by Larry Kramer
You know, his personal diaries were never found, Jimmy’s. He wrote in them every day. I remember a number of times when he excused himself “to go and write my history,” as he would laughingly say. My friend Pippy Phipps, who worked at Unnatural Acts (and who, it turned out, was married to a fairy herself, “that’s why I work here” she told me, “to protect him, my own husband”), believes Jimmy jumped because he was afraid he was about to be what you now call “outed.” She’d modeled in Florida for a time, and the male models said Jimmy had a gorgeous boyfriend in Coconut Grove and helped put him through college. There was even a rumor that Jimmy was murdered by a Jewish terrorist from the Irgun who pushed him out the window. He was a very decent, loyal, honest public servant, of which there are few anymore. And he and my Edwin had been guy friends. My, my.
It was still a number of years before Sumner Welles died, also mysteriously, in 1961. I don’t wish to bracket either of these two fine gentlemen (who were said to suffer from paranoia, with good reason) with Edgar Hoover and Sam Sport, and, yes, Richard Nixon (Bebe Rebozo was much more than Nixon’s guy friend for forty-four years, let me just squeeze in here: Why does no one ever notice this?) and James Jesus Angleton of the OSS/CIA (he was a real biggie—someone should nail him as well), who all fit a pattern of repressed homosexuality and paranoia. Serving one’s country is no easy task for closeted fairies.
But back to Brinestalker. Why was a fairy going on so enthusiastically about how many fairies he’d located? Before long Edwin was deep in his depression, so I could no longer count on the benefit of his mind. Being in Berlin hadn’t done him any good. He knew about the camps, and Franklin did not want to know about them, or anyone else to know about them. And it turned out that Franklin was just as big a shit about fairies as he was about Jews. He knew Edgar Hoover was a fairy and was up to no good about fairies, and many other things as well, and that was just fine with him. And because Hoover knew it was fine with Franklin, he felt free to expand his activities. He was a major monster sprouting there in front of my eyes and, like seeing Brinestalker in Berlin, even Hitler, Ianthe just was not on the ball. I couldn’t have done much about it, especially with Edwin about to be bedded down, but I have my mouth, which in its own way was becoming better known. I’m grateful, Fred, for this chance to what my mother used to call “churn my butter.”
You know how some people of phenomenal historic importance manage to get through everything, including posterity, clean as a whistle, despite their hideous deeds? Well, that’s Brinestalker, mark my words. How did he get hold of those names in the first place? Why, through IBM, of course. IBM had the same sort of setup here, with those same Hollerith machines and punch cards and lists, endless lists, many from the Office of Unnatural Acts, run by Eurora von Lutz, the other Lutz sister, with the help of that strange Arnold Botts and various additional Hoover appointees. Was Hoover our Hitler? Did he really say, as Brinestalker claimed to me, “these particular sex lives are of vital national interest and must be committed to a list”? Harry Truman claimed to not even know what a fairy was, if you can believe it. I don’t. You can’t work in a haberdashery in the sticks without knowing what a fairy is. Shit, Edwin told me that where he grew up in Altoona it was a well-known fact that fairies went to the local haberdashery on Saturday afternoons to meet each other and try clothes on and jerk each other off in the fitting rooms, or get a blow job from one of the salesmen. How could young Harry have missed out on that? Edwin didn’t.
Yes, Hoover was our Hitler too. It may seem ironic that a fairy did so much to exterminate his own. Our Fred gets very upset whenever he hears about such a thing. “But he’s killing his brothers!” he rails in sincere perplexity. What he refuses to see is this: Why should Hoover have been nice to “his own” when he was monstrous to everyone? That impressive gay playwright Tony Kushner has written to Fred, “I don’t think of me and Hoover belonging to anything shared no matter how much dick we each sucked.”
To this day IBM’s wartime files are sealed, if they haven’t been destroyed altogether, and it is only thanks to the remarkable scholarship by my friend Edwin Black that the ghastly history of this company is known. His book IBM and the Holocaust kept me up nights, and I longed to discuss it with my Edwin, but as you know his depression turned into his slitting his wrists turned into my burying him. I’ve felt very alone without him, and been grateful for your friendship and your work, my dear Hermia, and for our Fred, who has helped me keep my what is now called liberal mind alive by encouraging me, listening to me, and most important, believing me. It sounds as if he’s having a little breakdown of his own. He’ll come out of it, I know.
