If, as has been trumpeted by gay historians, nobody knew who these were, somebody still knows what they are.

  We are conducting a war, aren’t we? Of course we are.

  The American People are at war.

  * * *

  Did you pick up on that name dropped in above, Partekla? Its complexity will overwhelm you.

  The American People build and maintain a secret camp in northern Idaho where members of the armed forces known or discovered to be homosexual or caught in homosexual activity are imprisoned. It is authorized under the Perdist-Phail-Dridge Extension Act 21987, Appendix G.

  Partekla is under the supervision of Dr. Stuartgene Dye.

  It has several sections, each involved in different tasks.

  It is open for business just as the war begins. How thoughtful of someone to take an old tin mine and turn it into such a fortress and just in time. Who in your “killing apparatus” (to use German terminology) has such foresight?

  THE PAST IS A FOREIGN HARBOR

  They meet as freshmen at Yaddah, where they are assigned to live in the same rooms. It’s 1916 and there’s a war on, another war where young people are trying not to pay attention to an outside world that doesn’t pay any attention to them anyway. They bond immediately, evidently recognizing in each other something that each was finding in himself and hadn’t quite known what to do with. Each had puzzled privately with these feelings in a hometown where no one else seemed to notice them either. Philip, of course, is from Washington and Amos Standing is from Cincinnati and Brinestalker is from somewhere between Los Angeles and San Diego.

  “We shall just have to give the world something to make them notice us.”

  Who said that, Amos or Briney? It certainly wasn’t Philip. He was happy not to be noticed, although he didn’t say it. He just smiled his yeses. He hadn’t had friends before. Zilka, it turned out, had saved so diligently her son could make them here.

  Together they see a silent movie about three friends on the battlefield, three handsome German actors more interested in each other than the war, the world, or any woman in it. The movie is an international success, less so in America, of course, but it plays in New Godding. It was made by Studio Babelsberg, the German studio that was to become UFA (which Amos will one day run), and there is some resentment on campus that a German film is even being shown. Our threesome takes to pretending to be one or the other of the leading characters, Heinz or Heinrich or Helmut. They discover they’re good pretenders, a complicated skill to deal with emotionally if they were to think about it. Each can pretend easily as long as the other two are around as an attentive audience. Alone or in twosomes they are left more revealed, with less protection, less pretense, and what is pretending if not camouflage, a safer place to be? Three is their perfect number.

  It isn’t long before they are having sex as a threesome. Yes, they are having sex with each other quite regularly, each unquestioningly accepting the others’ bodies as if it was meant to be. “We weren’t even drunk when we fell into each other’s arms spontaneously at the end of one of our sessions of pretend,” Amos will say later. They claim there is no favoritism of one over another. They all state definitively in letters they exchange when they’re apart that their threesome is historic, like nothing ever before, “a love of equality, each for each, all together as one. Three against the world!” These are Amos’s words. He appears to have been their cheerleader. One marvels that they have fallen into this love so easily and with such celerity (an early indication, should anyone be noticing, of how movies are able to seriously affect lives).

  One wonders what they knew of homosexuality. There must have been similar fellows, even groups, at Yaddah. New Godding has always been a town of feverish sexual activity, of all sorts, going back to colonial days, which history YRH spoke of when we were there several hundred years ago. But wasn’t the world a bit more innocent in the seventeenth century, and its youngsters more naïve, than in 1916? On the other hand, Philip had already seen his father disappear after almost being emasculated with a meat cleaver by his mother. Perhaps what is naïve is to believe that just because the world was once younger it was concomitantly simpler, a stupid mistake historians fall into. We know now that Brinestalker’s father was a murderer. Did the son witness his crimes? Perhaps he did. Or not. He was briefly a child murderer himself. But in the wild west he came from, murder was not unusual.

  Amos has pleasant looks that are set off by the excellent traditional clothing he alone chooses to wear. He believes himself handsome. His family has for many generations been a principal builder of ships and canals and railroads and wealth in Cincinnati. Philip is of medium height, with the stocky frame he will have all his life, and the white skin that makes him look like a sheet when he’s naked. Brinestalker is the most unusual-looking, in that he’s taller by a head, with protruding jug ears positioned unevenly on his skull, and terrible posture that finds him always leaning forward, as if listening for something. It is his awkwardness that makes him attractive. California is a faraway place not many at Yaddah hail from yet, and his father, Jeshua, who is very rich, provides horses for the silent movies now beginning to be filmed on his enormous Brinestalker ranch. This land is said to have been “Coronado land” that once belonged to Spain. Like Briney’s ears and posture, the history of this land, and indeed of his forebears, is a crooked one. Only one thing is for certain: there is an awful lot of acreage, swirling in and out of several counties, all of which at one time or another have claimed it unsuccessfully. Jeshua knows how to fight back.

