The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Almost everyone who had stayed at home is employed, which means that when Johnny comes marching home he has a tough time of it. His job’s taken or gone. He wants to go back to where he left off but he lost his virginity at Pearl Harbor.

  In the postwar euphoria, journalists and historians don’t notice much amiss, except for a few of the more prescient, like Lippmann and the Alsops and the Blisses, and of course you, dear Ianthe. I’ve been reading your occasional columns in the Monument from those days, and I was particularly moved by the one about “the sorrow abroad in the land,” so Churchillian, gently acknowledging those like Daniel’s cousin Barry, who came back without a leg or an arm to find their jobs, or their wives, or the girlfriends they dreamed of on Wake Island or Normandy Beach gone with the wind.

  But for many, no bad weather’s in sight. No one thinks winter is coming. Is there anything more comforting than a president named Harry? Churches are full of people thanking God for everything. People are being grateful all over the place. Archbishop Sheeney is dropping in on more masses than ever to check up on all his boys. Rabbi Chesterfield’s radio program is now carried on more national stations. A rabbi broadcasting coast-to-coast on CBS! Let’s talk about progress. A Professor Volblade at Notre Dame devises the Serena, a method of calculating just how happy people are, using various measurements that will “usher in” new “disciplines” such as advertising and public relations. According to Professor Volblade, everybody’s happy because Serena says so. Who can dispute Serena? Since unhappy people haven’t learned how to speak out yet, unhappy mouths stay shut.

  Also largely unnoticed at this moment is that Washington is a hotbed of homosexuality. Single men are everywhere. Did they flunk their physicals so they wouldn’t be sent overseas? Did they go over in the closet and come back out of it? They won’t go unnoticed for very long, though. According to Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer in their 1951 bestseller, Washington Confidential, in the chapter “Garden of Pansies,” “The Washington Vice Squad had listed 5200 known deviates.” Dr. Ben Karpon, the psychiatrist at St. Purdah’s Hospital, believes they are in the tens of thousands. Dr. Kinsey wasn’t appalled by the 6,000 “swishes” in government jobs. According to Washington Confidential, 56,787 federal workers are congenital homosexuals. This includes 21 congressmen and 192 others that are bad behavior risks.

  So if you’re wondering where your semi-boy is tonight, he’s probably in Washington. The good people shook their heads in disbelief at the revelation that over 90 twisted twerps in trousers had been swished out of the state department. Fly commentators seized on it for gags about fags, whimsy with overtones of Kinsey and the odor of lavender. These 6000 homosexuals on the government payroll comprise only a fraction of the total of their kind in the city.

  One of the few who does notice, and long before Lait and Mortimer give their official “Heads Up” to this issue, is Senator O’Trackey Vurd (a Republican from Arizona), a pleasant-faced young “conscientious objector” whose heart is not so smooth as his saintly milk-white skin, which makes you wonder if the fellow ever has to shave. Fearful that he’s the only heterosexual man left in Washington who walks around DuPont Circle at night, he almost singlehandedly sees to it that the Office of Unnatural Acts is given more money to play with itself, that said new office be declared a “department” instead of an “office” (bigger budget this way), and that said new department be renamed the Tally Department, which of course was its original name, which excited little interest. Senator Vurd is eager for its return to that state of overt anonymous invincibility, all of which he is able to now accomplish legally under Section 21A of the Official Wartime Powers Act (still in existence and will be until—are you ready for this?—2011), which is entitled “How to Deal with Those Men on the Home Front Unfit for Active Duty Due to Social Misinformation,” which of course is the parent to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” bullshit that Boy Vertle will foist upon the Armed Services in 1993. Vurd is a high-ranking Disciple of Lovejoy (and serves on its Dominion Council of Elders), a covert homosexual (covert is the same as closeted), an alcoholic, a wife abuser three times over, an abusive father of eight children, a pederast, an embezzler from that Dominion Council of which he’s treasurer, on the take from sixty-two Arizona corporations and twenty-seven out-of-state ones, a three-time senator, and an evil man. Yes, you could get away with almost anything, particularly in any and all western states. Lait and Mortimer were not writing about Vurd, nor were Lippmann, the Phippses, or the Alsops. Corruption as a complete and utter way of life has yet to have its Gibbon, its Thucydides, etc. Vurd and many others will get away with similar lives and lies.

