by Larry Kramer
In my furious race to put things right, to figure things out, I’m also learning some stuff about myself. I brook no interference and suffer fools badly. I never knew I possessed either of these traits. They both take anger and, dare I say it, guts, and I also never knew that I had either. Is that why I have no lover, yet and still? Guts? I don’t think I have any guts at all.
He’s very tall, Tommy is, and lanky, all bones, with cute little jug ears that cup out quite remarkably. I sort of think he looks a little like the young Abe Lincoln, who was also tall and cute and with those ears. Sex with him was difficult for me because he was so big and tall and I’m not and I didn’t know what to do with all that body—we just didn’t fit right. After a few months of actually living together I finally had to take him out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and tell him it wasn’t working. This from the man whose hand he held constantly in public and was holding under the table at this moment. “Let them come at me!” he’d say defiantly from his height above us when we walked on crowded streets. He stared down anyone who stared unkindly at us. He loved to read. And I who buy and still own more books than most bookstores have on their shelves am moved by this habit; I buy them and read them only delicately, rarely fully, seldom to completion; I am so impatient when they don’t, for some reason, possess me. So little of anything does these days, I realize.
Tommy Boatwright will be by my side from now on throughout these continuing wars. I’ve been told by various mutual friends that I broke his heart over that Chinese dinner and wounded him irrevocably, in that he’s never had another love again as deep as the one he felt for me and continues to show me every day.
Anyway, I come to love him very much. I don’t think I ever had a best friend before.
His brother is dying now from UC. So it’s important for me to be with him when it happens, as he was for me with Felix.
THREE OLD JEWS ON THE BEACH OF FIRE ISLAND PINES
Monroe Abst, Jeffrey Curling, and Hy Evermore sit on a blanket late in the season. It’s the Jewish holy days so there’s still a somewhat crowd to attend services at Maury Diskind’s. Also, the sun is suddenly and miraculously out and warming.
Their bodies are old but their eyes are young, and until now their thoughts and imaginations have been younger still. They wear brightly colored billowing long-sleeved shirts to cover their bodies, but the sadness in their eyes is harder to cover, as is their fear.
“Did you notice the drop-off during the summer?” Monroe asks. “I have been thinking that this shit is a prophecy of what lies ahead of us. Do you not think it is a prophecy of a bleak fate?”
Hy says, “Usually I think that you are such a pessimist, Monroe, but the memories this is already stirring up for me condemn me to agree with you.”
“I, also,” Jeffrey says.
“I am afraid,” says Monroe.
“I am afraid,” says Jeffrey,
“I am afraid,” says Hy.
Yes, each says, one after the other, that he is afraid.
“My father got us out of Berlin just in time,” says Jeffrey.
Monroe says the dreaded word first. “This is our Holocaust.”
The other two nod their heads.
“Did you read Dr. Geiseric in The Prick?” Monroe asks. Neither of the others have.
“You don’t read that rag?” Hy asks.
Jeffrey reminds Hy that they have both used The Prick’s personals, “for laughs only, of course. That dishy little kid from Haiti, Ernesto Jean-Paul, remember, we all three had a taste of him? We found him through The Prick.”
“Stop!” says Jeffrey.
“Stop!” says Hy.
“What are we to do?”
“Where are we to go?”
“We must not lose our balance just because we are old Jews who remember when no one paid attention.”
“We must not overreact.”
“Perhaps it is not overreacting.”
“Canada.”
Later, no one recalls who said “Canada.”
“I will look into it,” says Monroe, who has a travel agency.
“We are being silly, silly, silly,” says Jeffrey, shaking his head as if to get bad thoughts out of it. “Let us all go in for a swim. There are few days left when the ocean will be as warm as today.”
And he leads the way, stripping off his billowing long-sleeved shirt of many colors, and dabbing some sun oil on his crinkled chest and arms and face, and then running into the ocean, followed by his two old friends, though one limps from a hip replacement and the other is out of breath just from standing up too quickly. They have shared this house in the Pines since 1965. And each and every summer weekend over all these years they have sat on their blanket on this beach in their billowing long-sleeved flowered shirts, under their protective overarching umbrella, and looked at all the beautiful young men who seem to get younger and more beautiful with each passing year. That this might be coming to an end, that they might be approaching their own Kristallnacht, is almost more than they can bear to think about. Their mishpocha escaped the first one. A second time might not be so lucky. Do you think that they are not still sexually active? Why do you assume that? Sexopolis is always running features on sex among the aging. It is one of Mordy Masturbov’s continuing crusades.
Each of these men will die within the next three years.
