The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  * * *

  I’m being left out in the cold and I don’t like it. Everybody and his mother and brother is making up part of this history. OK, here is part of mine that is useful to Greeting in this time of blame.

  A twenty-eight-year-old male is admitted to the Baptist and Jesus Memorial Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, with a diagnosis of pneumonia. Various tests are administered, as is the current prescribed treatment for pneumonia, Ventt-easy. The fever subsides and the abnormal markers bounce back to normal. The patient is discharged.

  He had not been a soldier or served in the war or been overseas. He was ineligible for the draft because of bad eyesight. He was unmarried and lived with his widowed mother. He had spent his entire life in Memphis, working as a gardener. He dies within the month, covered in purple scabs.

  He never took Dridgies.

  FROM MY HISTORY OF EVIL

  Who would care even if it were to be discovered what’s transpiring? In addition to goodies from Mungel, trunksful from the German-Dutch-Belgian-Japanese foray into “germ warfare” are in this pipeline. It’s amazing how such disparate nations manage to collaborate so adroitly. Why, among a certain set it’s as if there’s no enemy, as if research is all. Even the Japanese wanted in on anything to do with germ warfare, and they found a way to do so, even if it meant actually collaborating with countries with which they’re still at war! There seemed to be no enemies among this group of determined investigators into the life of poisons.

  Experienced German scientists are worth a lot of money in certain American markets before the war begins. There are books and exposés galore on the German infiltration of America before, during, and after the war, but they’re kiddie stuff compared to what’s actually going on.

  “Concentration camps are the laboratories where changes in human nature are tested” is a much-quoted statement from these times. David heard it uttered by Grodzo at Mungel. In this country it’s attributed to Aalvaar Heidrich, in what’s become a highly regarded textbook in his field, The Study of Prisons. “There is nothing wrong with concentration camps. They are very useful and perfectly logical. They do just what their name suggests: concentrate. Everyone’s life concentrates on one thing or another.” Aalvaar Heidrich was sent over to America in the 1920s to infiltrate. Sent by whom? How did he wind up looking after Mercy Hooker? Did his own sexual needs (or theirs? whose?) determine his attachment to her?

  “Homosexuals are useful because they can be infected and allowed to die. Since their sperm will never play any part in procreation, no one is in fact killed,” Heidrich also wrote. In fact, homosexuals are far more useful than Jews in wartime, and soon peacetime. There will be money in dead homosexuals, or more precisely phrased, in homosexuals whose demise no one will care about. Who wants them? Or any of this information?

  Aalvaar Heidrich is one of those who believed Germany was going to win the war and take over the world, so why not get started early with no small amount of American help? Help from American companies working in and with Germany, such as Ford and National City Bank and Chase and Standard Oil and DuPont and Alcoa and Dow and IBM and on and on, including Greeting. Many are represented by that most “eminent” of New York law firms, Sullivan and Cromwell. J. Edgar Hoover, like Roosevelt, does not object to the participation of the private sector in the war effort. One talks of Hoover as if he were president, with so much power. He does have this much power. Over the years little by little he learns how to just … take it.

  DRESS REHEARSAL FOR THE GREEK WING

  We are lined up naked in a big gymnasium, bigger than we had at high school in Davenport. The blond young men are all together. I’m dark. I have a hairy chest and so does everyone else, including the blond men. There isn’t a hairless man here!

  There’s no question that we’re all homosexual. We’re all around eighteen or so, no more than twenty. Some of us are having problems controlling erections in the midst of so many good-looking naked men. We’ve been told not to talk to each other, but there are no guards to stop us. Slowly we move up to the beginning of the line, where men in white coats measure us and weigh and photograph us from head to toe in front and back. The longer we wait in line, the more we are drawn to each other, touching familiarly, smiling, clapping each other on the shoulder, laughing at our erections. When we get to the front of the line, even the doctor laughs. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with you boys!”

  We are taken to an auditorium, still naked, where Mr. Brinestalker addresses us. Standing beside him is a womanish young man with an almost hairless body.