  Early in the friendship Amos falls in love with Philip alone, so much so that the more Amos blossoms into it, the more confused Philip becomes in his identity. The threesome’s activities originally seemed so carefree: kisses and cuddles at night, with swift ejaculations and then a gentle slumber in each other’s arms, all three jumbled together in sleep. In his growing passion, Amos’s extreme determination to have Philip at his side all the time requires harsher measures if Philip is not obligingly there, so that Philip becomes even more afraid of him, which Amos enjoys. Orders and commands soon fall from Amos’s lips with regularity. Philip obeys quickly, often from fear rather than politeness, and his subservience becomes a habit both pretend to enjoy, particularly when it consummates in an exciting new kind of sex, now only when Brinestalker is away. Amos ties Philip up and Philip finds that this excites him. Then he gets frightened, both of the act and of his excitement. That this all leads Amos years later to actually kidnap Philip’s son in an attempt to pressure Philip back into his arms—well, it is a strange act for the lover who professes such love, which Amos believes sincerely that he does. An
d why does Brinestalker withdraw from active participation in the threesome? How does he abandon an extremely active homosexual life and insist to the other two that he’s not a homosexual anymore?

  By the time of Partekla it will be some thirty years since their Yaddah frolics. Amos is still formulating plans to get Philip where he wants him. He is perhaps the strangest of these three, to hold on to his fantasy for so long, with so little satisfaction, particularly after Germany, after watching Philip not only abandon his son but run away from Amos as well in his growing terror. And then Hitler interferes and even Amos can’t facilitate any movement for the moment, a moment that lasts six, seven, eight years.

  How often did these three see one another between college and their wartime reunion in Berlin, between youth and middle age? More must have been going on than each wished the others to know. Mustn’t it? You would think so. Or to be perverse about it, perhaps less, as with most men in middle age and bored. According to Daniel, Philip was pretty much on view before he went to Germany (or was he?), so one can only assume it was Brinestalker and Amos Standing who kept in touch. But why assume anything? Partekla will be open for business.

  BRINESTALKER’S DEFENSE

  I had long ago begun to find it increasingly unpleasant when I had another man in my arms. Most of them were not men at all. They were silly girls. They got all giddy when they were kissed, and even sillier when the question of who was fucking whom was up for grabs. They either rolled over giggling to indicate there was nothing to discuss, or they put up strong opposition, a fortress not to be breached. I met few homosexual men who were men. After a while it repelled me. Amos and I spent many hours debating the question “What is a man?” I gave up and turned to celibacy. It sickened me that a man could turn into a silly, simpering schoolgirl so fast. Yes, that a big hairy-chested man could become such a fairy now made me ill. In the beginning I would say to them, I only want the hairy-chest part of you if you don’t mind, and they wouldn’t know what I was talking about. Too, I began to have trouble fucking another man up his asshole. I did it to Amos and did it to Philip and they certainly did it to me. But when we left each other to go out into the world, something inside me changed. What we had done together was spontaneous; we were learning from each other and we loved each other. Without that love, sex changed for me. Everyone I met wanted it up their filthy assholes, and that made them women in their own minds. God, how they screamed and groaned. Still, when I think of cocks and holding cocks and rubbing cocks together, I remember the masculinity in the nature of being homosexual that appealed to me in the first place, that hairy-chestedness of it all.

  I was able to come back to America before the war was over because Hoover summoned me. I felt like a bitter middle-aged man who had lost too much time and had too little to show for himself. I had a great deal to make up for. I was looking for something that excited my interest. I was sick of drug companies! I was sick of IBM! I had delivered enough information on both.

  What should a homosexual man be? And how can he be made that way? It seemed as good a new cause for me as any. It was actually Hoover’s idea. He was a remarkable man. He was not only determined to make America safe, but he was open to creative means to change our lives in other ways.

  We have a hundred young men lined up and ready to go. Dr. Dye has said, “Get cracking!”

  DR. STUARTGENE DYE

  Stuartgene is not a graduate of a prestigious medical school. He is a “hick” from the dirt flats of rural Maryland. You’d have to be a “dirt-poor” kid to be named Stuartgene. Dye is another matter. It’s American Indian, from the Pottawattamie Senecks. It doesn’t mean death or to change a shade of color. It means “Unusual Son,” but only Stuartgene knows this. In the outside world everyone hearing it thinks to himself, What a peculiar name. You think he doesn’t know it? Do you think he cares?

  His skin is light tan. He’s of average height and weight. His hair is black and slick. He’s quite good-looking.

