The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  She gets up from her chair and locks the door and throws the key through the mail slot after all. She gets into her old car and drives back to Masturbov Gardens. She guesses she now will have to go to Miami and sit with Philip looking for something pretty, never moving until there is nothing left to look at.

  DR. SISTER GRACE’S NOTEBOOK

  This world war almost thirty years ago took 80 million dead of which 55 million were civilians. The NITS Committee of Statistical Intervention has finally released these figures. NITS is a fucking blight on the world of scientific information.

  One of my patients at Partekla—he was actually one of the soldiers imprisoned for being gay—died from something strange. I sent some of his blood to Pewkin at COD, not an intelligent man but that was the chain of command dictated for such as this. He did not respond. The soldier had been stationed in Africa, so I sent his blood to Pepin, who suggested I go there. Vitabaum would not pay for my trip so I paid for it myself.

  Pepin took me through jungles and I stood underneath collecting what monkeys in the trees shat and pissed into the buckets we were holding.

  Shit has been causing deaths since Christianity threw out the rigid commandments Jews demanded for cleanliness. I guess Jesus didn’t wash his hands before he sat down for that Last Supper. Christians blamed plagues on the use of bathhouses!

  Our fucking Center of Disease wasn’t even founded until 1946. Not to take care of disease but to investigate biological warfare.

  I am getting closer. To something.

  * * *

  She is. I must get rid of her.

  DISTRACTIONS OF ACTIONS NOT TO COME

  Once upon a time, in the poorest neighborhood of the District, there lived a boy named Sammy Sircus. His father was long dead and his mother made what pennies she could to feed her young son by repairing bras and girdles. Those were the days when women still wore these and were considered slutty if they didn’t. Each and every day of his boyhood, Sammy looked around his impoverished world, and across town at the other world, and vowed to himself, “Fuck this cunt shit. I am going to be one of the richest men in that other world. I coulda shoulda be able to fucking do that!” It was a rough neighborhood and they spoke like this. And you got beat up less for being a sissy if you said words like fuck and cunt a lot.

  Many children make vows like this. Most of them never come true. Sammy Sircus’s vow will come true. He will be a billionaire. Since he’s a gay man, he will thus also be a gay billionaire, perhaps one of the first known publicly as such. Sammy Sircus will be very powerful in all the fields of media. He is reasonably attractive, reasonably intelligent, exceptionally lucky, and a long way from the corsets of his childhood.

  Sammy’s childhood was rife with clues to his future prominence. That he will support a cause or two—can this not be traced to all those girdles? That he will so unvaryingly identify with women performers and make the world pay attention to them—must this not come from helping his mother with her bras? “Ma, why is this one so much bigger?” “Ma, why is this one all spotted with funny-colored ook?” “Ma, I’m sure glad I don’t need these.” Years later, when interviewed by a biographer, he says, “As long as I didn’t have to come anywhere near her tits, I knew how to present a woman to her best advantage.”

  Why will Sammy Sircus be important in our history and our country and our plague? Well, actually he won’t be. But because he has so much money, he coulda shoulda been. What will he do with all his money and influence to help his dying gay brothers? Not much. Why not? Why did American Jews help to murder German Jews? Wer weiss? Who knows? as his own mother answered difficult childhood questions. “If God wanted me to uplift the world in more useful ways than bras, He would have summoned me. ‘Billie,’ He would say, ‘find more uplifting work.’ But He didn’t. And maybe He’s right. Boobies well placed can make a man happy. A happy man makes a happy woman. Happy men make a better America. I look upon my work as a necessary calling, like a rabbi or a nurse.” Sammy learned this lesson in charitable self-interest from his mother. When she died, she left half a million dollars, just from bras and girdles for the shiksas in Northwest Washington. She’d penny-pinched all her life and never gave away a dime.

  Trafe Elohenu is what Rabbi Chesterfield’s nephew Ralph now calls himself. He hates being a Jew so much that he gives himself this sacrilegious name and announces to his uncle that he’s a fegalah. Not another one, the rabbi thinks to himself. What is God telling me? Trafe knows Sammy because Trafe came with his mother from the Northwest for her fittings. The two boys stared at each other knowingly. They somehow knew they were meant to be in each other’s lives just as Billie Sircus knew she was meant to be in tits.