  Senator Vurd is joined in vociferous lobbying by Senator Joseph McCarthy, his buddy, and also of course by J. Edgar Hoover, another advocate for healthy living, all three of whom will be “discovered” after their deaths to have been pretty socially and solidly misinformed themselves. Eurora von Lutz is now riding a larger tiger with bigger teeth; it’s too bad she’s lost hers, as well as her life, in a simply dreadful automobile accident on the East-West Highway; the woman has simply been driving too long, thus paving the way for the Tally Department to be up for grabs. Brinestalker is offered the job but turns it down. “I don’t want to be so fenced in,” “Don’t Fence Me In” being a Cole Porter hit sung by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. Vurd is no doubt aided in his search for more and more fellow travelers by the mimeographed “anonymous” exposé mysteriously handed out in all government cafeterias reporting on “unimpeachable authority” that there are more than 75,000 fairies in “our” government “according to the late ‘beloved’ Eurora von Lutz.” Vurd and Brinestalker decide to leave the Tally Department leaderless for the moment. Eurorah’s well-trained minions can still do the work.

  Almost overnight more and more new agencies are created to take care of more and more new problems. The Animal Experimentation for the Post-War Effort League (AEPWEL), the Anti-Animal Experimentation for the Post-War Effort League (AAEPWEL), the Hadema Adonai Schwartz Clinical Wing for Severed Limbs (at Isidore Schmuck), the Nelson Punic Foster Home for Abandoned White Children, the Office for Aid to New War Widows (OANWW), the Agency for the Preservation of the Sanctity of Home and Marriage (POSHAM)—if ever a bureaucracy growing with the speed of lightning can be said to be exerting itself real hard to come out of the womb, it’s Washington attempting to look after various public thorns in its postwar ass.

  Yes, the war is over.

  Some figures are just in from Eugen Kogon in his 1947 pioneering report on this subject, The Theory and Practice of Hell (to be verified by Frank Rector in his 1981 The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals): During the twelve years of Nazi rule, nearly 500,000 men and women were convicted in Germany for being homosexual. The majority wound up in concentration camps and virtually all of them perished. And German homosexuals, should they have survived, remain silent after the war because being a homosexual is against the law. (In 2008, Professor William Percy at the University of Massachusetts will present evidence that “one million homosexuals somehow disappeared during the Holocaust.”)

  And while we are throwing around some grotesque numbers, try this one: “During 998 press conferences over the course of his twelve years in office, FDR never sent a word of warning” to Hitler and Germany about Hitler’s mass murders, which he’d promised many he would do. (Thanks to Laurel Leff and to Rafael Medoff at the Wyman Institute.) Such a monstrously inhumane disdain for the persecution of some of his people will be repeated by Peter Ruester in his utter disregard for The Underlying Condition and its sufferers, and its potential sufferers.

  History certainly requires a lot of history before you can say out loud you’re not wanted.

  DON’T FORGET TO TAKE YOUR DRIDGIES

  It’s been a slippery thing, Greeting Pharmaceuticals. It’s been plain old Dridge, it’s been Dridge-Meekly, it’s been Uriah-Dridge (I think I missed out on that one), it’s been British Dridge, it’s been BaxxterDridge, it’s been GreetingBaxxter
Dridge, and after that it became what it is at this moment, Greeting Pharmaceuticals. During the two world wars, it was not enough of a player in any market big enough to cause big boards to notice. None of Greeting’s pharmaceuticals was useful to the troops. No antibiotic, no anti-anything. Greeting was so useless as a supplier that its executives were drafted. Now that peacetime’s back, the only item of value in its portfolio of nostrums and elixirs and balms, all remnants from an earlier era of medicine men hawking “cures” from portable valises set up in traveling carnival shows, will turn out to be what’s been simply and innocently listed in their catalogue for ages as the Dridge Ampule.