That day in the hospital—Brinestalker managed to get in to see Edwin that way—he delivered a diatribe about homosexuals that I shall never forget. “The homosexual population is the axis around which the wheel of world history revolves. Homosexuals in America are now coming into a position where they will undermine our way of life. Too much of our culture will be built on their worldview. I saw this in Berlin before the war, and in London and Paris and Budapest and Prague and Vienna, and even in Russia, where Stalin was getting older and sloppier. I see it now in Washington, now that I’m back. New York and San Francisco are sewers. The homosexual spirit seems to survive every physical assault on the homosexual body. The war may be freeing them up to creep into the open, but it’s time to expunge this evil spirit from the soul of our country once and for all before we’re poisoned beyond repair!” No, I’m not quoting from memory. I am reading from one of many flyers he hurls around Washington like confetti.
Edwin and I listened in openmouthed shock, and then Edwin looked Brinestalker straight in the eye and said, “Get out,” in a tone of such moral authority that Brinestalker turned on his heel and left.
“Expunge!” Edwin said. “God help us.”
My Edwin killed himself by the next morning.
DR. SISTER GRACE IS ON TO SOMETHING!
Shitty ass rat fuck!
You can imagine my buzzer when I read in The New England Journal of Feces that the important work begun by Dr. Flo Hung Nu was threatened by a cessation of all feces delivery. Then I read an article in The New England Journal of Digestion by a young woman at Isidore Schmuck whose research led her to an establishment on the Gulf Coast of Florida, the Table Family Hotel, situated on “unusual” alluvial deposits of human waste. “It is old shit,” this Dr. Nesta Trout wrote (they even allowed the word shit; what is scientific research coming to!), “historic shit, dating from the Civil War, and it is full of verts and gligs.” Verts and gligs! It’s not a joke! That is what they used to call shit then. But since I now had shit from the North, that good old trusty Hooker shit, and Dr. Trout’s analysis of that prehistoric shit from the South, my stump was twitching.
Fuckheads beware!
Dr. Nesta Trout is a protégée of mine. Chary though I always am of doling out praise to associates for work I’ve initiated myself—it’s not for nothing they call me the Queen of Shit—I publicly congratulated Trout on her discovery of this old shit, which, amusingly, surprised everyone, unaccustomed as all are to a word of praise coming from yours truly. Nesta’s article had my stump twitching in a number of ways. The little cunt was on to something although she obviously didn’t know what. I had an idea, a good idea, A GREAT IDEA!—one that needed testing of a highly confidential nature, but my instincts told me it was out there, just waiting for Dr. Sister Grace to pluck it.
Fred, I note that you have taken offense at dear Hermia, and even me, your dearest Grace. I guess it was overdue, the stress, I mean, not its inconsiderateness. I would slap you around if you were anywhere in my shitty vicinity. You simply must be made of fucking sterner fucking stuff to fight this fucking fight. Get over it. You are needed.
BACK
I was taken from Germany back to America. I don’t know how it was arranged. A man with a pilot’s cap came to UFA and took me from Amos to a nearby field that had been leveled by the bombing. He put us in
a small plane and we rose up into the air and flew over the remains of this tortured city. Before I knew it I was asleep. I was so tired. It did occur to me that for the first time I might have more hope than fear. I don’t think I had ever faced how frightened I have been all these years. It felt good to let that go. If that was what was happening.
When I was there I would count the days since I came to Mungel, but after a while I stopped. So I don’t know how long I was there. It was a long time. I don’t know how many of the boys I’d started with at Mungel remain alive. I had seen or heard or smelled most of them put to death. I’d had no friends since Pieter. Except for Klaus. My Mungel story begins with one and ends with the other. No one talked to me because after the beginning I was rarely done to. The tests were on others. I still have no understanding of why I’m alive. I will always have nightmares of penises being chopped off and intestines being scooped out and instruments being inserted into the bodies of my companions. Is it a relief, now, to have the freedom to think of anything?
