The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  I ask Velvalee if she would like to sit down, or have some tea, or tell me what she is thinking.

  “What am I thinking? I am thinking that I should like to go and live in a whorehouse where I can get my own back against men by not letting them touch me. Or live in a nunnery except that I could never believe in God. Men are pigs. I feel sorry for every woman. I’d like to help all of us, somehow.”

  AND SO IT GOES

  Bohunk Vernissage, a little-known subsidiary of Greeting Pharmaceuticals, further improves cryoprecipitate, thus making possible the world’s first commercial freeze-dried blood-clotting concentrate for hemophiliacs. It is not heat-treated. Von Greeting knows it is not heat-treated. But it will now be possible to market a product for a growing market fueled by the anger of helpless parents at our government for so long ignoring this condition. It will be called BaxxterDridge Factor VIII. This product will be made from blood pooled from thousands, eventually tens of thousands, of donors.

  AND SO IT GOES …

  Dr. Stuartgene Dye doesn’t like to lie down, so they sit face-to-face.

  “Arnold just watched last night. I invited him to join us. Claudia was strangely passive. She hates Ethan Zimmer. Which makes it more exciting when he’s with us. Although I tied Nellie up. She performed only adequately. It wasn’t good for me. It made me want another woman. Perhaps Jinx. Although this isn’t really Jinx. Plus Claudia watching, of course. I phoned down to Doris but there was no one who would come to me. Doris said she’s trying to cut out ‘all your kind of crap.’ I told her that would put her out of business. Every time she says that I tell her that actualizing fantasies is the most important progressive step she can take and that she should read Sexopolis to keep up with the times. So Nellie receives the brunt of my anger, of course. Does all this shock you? Or have you heard it too many times?”

  “No, it always shocks me,” Korah Ludens answers.

  “Ah, your moralizing tone.”

  “Yes.”

  “At moments like this you wonder why you’ve devoted your life to this. And what has happened to turn our world into such a universe.”

  “You are imagining for me again. We are here to talk about you, not me.”

  “‘I have imagined everything conceivable, but I have certainly not done, and certainly never will, all that I’ve imagined.’ De Sade. I think I know myself inside out by now.”

  “I know you think you do.”

  “Ah. The innuendo.”

  “More specific than innuendo.”

  Korah wants to say, “You have almost killed Nellie several times.” Instead, she listens as he says, “Arnold and I have to finish with Ethan Zimmer.”

  “What are you going to do with Ethan Zimmer?” She should not be asking direct questions.

  “You know I can’t tell you that. You’ll excuse me this slight … repression.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  After a moment, he says, “I’m courting death. I know that. It’s an old Native American tradition. Perhaps it won’t be long in coming.” He looks at his watch. “Our time is up for today. You’re still a wonderful analyst.”

  “You make me feel helpless,” she says, knowing such a thought voiced out loud is not recommended.

  “I merge vengeance with transgression and transform transgression into glory. Another Native American belief.”

  “That is intellectual bullshit!” Another something she should certainly not have said out loud to him.

  He jumps up suddenly, causing Ranger to bark. Stuartgene smiles as he leaves. She sits there, numb. Even when the dog jumps into her lap and she automatically rubs him behind his ears, her eyes can’t focus. Oh, yes, she does know everything about Dr. Stuartgene Dye that any analyst needs to know including the fact that he is high up in dealing with the health of The American People and she is helpless to help him, or, come to think of it, in this case, them.

  * * *

  She goes back to Rivtov, back to her training analyst at Yaddah. She’d been his prize student. He’d also voted to have her thrown out of the society. Some thirty-odd years ago, all of this was. She used to know the dates.

  “Get rid of him. That’s still my advice to you.” He’s now white-haired, his glasses thicker, but still waving his clubfoot as he talks to you, the leg with this clubfoot crossed over his good leg, the clubfoot in its space shoe dangling, misshapen, almost flaunted for inspection by an incumbent patient’s eyes. “You have let yourself become too involved in Dr. Dye’s case, allowing everything to advance too far. He is not a patient with whom you should allow yourself to be affiliated. From the very beginning you must have sensed that. How could you not? You should have realized that there is nothing you can do to help this sort of patient. He is an embarrassment. A danger. An obtusity. I believe I have told you all this before.”

  “Obtuseness,” she corrects him.

  “Dr. Ludens, please get rid of him. Again, you have overstepped the guidelines that we set up long ago for our own protection. You simply always go too far. Did your failure to raise the place of women not convince you of the harsh difficulties, nay impossibility, of changing certain immutable things?”

  She wants to say, “I hate you.” She wearily stands up and looks at him. The argument that comes from her heart and soul is the argument that also came out some thirty-odd years ago when they expelled her, as it has also been the argument upon which she’s based her life.

  “I can only go where the patient takes me,” she says with all the force she can muster. “I cannot stop the direction of his unconscious will. Nor would I want to, even if I knew where it was heading. Isn’t that like a kind of abortion, Reiner Rivtov? I know you are not against abortion.”

  “Now I am for it.”