  Kipper Gross is a third lad out of Washington who bonds with Sammy and Trafe. Kipper meets Sammy when he comes to “apprentice” with Billie. “Can I help it if this fine young man wants to learn all about brassieres? That he has heard I have the magic fingers,” his mother demands when her son inquires why cute Kipper is suddenly there. “I want to be the most successful women’s wear designer in the entire world,” Kipper says practically every day to Sammy. “How do you know this so early?” Sammy asks him. “I have known it since I was a little boy. I can feel it in my fingers.” At least Kipper knows how he wants to make his millions. Sammy’s path is not so precisely set.

  In the end Sammy Sircus will be the richest. Kipper Gross will be more world famous. Trafe Elohenu will be the tagalong. He’ll be very rich too, but he doesn’t want fame the way the other two do. He’ll make his riches representing all the famous performers with big tits that Sammy will discover and Kipper will dress, all three turning them into the biggest and most remunerative of stars.

  Actually, they are not three, they are four: we must not forget to include in their bonding, their pact of everlasting friendship, Randy Dildough, a bit more of a loner than the others, and who doesn’t smile as much, perhaps because his own path is still not satisfyingly set, even after all the success that’s come to him by the time of the plague. That he will even marry the famous women’s fashion designer Dordogna del Dongo is as good an example as any that he’s troubled in his focus and his deepest desires. But together they’ll find their billion, one way or another, multifactorially.

  It is interesting that none of these great American gay men, upon reaching middle age, will have found love. Their true longings will remain unfulfilled.

  Certain industries in America are more important than others. Media is on its way to becoming the most important of all. Media, which includes movies, TV, computers, rock music, publishing, and fashion, is the most important because media is messages everyone will hear and see. These four American gay men by the time of the plague’s arrival will be more important in our country’s heterosexual social fabric than anyone imagines.

  The straight world’s had its Rockefeller, Astor, Morgan, Harriman ad infinitum, who, even though they were big-time crooks, lent their names to mammoth improvements to America and for The American People. What will these four build for their own people, people they fucked with for so many years? How will they say thank you to their gay brothers? As with Horatio Dridge and Clarence Meekley, that the filthy rich include these gay fellows escapes true scholarly attention to the history of homosexuality.

  At this still-preplague moment Randy is chairman of a major motion picture studio, Kipper head of his fashion empire, and Sammy Sircus is closing in on that first billion, acquired from buying and selling record companies and movie studios and talent agencies and acquiring a burgeoning collection of the world’s most valuable art. Trafe, who’s lately been spending more of his spare time with his new hobby, interior decorating, has decided to become, after all, a serious Jew. So he stays home a lot studying Hebrew and the Talmud while choosing from swatches of samples to tastefully cover some rich yenta’s sofas and chairs, not to mention curtains and drapes.

  When our coming plague reaches new peaks of its destruction, these four will be well on their
way to controlling some twenty-plus billion dollars.