I know a lot has been written about Dr. Mengele and his experiments on twins. People always want to know about Dr. Mengele. He only wanted to work on twins. He would do something to one twin and something else to the other. Grodzo did this at our camp too. As Daniel wasn’t there, Dr. Mengele wasn’t interested in me, despite Grodzo’s believing me that I was a twin. Dr. Mengele slept with me one night when he was visiting Grodzo. “I cannot sleep without a youngster beside me. Usually I am able to have a young girl, but this Mungel is only males. It is very kind of Dr. Grodzo to, as it were, lend you to me.” He crawled into my bed and kissed me good night and put his arm around me and went to sleep. He felt and smelled just like any other man.
Dr. Mengele walked around our little house stark naked from the moment he arrived, stretching his arms lazily. He asked me to be naked too. He asked me to open my mouth. “Ah, you Americans have such good teeth,” he said approvingly. “How do you manage to achieve it for so many people?” We ate our dinner naked, the three of us, even though we were served by one of the camp’s young men. I kept waiting for our visitor to make a physical advance. He didn’t try to fuck me, which I expected him to. Even guards were always fucking everyone all over the place. I had to watch him operate a number of times. Grodzo would hold my hand. He and Mengele would smile or frown in disappointment, depending on the outcome of the surgery. I had no idea what they were trying to do.
My nightmares started only when I returned home, if I can call America home. I was back in America only days when I realized how hard it had been to not be afraid for so long, how much energy that took that I wasn’t aware of, and which now fell from my shoulders to be replaced by nightmares. Amos would tell me at Partekla that I had nothing to be afraid of. “Then why am I afraid?” I asked each time. I am afraid that I am still afraid.
When I wake up on that small plane, it’s flying toward the mountains. In every direction there’s nothing but snow. We must be at the North Pole. We’re crossing a desert of snow and ice. The sun is so blinding I have to close my eyes again.
When I open them we’re sputtering down. I don’t know why, since there appears to be nothing here but snow and ice. The pilot lands and motions for me to get out. I jump from the door as he takes off and leaves me in the middle of nowhere.
The same thing happens three more times. A total of four small planes fly me from one icy wilderness to another. Or maybe there are more planes. It all takes many days and nights. The flying is always bumpy, the night flying particularly frightening. I don’t know how much I sleep and how much I’m awake. I’m given sandwiches and soup. Perhaps there was something in the soup. The pilots are all middle-aged men who don’t talk very much, not that we could hear each other for the noise. I think each speaks a different language as we cross the globe, but I’m not certain. I do know that none of them ever smiles.
Another plane deposits me and leaves me in another icy wilderness. I’m freezing in seconds. I run just to keep warm. There is no indication that one direction is better than another. I keep looking at the sky for another plane to appear, but it doesn’t. Still, that there is so much sunshine gives me a small sense of hope, just as through all the awfulness of many years I clutched some hope. Sometimes people press me. What’s your story? And I answer, I’m sick of my story, tell me yours. I try to find stories that are worse, as if that might help me. I haven’t found one yet.
I keep running through the desert of snow. There is a house in the distance that I see. It seems to be waiting for me. I’m tired and cold and my eyes hurt from the glare. It seems like a nice place. It’s made of logs and there’s smoke coming out of the chimney. When a man opens the door and says hello and invites me inside I realize I haven’t heard English spoken, or spoken it myself, for many years except for those few words with Amos Standing. It’s a comfortable house inside but I wonder why it’s far away from everywhere. I ask him where we are and he doesn’t tell me. Instead he hands me a bottle of whiskey and tells me to drink and get warm. I manage to get a little down. I ask him for some food and he starts complaining angrily about being cheated out of several hundred dollars’ worth of something that a Mr. Dridge was meant to send him to sell. He swallows from the bottle and it’s not long before he’s drunk. He stands up and holds his clenched fists out to box with me. I run around him, trying to make it look like a game, but he’s determined to have a fight. When I won’t fight back he picks me up and throws me down a flight of stairs. I land on a cold cement floor. I hear him roaring with laughter as he slams the door and locks it. I’m in darkness.