  “Perhaps that is an inept analogy, then.”

  “It is a sign of the impossible situation you have put yourself in that you so confuse your metaphors that they no longer coincide with your own personal safety.”

  AND SO IT GOES…?

  “What did you say, Mickey?” Fred asks his old friend, Dr. Mickey Marcus. Fred is in New York, in Greenwich Village, in his own apartment overlooking Washington Square and seeking a next outlet for his energies. He’s known Mickey since as a med school student he’d come to meet Fred in London, where they’d tricked. That was years ago but they’ve stayed in touch.

  “It’s in the Journal of Death. Put out by COD. There’s a puzzling appearance of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in gay men. Pewkin at COD told me when I called to request information about the only medicine for it. They have embargoed it for some reason, I can’t imagine why. Aerosolized pentamidine. It’s been around forever. No drug company makes it because there’s no profit in it, it’s so cheap to make.”

  “Do you die from it?” Fred asks.

  “Yes. If left untreated.”

  “What do you think is happening?”

  “I don’t know but I’ll write about it in my health column in The Prick.”

  “Is this the next thing we have to worry about from having so much sex?” He remembers his own bouts with VD, hep. B, amoebas …

  “I can’t say that!”

  “Maybe put in a cautionary note? Be careful.”

  “Pewkin won’t release any of the med. That’s what’s really puzzling.”

  “Be sure and write about that, too.”

  “You’re such a troublemaker! Isn’t writing that novel about us enough to calm you down?”

  “Better safe than sorry, no?”

  “I don’t want to lose my license. Remember I work for the city.”

  DEAR GOVERNOR RUESTER

  I am working on a liquid that when drunk will kill its imbiber in one minute’s time. I plan to take a large supply and pass it out at those secret meetings of the fairies in the Redwoods that I’ve heard about. I hate fairies and I hope you do too. I’m glad you’re running for president so you can start killing them all before it’s too late.

  DAME LADY HERMIA’S HISTO
RY OF EVIL

  It is generous of Fred to include me in his research into what he calls “the real and honest history of our country.” As a truly educated woman in a world that allows us scant attention of any significant nature, I come more and more to acknowledge that we like-mindeds must join together and fight in every way we can. I have looked forward to further installments as the monsters he is so carefully observing move closer to Ground Zero. I continue to be increasingly agog, which is what good history should arouse in one! My own work is not yet nearly “agog” enough!

  Let me enter here this maxim of a brilliant chum, Hannah Arendt, to engrave upon our hearts and minds: “The destruction of a man’s rights is a prerequisite for dominating him entirely.”

  Arendt has of course written about the camps. “The most essential function of camps is their role as major killing centers ‘in the larger terror apparatus.’” Well, your history has described several of America’s early camps in operation. What we have all been rather lackluster in attending to is this query that I now wish to raise: What really is this larger terror apparatus now? Discovering Partekla and researching NITS, I wonder.

  One of the most difficult of tasks is discerning the line that divides evil from other man-made happenings. For me evil requires a certain conscious intentionality. I have decided this will be my yardstick, so to speak, and I shall stick to it as we continue to explore America’s sordid history of this plague.

  The arrival at NITS of one Dr. Jerrold Omicidio has not even been noted. He is sneaky that way. Now you’ll see him, now you won’t. I hope our attempt to unravel and understand his actions shall form a major portion of our history of evil. And of poor Sister Grace, whatever she is so frightened of now.

  “There are many ways to kill people in large numbers,” Omicidio said in his text, Today’s Bible of Infectious Diseases, which will become the largest textbook on this subject ever published. Would Hannah identify and include NITS as one of her major killing centers, one of the world’s largest?

  “WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER! GET USED TO IT!”

  In 1969 a bunch of drag queens fought back like tigers when a parcel of cops raided their bar in Greenwich Village called Stonewall. The cops had never confronted such resistance from the fairies and overextended their brutal response. This escalated out to the streets and before you knew it a full-scale revolt materialized as gays from anywhere nearby came to join in. It was a couple of weeks before it sort of calmed down.

  Something historic had happened. Gays had fought back with other gays and got the courage to continue doing so.

  There had been over the years a number of small and powerless groups organized to bring gays out into the open. Nothing had worked. A few guys and women picketing in front of the White House wasn’t doing it. Starting with Stonewall, groups got bigger and if not yet angry enough at least more visible and volubly louder in their demands for equality. Some kind of historical line had been confronted, breached, and crossed by a number of people. It would start to slowly change things for the better, at least for a little while.

  By no means was it the organized movement that was certainly required. Gays had never been good at organizing and really fighting back. The early movement activists and the heroic band of Stonewall protestors were numerically small compared with the crowds that will be coming with the disco era, dancing and drugging in the hope that their newly perking acceptance will be waiting for them with open arms.

  It will be the bars and the discos, presumed to be their ticket to ride, that will also serve to lead them to their continuing entrapment.

  Neither Fred nor Daniel is on the scene for Stonewall. Fred’s winding up a movie somewhere far away and Daniel in Washington is still living in never-never land.