  Why is Fred harping so on the Dridge Ampule? Because it will be one of the most important participants in the plague of The Underlying Condition, as Dr. Rebby Itsenfelder will warn all along. The one certainly helped contribute to the other. Sit tight. As one of the greatest of gay Broadway composers will warn us, “Something’s coming!”

  The Dridge Ampule is the current incarnation of several hundred years of searching for the perfect aphrodisiac. We had whiffs of it from Dr. Hogarth Hooker, the Drs. Punic, young Lucid Hooker, the lovers Horatio Dridge and Clarence Meekly, Doc Rebbish, and … has anyone been left out? These have snowballed, as the years marched on, into something that will shortly knock all jocks off. Many hands have tinkered. New cooks constantly revise the latest recipe. This is indeed how most drugs are developed. It’s difficult to assign credit though many have claimed it, do claim it, and will claim it (until the drug becomes so embarrassing on UC’s playing fields that attempts will be made to hide it from view). The formula—Dr. Sister Grace’s discovery of Vel had a great deal to do with it all metamorphosing into the current “product,” which lasts a little longer (so important in an aphrodisiac), leading her to claim its current patent—has been marketed successfully for almost a century as a “cure for those vapors that come upon a perfectly happy afternoon to cloud the sky of blue.” (It did not cure Grace’s mismitosial fits, which she thought it might, which was why she got involved with it in the first place.) The Dridge Ampule helps old people revive themselves, having been much used by maiden ladies with a propensity to fainting, or with hearts no longer young and gay but desirous of being both. Ladies, just pinch the little glass bauble in its little silk stocking until it breaks and hold it under your nose and heartily sniff. Don’t you feel young and wonderful again? With all kinds of unnameable tinglings in your equally unnameable nether-regioned body parts.

  Yes, history does require a lot of history.

  DANIEL, AT HOME

  David won’t speak to us. He’s completely silent. He disappears from Masturbov Gardens for days at a time and returns and won’t say where he’s spent the nights or slept or bathed. After a while I wonder if he’s come back just to punish us. His silent presence is a constant accusation. To be honest, it’s been so long since I’ve seen him that I’ve lost any sense of personal blame for his disappearance.

  Mostly I’m struck by how much we still look alike and yet how different we must be inside. I don’t understand his silence but Rivka says he’s shell-shocked and we just have to wait for him to come out of it. Mrs. Blood Bank has had so much experience in this field that in the face of the obvious fact that one of her sons is acting catatonic, she confidently proclaims, as always, “everything will be all right.”

  So David’s back. He sleeps in his old bed across from mine. He looks at my body and I look at his. He’s much more blatant in his observations, open and without embarrassment, and once he’s registered whatever he’s looking at he gets into his bed and goes to sleep. The pattern of hair on his chest matches mine precisely. He has a lot of marks and scars on his body, particularly his back. I want to touch them but he won’t let me.

  “Why won’t you talk to me?” No response. “It’s amazing how our bodies are still so much alike,” I try again. I give up.

  No, I don’t. Nothing would silence me now. Not now.

  I stand naked by his bedside, by his sleeping head. “Look at me,” I say, so close that he must feel me practically on top of him. “Did it scare you when your body started to grow hair? I got scared. Did it scare you when your penis got hard? I got scared. Do you want to hear what Uncle Hyman did to me?” I keep thinking that each confession will open his eyes and he’ll look at me. I suddenly wonder if I’m jealous. Silence has a way of making things dramatic. He’s been having a wonderful time all these years and he hasn’t had to live with Rivka and Philip.

  David is asleep now, breathing deeply, as if he’s in some dreamland even further away from me. I reach out and run my fingers millimeters above his scarred skin. The marks seem of several kinds—lacerations, burns, stitches, welts. No, he couldn’t have been having a wonderful time. Should I run and get Rivka? Look, Mommy, look what’s happened to David. I’m overcome with pity for him. I shake him until he finally opens his eyes and looks at me. Yes, he looks up at me, but he still doesn’t speak. Can he possibly be half of me anymore, this David whom I haven’t seen since I was six and now we’re seventeen? I start to cry. He’s still looking at me. He gets up and puts his arm around me and puts me in my bed and pulls the covers up to my chin. Then he goes back to his own bed and turns his face to the wall, and soon enough he’s left me again. I have awful dreams and when I wake up he’s gone.