  SAM SPORT

  Sam Sport is a big shit. One of the biggest The American People’s ever produced. He ran his office in New York but a really smart shit was more and more needed in Washington. Roy Cohn’s got New York covered. So Sam is the man who is Lucas and Stephen Jerusalem’s partner in Jerusalem & Sport. This was a marriage arranged by Abe Masturbov, a longtime client of Sam’s. Abe wants Doris to have the best protection that money can buy. Sam is that, and Doris remains in business. Sam Sport has played upon the stages of history before, learning how to be a shit from the best of them. He was assistant to Roy and to Sen. Vurd in their infamous notorious postwar blacklisting trials against faggots and commies that put thousands out of work or into jail or out of the country. That’s where and when Sam became chums with Peter and Purpura Ruester, soon to be living a few blocks away. If doing evil deeds shows up on your face, Sam Sport is sinisterly handsome. There are few practical gifts God hasn’t given Sam Sport except decency. Like all big shits he doesn’t give a shit. Sam Sport doesn’t look his age, whatever it is. Age is one of the many things he lies about. He keeps his body, which is short and thin and extremely agile, well tailored so he doesn’t look old at all. For sex he works hard to keep it this way. His face is ashen and expressionless, with deep-set eyes that see everything and show nothing. His whole package is like some doormat of harsh cocoa matting bristlingly embossed with “Don’t Tread on Me.” Those that pay attention to such things suppose that Sam Sport is homosexual. He is. On other days he’s also other things to other people. Some days he is Italian for his Mafia clients and some days he’s a Catholic for the cardinal. His laws, or rather the laws he fights against, or defends, all of which he treats proprietorially, like his desires, are as changeable as a jukebox. Sam allows all rumors to flourish. “There is no truth” is of course too simplistic. So, for Sam, is perversity. His sexual fantasies are neither of men or women. They are of self-glorification. When he fucks guys, or preferably is fucked by them, it is not because he’s a homosexual but because it’s perverse to be a homosexual when everyone around him, every figure of power he represents or associates with, and all of whom need him and his legendary ability to get you off free from almost anything, is on record as full of hatred for the queers, and that’s a turn-on. That gets him hot. That makes him come. To have the cardinal suck his cock knowing he’s violating two thousand years of his religion’s condemnation is a very potent aphrodisiac. “Never go where you’re not wanted” had been his poor and dreary father’s failure. “Always go where you’re not wanted” has made Sam Sport powerful and rich.

  Sam is always dapper: jaunty, perky, nattily (another archaic word) dressed in the stuff younger guys wear: gabardine, tweed, corduroy, oxford cloth, repp, cordovan, loafers, button-downs, and always the “intellectual” spectacles, a college kid’s wire-rimmed glasses. He must be sixty now and still he looks like a boy, thin, with all his hair, his face somehow still unlined, unless you stand up close, when you can see he’s not a kid at all. He’s hard and wrinkled, like a shattered windshield with a cobweb of almost invisible fractures. Daniel knows he’s gay, but Sam denies it daily and constantly, so Lucas won’t allow his brother Daniel to talk about it.

  Daniel once asked Lucas why Sam Sport is a partner in his firm. Lucas got very defensive.

  “It’s important to remember the concept that everyone, no matter who, is entitled to good legal representation. He saved my life once when a contract was put out on me by the Mob when I lost my first case and our client had to go to jail. We started this firm together, just the three of us, in one room across from the Archives Building, with a secretary and an empty file. Now we have three hundred and seven lawyers and we own this building and fill up its seven floors. That’s not bad for two poor brothers from Masturbov Gardens. The first time I saw one of his Mafia clients pull out a gun in the middle of a deposition when he didn’t like the cross-examination, and I looked over at Sam and Sam was smiling … I knew I’d have to make some major decisions. I still know I have to make some decisions. In the meantime…”

  It was, for Lucas, a very long answer, and nervously spoken, which is unlike him, and of course the subtext is that he loves Sam and that Sam is a shit, and what do you do when the shit you love is your partner and friend and can reach everyone powerful anywhere in the entire world and has made you and your brother as rich as Sexopolis has made Mordy?

  A RUDE AWAKENING

  Fred had recently studied his Seven Star Mini Diary, which had revealed:

  Dates leading to orgasm: 57 (counting street tricks, the tubs, and Fire Island, but definitely not counting the Meat Rack)

  Dates interesting enough to want to see again: 2

  Dates seen again: 23

  Tubs attended how many times: 24

  Discos danced at how many nights: 37 (not counting Fire Island).

  He had been dismayed at how many of the faces he no longer remembered. He’d spent all this time with a faceless group of sex objects. Talk about sexist! Talk about using the body as a thing!

  Why hasn’t he been writing anything about all this?

  PROTESTERS THROW HUMAN EXCREMENT AT GAYS

  Fristberg, North Carolina, December 8, 1975.

  Hundreds of angry protesters gathered at the Fristberg Gay Community Center building site at Ridgemont and Central Avenues in downtown Fristberg where several hundred others, gay men and women, were celebrating the completion of a fund-raising campaign to pay for their community center they plan to start building on this site on January 2, 1976.

  “I was hit by a bag of s—t and I had to go home and wash up,” said the Rev. Maria Torrero of the Gay Community Church.