  Mr. Brinestalker talks to the young man in his commanding voice. “Warren, listen to me. We do not accept your effeminacy. God made you a man. Being a man is special. Do you understand what I am saying to you? If you do not you will be sent away. If you do not become a man here you are useless to us.”

  The young man breaks down. He waves his arms and flutters his hands and starts to cry.

  Mr. Brinestalker turns to face all of us. “You see! This is what I mean. See how this youngster flaps his wrists and acts like a woman! Why, his body is even hairless like a woman’s. When he lies on his back to let you screw him, I guarantee he will act like a woman. Perhaps he thinks he is one.

  “The Kursie Foundation has invited you here to become Greek Warriors. You will learn what this means and how fortunate you are to be chosen to be one. Greek Warriors reject effeminacy. Greek Warriors live the truth that one man can love another man without any surrender of either man’s masculinity and without turning into a pseudo-woman. You are going to learn a new and different message about yourself and what you can be and should be. And you are going to be sent out into the world to teach our people that message!”

  He speaks with such conviction and urgency that we all stand up and give the old man a rousing cheer. Our erections are gone now. I don’t think anyone here has ever thought of himself as such a special person. We have never talked about sex so openly or heard it talked about so publicly.

  He summons two of the blonds up to the platform, on which there is a bed.

  “I invite you to lie down side by side, to touch each other, to run your hands across each other, to enjoy each other.” Naturally the two of them are embarrassed. “Tell me your names.” Dano and Julian. “Dano, kiss Julian’s nipples. Do you know what nipples are?” There is giggling in the audience. “Take your tongue and lick his nipples. Remember how they taste. Kiss him. Julian, kiss Dano. Take his penis in your hand and play with yours.” On the wall is now projected a film of two young men on a bed, hairy-chested young men with enormous penises that they are rubbing against each other’s hairy chest. Clearly they’re having fun, laughing as they roll around. One of them plays now with his partner’s pubic hair, twisting it playfully around a finger, then jumping on the bed so his cock waves up and down, his hand on it as it gets harder and harder, and then they shoot, the penises in the grainy black-and-white film and the penises on the platform.

  We’re happy! None of us here is accustomed to being happy. We have had no information about our sexual desires. We have not been able to find explanations for why we feel the way we do for other men. Life has been mixed with fear, uncertainty, and stupidity. How did they find so many of us who are like this? I do remember answering an awful lot of personal questions at my interview and Mr. Brinestalker making marks on cards.

  “Note that they have kissed each other as two men!” Mr. Brinestalker commands. “Note that they have not engaged in anal penetration, taboo in every known culture from ancient Egypt and Greece and Rome to the book of Leviticus to the present day!”

  Taboo is a term new to most of us, and so is anal penetration, though I’m sure a lot of us have done it, and it was probably messy and painful, so it’s easy enough to dispense with if that’s what Mr. Brinestalker wants. Clearly he’s a decent and caring man who wishes us the best.

  “Are you ready to reject anal penetration? Are you ready to reject effeminacy?” he shouts from
the platform.

  “Yes!” we shout back, and throw ourselves into each other’s arms. All of us in the audience are now with someone else, with several others. “Kiss each other as man to man!” Many of us are country boys from small towns. We are the sons of mothers and fathers who do not want to see us again.

  I’m going to Yaddah in the fall. A rich man in Davenport is sending me there. He is a homosexual but he leaves me alone.

  WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?

  I know you are back in America. What have you done with him now? I’ll be damned if I’ll shut up, should it come to that, without clearing my name, at least with my wife, who still hardly talks to me.

  Please return my son forthwith. I am not going to come to get him. You would never let me return alive.