  DAVID, AT HOME

  I want to punish them. Something started under this roof, with this family. You know how people are always saying these days, “He’s a survivor”? I hate that word. As if some decide to survive and some don’t. It has nothing to do with will. It has nothing to do with anything but luck. All around me boys just like me were getting killed like flies. Better-looking boys, boys with bigger penises, boys forced to do more than I would to stay alive, like give guards blow jobs or let themselves be fucked. Once, I was standing in line next to a kid who was making faces at a guard behind his back and I did exactly the same thing, and the kid got sliced to pieces like a steak on a carving board. The blood’s the same color.

  I’m back and I’m doing my best to scare my family to death. I’m thin as a rail, which to a Jewish mother means I’m unhealthy and haven’t eaten properly since I left home. Rivka loads down the table with piles of food, “your favorites,” as if either of us could remember what they were. She slaps any hand that reaches out. “It’s for David! Let him choose first!” This annoys Philip. If anyone’s going to play the martyr, it should be him.

  He corners me in the toilet after a few days. I’m peeing and he claps his hand over my mouth. He spits out his questions. “Why has it taken you so long to get in touch with me? Why aren’t you talking? Why won’t you speak to me?”

  He removes his hand as if to release the answers. I flush the toilet. “How is Mr. Standing?” I ask, without waiting for an answer.

  I wonder how much he’s told Rivka. Everything? Nothing? Maybe they’ve worked out some story that lets them live with themselves. She must know something. How could she not after all these years? Maybe they never expected me to come back. Now, that’s a thought. Rivka never once asks me about where I’ve been.

  Lucas and Stephen are away at college. It would be hard for me to stand up to their questions. It’s hard enough with Daniel. When I look at him I still can see myself.

  DANIEL, NOT AT HOME

  All I am is selfish, trying to get him to look at me and say hi, I’m back, I missed you, I still love you. Why should he say any of that? I haven’t said it to him. I didn’t miss him. I barely thought of him after a while.

  I walk the streets at night after I finish at the Jew Tank. The women still believe they can save people. I like being with them. The war is over and they don’t have a very good record of finding loved ones but they don’t give up. I have after-school jobs too, ushering at Constitution Hall, where I can hear all the concerts, and working at a record store. I like staying downtown. Anything so I don’t have to go home. I want to see him. I don’t want to see him. He’s there. He’s no
t there. Sometimes I walk so long that it’s too late to go home because there aren’t any buses after midnight. I go back to the Jew Tank Quonset hut and sleep on a beat-up sofa and go to school in the morning from there. I go to a Washington high school now. Lucas made me transfer. He says I won’t get into Yaddah from the crummy school in Franeeda County.

  The papers and the radio are filled with Senator Vurd this and Senator Vurd that. He’s naming names every minute. The names he’s naming used to be Communists, but now he thinks everyone in the entire government is a homosexual. I read in the Monument that Senator Vurd has 112 men fired for being homosexual. There’s an editorial agreeing that such people should not be employed in “sensitive” jobs. I’ve known what a homosexual is since Uncle Hyman’s reading class, but something different is involved now. It’s no longer being with Mordy way out in the bushes past Masturbov Gardens. Now it’s a sensitive job that gets you fired. What is a sensitive job? Does Philip have one? What was he doing with his friend in Berlin? Was it homosexual? Whatever it was, it certainly made Rivka angry. Senator Vurd is now sending men into hiding. There’s a story about a man who changed his name and was still found and fired from a job that wasn’t sensitive-sounding at all, selling insurance door-to-door. A man down the street from us in Masturbov Gardens kills himself because Senator Vurd names him in the Monument. He has a wife and five kids, so now I’m not sure I know what a homosexual is. Now it seems to mean seeing your name in the newspaper and killing yourself. At Constitution Hall, they wouldn’t let Marian Anderson sing. There’s a picture in the Monument of Senator Vurd with his two handsome associates, Sam Sport and Louis Blick. Why do you all hate me? I ask the photograph. Is David homosexual too? Did whatever happened to him happen because of that? Why don’t I just ask him? I decide I will, but he’s gone again.