  Who is on the scene observing what is happening are Roy Cohn, Sam Sport, and their tagalong monster-in-training Dereck Dumster. Roy is teaching them that the first requirement for any behavior or action is always: “NEVER APOLOGIZE, NEVER EXPLAIN.”

  ANOTHER DEAD BOY

  Murphy Evers, age sixteen, student at Michigan Mountain Day School, Ann Arbor Village, Michigan. Died Sept. 18, 1970, while participating in soccer practice after school. He was the team captain. He had not been in bodily contact with any other player. He had no ailments that his doctor knew about. His teammates said “he just turned purple and collapsed.” Evidently he was in every conceivable way a healthy normal American teenager. His death was registered as “from unknown causes.” His father, returning from a business trip to Haiti, collects his son’s body from St. Purdah’s, where Dr. Alvaar Heidrich had asked to study it.

  —PJ

  * * *

  You will not be able to know for another eighteen years that this is a death from me, when Murphy’s body will be dug up by his grieving parents, who are trying, like you, to put pieces together. Murphy’s boyfriend had been a hemophiliac taking BaxxterDridge, one of those Factor VIII thingies. Don’t know how they got hold of this thingie so early, and in Michigan. I hadn’t been in Michigan yet. His folks must have had what you call connections.

  VON GREETING MEETS WITH DR. STUARTGENE DYE

  I was looking at a photo in The Washington Monument of these people marching in a parade past the White House. I realized that the time is approaching wherein they could be eliminated forever. Once and for all we could get rid of homosexuals. Words like pansy and fairy are not nice. Homosexual is awful enough but it’s what they’re officially called. In science I know you respect names. Taxonomy, I believe it’s called.

  The salient point is not what they’re called but that they shouldn’t be here. They get in the way of orderly progress. Now there are so many of them I worry it might be too late. I’m not certain why they want to show themselves so aggressively but they seem to be doing so more and more. You’d think they’d know that they were safer when they were secret and invisible.

  I am being pestered about the release to regurgiacs of our first batch of our alpha. I am told by your people that it’s still too early. “You don’t have your ducks all in line yet.” Our alpha is from batches of donor blood from all over the world and combined together and processed down into single injections. Both of us know it’s not clean and that I shouldn’t be distributing it until we know how to clean it. We all know it can’t officially be approved by FADS until then. But more people will get sick and die if I don’t distribute it, which is the convenient threat I’ll use unless you approve of releasing it before it’s clean. I figure we’ve got one year, two tops, to get this stuff out there into gay bloodstreams before that door will be closed by some newly discovered technique that will clean alpha up and out. The window of opportunity to mass-infect an entire population will be cut short. Partekla says there are more gay hemophiliacs out there than we think, all waiting to further infect each other with whatever their nasty habits are giving them.

  GAAAH, ETC.

  Grossie Wildeschone, Pubie Grotty, Cocker Rutt, Babs Gershowitz, and Muxter Questlos—these names enter themselves in the pages of this history as their owners summon themselves to the halls of New Jersey’s School of Continuing Dentistry to found the Gay Association of Academic Alliances of Homosexuals and Lesbians (GAAAGAAHL, though soon to be shortened to just plain GAAAH). Within months of word getting around they are joined by several dozen others, men and women, academics all, who desire to be recognized for who they are in their academic environments, that is, as full-frontal homosexuals and lesbians. It is time for gay teachers to stand taller in the groves of academe. The movement is slow to grow but these few are fervent.

  What means this word gay that is more and more heard in the land? Gay? In what sense? Is there dancing in the streets when those so named decide to get together? Nothing but smiles? Frolics and tra-la-la-ing? The origin of this word, as it applies to homosexuals, is imprecisely known, much like hushmarked had been for previous centuries. What is known is that for whatever reasons the word homosexual sits unhappily on tongues and shoulders as
too clinical and harsh, too limiting, too medical, as precise taxonomy is apt to so be.

  Grossie, of course, is the famous lesbian scholar of ancient Greece and Rome. She it is who wrote the book on what it means to be a dyke, in psychosocial terms, just as Dr. Muxter Questlos did for homosexual men. Their “definitive” tomes are long and virtually incomprehensible, hopelessly caught up in the growing linguistic spiderwebs of “queer theory” and “gender studies,” now beginning to be spun. Gay will soon not be good enough for this lot, who will start calling everything “queer,” it occurring to none of them that queer is also a revolting and demeaning word and still abhorrent for many who recall it from being stoned with it in their youth.

  The defining of gay groups by their members has never been an easy matter. “Queers have been here since the beginning,” they state in its simplicity, which of course is true, that homosexuals have been here since the beginning. But “the beginning of what?” is the question that sends everything off the track. The word homosexual did not exist until 1864, so to these new queer theorists, homosexuals did not exist before then, so that another all-encompassing “timeless” word is thus required for today. This nonsense is another nail in the coffin of gay people ever locating their history, ever defining precisely who lived it, ever agreeing on a history at all.