  IANTHE ADAMS STRODE REPLIES TO DAME LADY HERMIA BLEDD-WRENCH’S INQUIRY

  Ah, yes, my dear Hermia, Brinestalker. The strange man without a first name. We met in Berlin just before we entered the war. He looked like he was no picnic, like he belonged in a Bierkeller with a hundred other men just like him chugging from huge tankards and singing those revolting songs with their insidious tunes you couldn’t get out of your head. Big fellow, funny protuberant ears, brutish and frightening when he was all dressed up in his black leather overalls and those clumpy boots men wear when they want to look German.

  It was my Edwin who introduced me to him, at an embassy party. He was with Amos Standing, my old pal from bridge classes in Chevy Chase, who was working in the Berlin film industry. They both escorted buxom peroxide blond beauties they said were being “groomed” for stardom. The Krauts love their babes like this. The minute I saw them standing side by side ignoring the babes I should have known they were fairies. Berlin was filled with fairies. (I am sorry but I cannot bring myself to call them homosexuals, which I think is not nearly so friendly as fairies.) They gave the city life. Brinestalker talked so rapturously about this new machine and what they were learning with it and how there were really more people in some groups than the census takers were tallying. Fairies, for one. And Jews, of course. Hitler had ordered the census takers to up the numbers of both Jews and fairies no matter how people answered the questions. He was telling me all this. Lots of Jews carted off to the camps weren’t Jews at all. Minna Trooble from our Jew Tank actually met the daughters of a gentile couple who’d been exterminated in this way. It started her looking for others, and she found a number of them here in Washington alone. They’re still frightened. After all these years there are gentile Germans who are still frightened. Minna told me they’d say things like, “We’re not that far away from Germany, you know. Airplanes fly every day. They will punish us for leaving Germany. They have eyes and ears everywhere. My cousin was kidnapped and never seen again.”

  I didn’t put two and two together when we were stationed in Berlin. Smart I was, but still one naïve tootsie. I would dance all night with a mob of men in leather and think, My God, these men are sexy. And when it came near dawn and they were all dancing with each other, I just told myself, Hey, that’s what they do in Berlin. Even Hitler came once in a while and did a funny jig that made everybody laugh. (I’ve since wondered about Hitler. His being a fairy too would cause no end of interest, wouldn’t it?) Edwin would work all night at the embassy and we’d meet for breakfast. That’s when Berlin was fun. That’s when Edwin was fun. Shit, that’s when Hitler was fun. He joined us for breakfast a few times. Who fucking knew? I like to say I did, in fact I have said it, but I really didn’t. I sensed things. I sensed he was strange as all get-out, and then I went and danced until dawn. I didn’t figure it out about Amos until I saw him here in Washington with Brinestalker. And there was a third man, well dressed but short and stubby, who turned out to be Daniel’s father! He didn’t look too happy to be on whatever voyage they were on together—for they were definitely a threesome. By then I had better antennae. They sort of hung on to each other without actually hanging on to each other, or knowing that this is noticeable because they are trying so hard not to show anything.

  I don’t know what Amos did over there in Berlin, or does in the State Department now—oh, I asked him of course, but I got a nebulous answer which I knew wasn’t true. I didn’t think much about it. Spies were all over the place now. I didn’t know then about the Ivy Lee–Hitler PR gig. Imagine having Hitler for a client! And I.G. Farben. And that big movie studio, whatever it was called. UFA. Too bad Ivy died in 1934 (the year Edwin was sent to Prague, so we missed his funeral; we knew Ivy; everyone knew Ivy), before anyone could get to him. Amos, it turns out, was in charge of the Ivy Lee German office, this Hitler account, including the movie studio, and Hitler kept him on almost through the end of the war. Edwin had been called home long before. The Ivy Lee organization went on into the ’60s. There must be people who worked there who could still talk, maybe even Amos, if he’s still around. And Brinestalker, too, of course. He told me all of this on Carlotta’s lawn; Brinestalker never stopped talking about himself.