“SPICE PINCHED FROM SPELLMAN BIO”
A biography of Francis Cardinal Spellman that states that the late prelate led an active gay sex life which was embarrassing to the church will be toned down somewhat before its publication. John Cooney, author of The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman, told The Prick he will rewrite the pages of the book dealing with Spellman’s “alleged seductions” of altar boys and others while spiritual leader of the New York Catholic Archdiocese from 1939 until his death in 1967.
Avocado Books, the publisher of the biography, was questioned about whether Cooney’s information was adequately substantiated, according to an August 2 report in The New York Truth (“Publisher Wants Proof Cardinal Spellman Was Homosexual”). After meeting with their lawyers, Cooney said he would rewrite the portion of his book dealing with Spellman’s sexuality along the lines of “many people say Spellman was homosexual, priests all took it for granted, but who knows what takes place in a bedroom?” Such a change would be a significant alteration of Cooney’s original text, which included details of a purported 1942 liaison with a chorus boy supplied by a leading sex researcher and author, and accounts of gay parties attended by the cardinal. Other sources quoted on the matter of Spellman’s sexuality included a former seminarian who served as one of Spellman’s altar boys and the owner of a bar popular with gay men during the 1940s and ’50s.
“I have no doubt in my mind that the cardinal was gay,” Cooney told The Prick. He maintains that revealing the cardinal’s sexuality was important. The biography is not a flattering portrait, Cooney readily admits; the author sees the cardinal as a “first-line candidate to illustrate the use and abuse of political power. He was such a moral hypocrite. I don’t think he even believed in God.”
Cooney worked eleven years as a writer for The Wall Street Journal before leaving three years ago to pursue freelance writing full time. The American Pope is his second book. His first, The Punic Legacy, was a study of a family’s attempt at “changing dirty money into clean power.”
TOUGH LUCK
An aging Sen. O’Trackney Vurd sees to it that legislation is renewed, and rather overwhelmingly it is too, that prohibits federal money to any program or organization or entity utilizing educational or therapeutic material that contains the word homosexual, now expanded to include such words as sexual and intercourse, those for various “personal body parts,” and yes, “the underlying condition,” which words, without capitals, slip through without protest. This legislation effectively prohibits any material from being disseminated by the government that might help educate and curtail UC. This prohibition will not b
e overturned by a federal judge for many years.
New York Truth headline: “ROUTINE CONTACT CAN SPREAD THE DISEASE, SAYS NITS’S DR. GEISERIC.”
DEEP THROAT AND BIG PHARMA
The head of Big Pharma is Tolly McGuire, the typical Washington lobbyist, hale-fellow-well-met, who slaps you on your back every other sentence with a beaming smile while he says, “I doubt my boys and girls will go for this.” We’ve known each other for too long. He’s a cruel and heartless and greedy bastard. That’s why he’s always reappointed as this inhuman industry’s spokesperson.
“No,” he continues, “I’ve heard no buzz on this one.” Then he said, before I could answer, “I state that emphatically. And there’s no money in this. It doesn’t constitute a big enough market.”
“Oh, it will be a big market. And getting bigger every day. It looks like it’s going to be a major public health emergency.”
“Well, now, public health is not our bag, is it?”
“It was, once upon a time when we were young.”
“Look, how many ways do I have to say this. You always were a stubborn cuss paying no attention to reality. I have never seen less interest in an illness than I’m seeing in this shit. Sure, we talk about it, we even sponsored a confidential sort of conference on it, where we could sort of brainstorm. The big guys all came, Rolf Voss from Heissliche, Frankfurt from KlipperInterswiss, Talbott Prenderghast from Dinkens-Savoy-Trailheim, Barney Osterveld from Prinkus Maxwell, Diane Globbenger from InterAmerican, this rich new bunch from something they’re going to be calling Presidium, and of course, how could I forget, Dash Snicker from Greeting. Dash was particularly against ‘entering this field,’ as he put it. Oh, and Molly Trachtbart from NEJS. She wanted to cover the conference but she had another engagement.”
“Isn’t it NEJS’s job to report what’s going on?”
“Get on track, will you. Listen, you and I have known each other a long time. Read my lips: nobody wants to touch this shit with a barge pole. How many ways can I say this? There’s still no hundred percent yet confirmed definitive causative anything found yet, and this Dodo as far as pharms are concerned is a dodo, announcing one bullshit thing after another, with, I might add, no clue as to what he’s thinking that could give us a head start on a Help Out, and the infected population means we’ll have a lot of trouble convincing our scientists to go anywhere near this. You get the picture? Nobody likes faggots. Period. Especially stockholders.”