A candle is lit and a woman’s voice says, “Don’t mind Joe. He gets like this. You must be the lad he was meant to meet and take to Partekla. He’s a-frightened of that place. We all are. More people live around here in this godforsaken wildnerness than you think. We all work at the Greeting factory, except now they’ve stopped production. There’s to be a big rally of protest tonight.”
“Where are we?” I ask this person overflowing with such information.
“Idaho.”
“Idaho?”
“Have you never heard of it? We are in the northern narrow part near to Canada, and near a town named Coeur d’Alene that’s very beautiful in the summer, short though that is. It is called Partekla. Many crazy and dissatisfied people come here to live. I married one of those. You can hate America easier up here. You can not pay your taxes and they don’t come after you. You can shoot people you don’t like and no one cares. All these lands around here—Oregon and Washington and Montana and Wyoming—are filled with crazies. They meet all the time. You’ll see. Whatever you’re here for. What are you here for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then you’ll have a lot of friends.”
“Do you have to stay down here a lot?”
“I been down here since night before last, I think it must’ve been. He’s not been feeling his best. He does bring me my tea, though. Once he even kissed me right here on this floor. You can’t think ill of a man who could do that, can you? At least I’m his only wife.”
After several hours Joe comes down and drags us both up to the daylight. “Make us some eggs, Iris,” he growls, and then he sits me down, slamming the whiskey and a pot of coffee in front of me, and commands me to drink.
Why do I obey his order? Why have I obeyed everybody’s wishes? I didn’t have to go away with Philip. I didn’t have to become Dr. Grodzo’s special friend; there were boys who refused him and they were allowed to live. He called them nützlich. Useful. I guess nothing ever seems too awful to me. I always figure it can be worse.
I drink like Joe said. I puke, on the table, on the chair, into the fireplace. Each time I vomit he makes me drink more. “Only way to get over it.” He mixes the whiskey in the coffee, which makes it go down easier, though not for long. Iris comes in with hard-boiled eggs and salad as I’m vomiting again. “A nice plate of salad will do you a world of good.”
Joe puts on his clothing fo
r outside. “It’s time to go.” He piles me into his car. Evidently Iris isn’t coming. It’s dark outside now, and very cold. We drive off into the night.
Joe drives too fast on the ice and we skid a lot. I try to get him to talk. Eventually we reach a fenced encampment hung with a lit-up banner announcing “We demand fair wages for our labor.” People are rushing to get inside the gates, what looks like hundreds of them. There are buses and cars parked in the snow. Most of the people are men.
The crowd is moving in the direction of a huge black building. There must be five hundred people inside, listening to speeches that have already started, screaming their approval, all of them as drunk as Joe. I’m smelly and messy from vomiting, and I still feel sick. Everyone is weaving back and forth, trying not to fall down. The stench in the place is awful. People would be in the middle of a sentence when they would suddenly throw up. Then they’d take another guzzle from the bottle clutched in every hand.
From the speeches and the drunken conversation I learn there’s been a hijacking. Several thousand dollars’ worth of something called Dridge Ampules have been stolen somewhere. Because of the war, there hasn’t been a steady supply of them. Salesmen get a dollar for each packet of six ampules they sell. These men depend on the ampules to make a living. “We would go over to Spokane and down to Missoula and even Anaconda to sell them,” I hear someone say on the loudspeaker. “Now we stay home and get drunk. I’m sick of getting drunk.” Tonight the manufacturer is making things up to them. They had stopped production with the hijacking but now they would start up again come Monday. A man tries to give Joe a tiny glass tube in a case of white silk, but he slips in a mess of vomit on the floor. When the people near him see that he’s dropped the ampule, they dive into the mess after it. A fat woman finds it. She grabs a man and breaks the thing and sticks it in the man’s nose and then her own. In a matter of seconds he’s ripping off her skirt and she’s grabbing his pants. People crowd around screaming and yelling and cheering them on while he fucks her. Now I know what a Dridge Ampule is and can see what a popular product it is.