  “I was covered with it from head to foot. It was quite smelly,” said Anderson Vibro, who works for the First Fristberg Bank at 17 Corners.

  Human excrement, eggs and rotten food were flung. Anyone who looked gay was liable to a pelting.

  “Despite our requests for police protection, no police arrived to protect us,” said Marvin Wilson, a bartender at Nestor’s Bar and Grill at 1773 Nemoy Street. “These people are Nazis.”

  The protesters, who call their group “No Way,” claim, “We are a highly organized alliance of Christian fundamentalists,” said Fulton Bianchu, of Bianchu and Son Landscaping, 2000 Col. Hiram Herbert Highway, East Fristberg. “We do not welcome this building or these people in our town. We see documentaries on CBS and PBS about them. Nasty!”

  “We cannot allow people who are unacceptable to a large part of America,” said 18-year-old Tricia Cocks of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We study them at school and that’s what statistics tell us.”

  Mayor Kathy Sullivan-Feinstein called the attempt “by those people to put up their own building right in the middle of our lovely town” “a desecration, a provocation and a contamination. Of course people beat them up,” she said.

  —Reported by Roy Turbelow, Calhoun County (NC) Patriot

  IT’S A HELLUVA TOWN

  FRED TRIES TO CAPTURE THE MOMENT NOW THAT, PER DR. GILLESPIE’S INSIGHT AND ENCOURAGEMENT, HE IS AT LAST CHOOSING TO BEAR WITNESS IN HIS NOVEL FAGGOTS

  The last orgy of the spring season before decampment to Fire Island was held at the home of Garfield Toye, a closeted member of the New York office of the law firm Jerusalem & Sport, who was not expecting to hold it. He had a free evening on his hands. He considered going to the baths, but what was the point of having a Central Park West penthouse in the sky if not to stay at home, make a few phone calls, and ask some friends to drop in for a quiet evening chez moi. Word would be passed around with speed and by nine, ten at the latest, he would have an apartment full of humpy numbers. Garfield just loved being a faggot in New York. You could get things done so quickly here.

  Winnie Heinz came, bringing a Florsheim shopping bag that he said contained just a few old sneakers, and Troy Mommser, who was Winnie’s creative director at Heiserdiener-Punic-Slough,
came with several other models from the Hans Zoroaster Agency, and Maxine came alone—“I don’t know where Patty is, he said he’d meet me here”—and Sammy Sircus came, too, though Garfield wondered who’d called that cunt, unkind and ungenerous as the day is long (Garfield was a lawyer for Sammy’s expanding media agglomeration, already in trouble with the SEC).

  A call to One Touch of Penis produced Vladek, Cully, and Midnight Cowboy, Penis’s top three in billings, all for free, they must want to get in shape now that summer’s coming. They brought three youngsters, including that Paulie whom Garfield had paid fifty to only just last week, he sure is looking pale and run-down, and also including one of the most beautiful morsels Garfield had ever seen, he thought he heard his name as Timmy, and one look at that Junior Adonis and Garfield knew he wouldn’t be at One Touch of Penis for long. The three kids went off into a corner with Troy Mommser, always a quick worker passing the early grass for the evening, plus a little angel dust, judging from the smell of things. Garfield watched as Timmy Gorgeous inhaled on—could it be his first encounter with the weed? I wonder how old he is, his mind then automatically reminding him: corruption of the morals of a minor—ten to fifty … then eyed Maxine and hoped that tonight he wouldn’t change into drag.

  The black contingent arrived, headed by Morrison van Gelding and Hubie Stint, both hulking figures you’d cross the street to avoid if you didn’t know them but Garfield did and knew that both were pussycats. And, at the sight of so much black flesh, he practically expired in the excitement of his own anticipation. Morrison and Hubie each had a cute little white boy in tow, like prize pugs on leashes: Morry’s was Wilder and Hubie’s was called Slim, who was evidently just in from the Coast, where he was a math teacher, and he’d met Hubie and Hubie’s eleven-inch wonderful instrument while cruising Central Park. Morry said he’d informed a few of his black friends at Legal Aid about the event and Garfield might have some additional dark meat soon.