  Stuartgene knows how to kill. He can look at all things living and determine the best way to end them, or make it look like they’ve ended themselves, or to bring them back from the almost-dead. It’s an odd gift, but a gift it is. He knows how to string lives out as well, although he much prefers to figure out new and better and more invisible ways to not extend or even delay. Stuartgene knows without question that what he has in mind is not only not immoral but will be blessed, in the end, not only by the Nobel committee, but by his god, the Seneck god of gods, Hymos Eleckro.

  Death is all Dr. Stuartgene Dye is interested in. He has killed from the earliest of ages. Bugs. Rats. Cats. Dogs. Mules. A horse or two. As a boy he was fascinated with finding ways to make them die at differing speeds. A slow death for a cat could be achieved by mixing potassium salts with mondicaridal drops. A fast way to get rid of a horse: three injections of mynth, a wild mountain herb. He voraciously read ancient books wherever he could view or steal them, and stole as well medicaments, herbs, and unguents with greed from drugstores in the bigger towns, all the while working for Doc Rebbish, who wasn’t a doctor but a medicine man, a good one, famous among the many tribes still scattered around the country, living in small towns or sequestered on reservations or just wandering around like gypsies. There are still medicine men wandering the back roads, though they are harder to locate as there are fewer back roads, but you can find them if you really want to. And there are always people who want to. The disenfranchised and the distrustful and the fatally diseased will wander the back roads of the world forever.

  Stuartgene’s parents were wandering gypsies. He was dropped from his mother’s womb in Fairchild, Maryland, and left there, never to see her again, never to know who she was or who his father was. He was brought up more or less by the whole town, a few hundred folks who sheltered him and shunted him to whoever had a spare room. It’s not as bad an upbringing as one might think: people in “the sticks” are generous with food and affection and interest.

  One day when Doc Rebbish came to town, Stuartgene gravitated to him as if pulled by a magnet. (The life stories of so many seminal—there’s that word again—forces in history often begin with the words “one day.”)

  Doc Rebbish was the first person to show him how to kill humans. To put them out of their misery when the misery went too far. People came to him in such pain that they begged to be put to sleep. Doc was pretty good at telling who would snap out of it, but mostly he obliged. When someone wished to die “so bad,” it was a mercy to grant it. These were mighty poor people who got all tuckered out and had had enough. Doc Rebbish tried to impart to this smart kid all the lore from all the tribes to back before Columbus so there’d be continuity in these particular tasks when he himself got too tired. Yes, he taught Stuartgene everything. “You’ll kill me, boy, just when and how I’ll tell you, and then you’ll get the money I’m leaving you to get the fuck out of this dump full of mud and shit and puke and germs and hooey. I’d have gone a long time ago, but what can a half-breed Seneck do in the white man’s world? Nothing but drink himself to death. I’m trying. I’m drinking as hard and fast as I can, but I must have a liver made of steel.” He wrote this “to get it down on paper.”

  When the time came, Stuartgene was seventeen years old, tall and lanky and the heartthrob of every girl in town. Doc Rebbish stumbled into the bedroom they shared in the back of Ferla Peltz’s Deltoid Barbecue, and nodded to Stuartgene. “Get the stuff.” He was doubled over in pain from his gut; a white-man doctor would have diagnosed it as pancreatitis from unknown causes, but Doc knew it was pancreatitis from chewing too much snalfa, the bark of a local tree that everyone knew made you feel too good. Doc knew that eventually snalfa knocked the life out of the liver and the pancreas, worse even than drinking yourself to death.

  Stuartgene must get to medical school. Which is exactly what he does after shooting Doc Rebbish full of “the blue stuff from the locked green trunk” and burying his body out back in the earth by the creek. Also in the green trun
k is a letter bequeathing all of Doc’s money to him, more than $200,000, a mighty amount. Stuartgene has no idea how this man who never seemed to have enough for a hamburger could have amassed so much money. Doc Rebbish’s big thick book of knowledge is in the green trunk, too—cures and possible cures and ideas for combinations and failures that just might work if you tinkered with them. Also, in a thick bundle is a wadge of receipts “for services, goods, and knowledge rendered” to someone called Boris Greeting.

  There aren’t many medical schools that take kids at seventeen, much less kids who haven’t even gone to college, but Stuartgene finds one called Southern Towser, not all that far away, over the hills and into West Virginia. Of course it isn’t accredited, but it teaches the nuts-and-bolts stuff well enough, all in a couple of years. And if you have some extra money Dr. Ishie Ferse, who owns and runs the place, will give you a diploma under the table stating that Dr. Stuartgene Dye has graduated with honors from the Medical School of the University of Florida (or your choice of any large state school where it’s hard to check the records). Stuartgene got another one from the University of Michigan just in case. From there he will answer an ad in the International Journal of Poisons that will take him to Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer and his brain research in Darmstadt, which will develop into the opportunity to study with Mengele at Auschwitz, where Brinestalker will locate him for Partekla.