  Anyway, Brinestalker collected the names of all the men being exempted from the draft because they were fairies. I mean American men. He had their names and addresses. And he talked about this list of his. There were a lot of these names, he said, almost gleefully. He wanted me to tell Edwin, who was not returning calls (which is another story). Brinestalker had already brought his list to Breckenridge Winesap, that monster of Franklin’s who kept any Jews out of America. I wondered if Jews were yesterday’s slug of hemlock, with Brinestalker regaling so forthrightly that fairies were tomorrow’s. Once Franklin, in the height of all that Sumner Welles mess, actually asked my opinion about what he should do about “these people.” He actually said something like, “Ianthe, I believe you move in a more free and liberal set than I do and no doubt know a number of people like … these people. I feel uncomfortable with … these people. I was very upset about Sumner when … Cordell threatened and … I had to let Sumner go.” I told him to leave these people alone. They were already in enough unhappiness. “I suspect you are correct,” he said, which made me impetuously give him a little peck of a kiss. He never knew how to handle that!

  Breckenridge Winesap, well, Charlie Higham said this about him in his American Swastika book: “No record is blacker in World War II than Winesap’s.” That is strong stuff, particularly in this particular history. Brecky was in charge of the Visa Division and he left half a million places open on the quota list while Jews died in the camps. All that shit-on-a-smile he was handing us at the Jew Tank! He was also Mussolini’s big buddy. How did he get away with all of this, and while working for Franklin?

  Brinestalker will try to peddle his wares to Truman next. I know this because of a hideous personal connection to this part of this perverse story. I’m going to tell it to you now, although it’s too early; but we both could be dead before I can unload.

  Edwin and I were driving to Franeeda Naval Hospital to see Jimmy Forrestal, who was there recovering from a nervous breakdown he’d had after having been sliced to bits by Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell. They were the two most famous muckrakers—liberal, they were called, hah!—of that era and Jimmy had been a noble secretary of the Navy and defense for Truman. He was against the establishing of the state of Israel. He foresaw that it would cause nothing but warfare in the Middle East forever. That’s why he was being carved to bits. Truman gave in to all the pressure and Israel was born and Jimmy was out of a job. He was very handsome and a true workaholic, so much so that his two boys never saw him, nor did his wife, who took to booze. Edwin and he had worked together, of course, here and there. I had made a load of cookies and we were driving out Wisconsin Avenue when a bulletin came on the radio that Jimmy had committed suicide by jumping out his window. Sick as he was from his breakdown, they’d put him in a suite on the highest floor, I think it was sixteen or seventeen. No one could ever make that one out. He’d been treated by Menninger himself, the great shrink of the day, who said he warned the Navy doctor to watch out. Edwin al
most drove us into a tree. I had to grab the wheel and maneuver us to the side of the road. Edwin was not a crier but he was bawling. In fact, I don’t think I’d ever seen him cry. Well, he was an ocean of tears and shudders and moans and I held him in my arms trying to comfort him. He finally stopped. Then he looked out into space and told me that he and Jimmy had been lovers when they first came to Washington. They were both very handsome men. And they saw each other over the years, even when we were in Berlin. And his own breakdown, my Edwin’s, started when they broke up, which, come to think of it, was about this same time that Brinestalker was complaining that Edwin wasn’t accepting his calls.

  I can remember that car scene as if it were yesterday. “Oh, it wasn’t too regular,” Edwin said, “but it was enough to keep our warmth and affection going, and yes, Ianthe, our love, and get us to our next meeting, which was never easy to arrange for two such busy guys.” I’d never heard him use the word guy before. Then he told me the rest of it.

  Truman had called him into a meeting. There was Brinestalker, trying to peddle his list of American fairies, “to protect your country, our country, my country from becoming a nation of perverts!” Truman was holding a piece of paper, one of the pages of Brinestalker’s wad. At the top of this page, headed “Prominent Homosexuals in Our Government” or some such, were Edwin’s name and Jimmy’s name. After that day in the car at the side of the road listening to the radio, Edwin’s breakdown started. Truman asked Edwin if he was ready to retire, and he really wasn’t. Poor dear man wouldn’t know what to do with himself all day long.