I nodded. “What happened to the ‘for the good of humanity’ stuff?”
Now he nodded. “You’re still such a fucking troublemaker. Is Uncle Jerry willing to throw in any grants for us to jointly start the ‘for the good of humanity’ stuff?”
I knew Uncle Jerry was not. When I relayed to him the above he said, “They know I’ve been turned down by Vurd and HAH for support.”
“What about the president?” I asked Tolly.
“You should pardon the expression but you’ve got to be joking” was his answer.
I shall report all of this to Mother.
MOTHER
Good work, Deep Throat. It is just as I expected. NITS is simply not doing its job.
“LET THEM EAT SHIT”
I was trying to write a book about my love for Junior Ruester. It was painful trying to do this, and when I got sick I put it aside. He knew I was sick and he never even called. He has refused to keep in touch with me. He didn’t invite me to his wedding, of course. On our last time together, after the last time we made love, he said, “I know someday you will violate our sacred trust. Farewell, forever.” And he got up and got dressed and he didn’t even kiss me goodbye. Anyway, here’s what I wrote about when he asked me to take him to Dr. Horace Vetch. Out of the blue he called me up and said, “Perky, I’m on my secret phone. I’m in trouble. I need you to take me someplace.” I feared the worst because the worst was already starting to happen to me.
We arrive at a top-secret location, a treatment center far out in West Virginia. He says his Secret Service men are probably frantic. This time they don’t know where he is. It’s just as well.
He’s referred to as Patient X. In other rooms there are seven Patient Xs and five Patient Ys also receiving this secret experimental treatment.
At 8:22 a.m. Peter Ruester, Jr., called Junior, the son of the just reelected president of the United States, is connected to the Neutralitron. I smuggled him here. He has come down with ridilinitis. His nimroid factor is high. Rebby said to me, “The ridilinitis, ironically—for it is usually a fatal syndrome on its own—can in the smallest number of cases mediate with UC, keeping each at bay … but for how long is still unknown. It is only known that there is a ‘window of opportunity’ during which this interference might operate successfully. Your ‘secret friend’ might, just might, be okay. Ridilinitis is not necessarily UC.”
It’s all mumbo-jumbo to me.
Dr. Horace Vetch sounds like the name of a quack, and I’ll bet he is. I guess there comes a time when you have to go along with blind faith, and this is such a time. Guys are dying like flies. Seven guys from our class at Yaddah so far.
Dr. Horace Vetch appeared from out of nowhere with a treatment that utilizes shit. “Cultivated human intestinal bacteria, including Streptococcus faecalis,” to quote the New Statesman, which headlined its report on this treatment “Let Them Eat Shit.” Copies of this article are in Vetch’s waiting room.
Your shit is dried at temperatures high enough to turn it into a fine pulverized ash. This ash is combined with your blood, which is irradiated with fluorescent something or other. Dr. Vetch claims that his treatment raises the vel level and that after monthly treatments, the 729/s will increase and the system will slowly reconstitute itself. I ask him if it melts the muscles, which I’ve heard happened to some poor guy. He ignores me.
It all seems pretty absurd, except that Dr. Vetch has produced, in living suntanned flesh, five UC patients who have been treated with their irradiated shit, a procedure he’s patented and calls V-200. And they are very handsome. They bounce around in bathing suits at medical presentations, where they parade before any interested doctors. They wear those Speedos. Even Rebby has to admit these guys look and act terrific.
Rebby says there are many such shows these days—doctors suddenly appearing from out of nowhere with alleged cures and cavorting muscular suntanned showboys to promote them. “We must not allow them any validity,” he warns me. “But you just did,” I point out to him. He blushes. “Did I? I guess I did. I was carried away by the beauty of them in their bathing suits.”
The son has not been unmindful of his place in history. During the early days of this plague, as all around him friends and fuck buddies and fellow Yaddahs fall dead by the side of the road, Junior begins to have gnawing pangs of conscience. I just knew it! And now he’s finally telling me about it. On our trip to West Virginia he tells me how he wakes up in the middle of the night and vomits. “I know that my father is the only person in this country who has the power to help me and my friends like you and assure the salvation of our homosexuality.” I never heard him come anywhere near to talking like this. Maybe he could be our hero after all. “I’m also scared shitless of my mother, who thinks I must get married. Which I said I will. So I’m safe. For the moment.” So much for the heroic. Where and how he finds safety in all this … Well, you have to know Junior.
Even in the waiting room, even on the trip home, he still won’t tell me how he really felt about the two of us. Or if maybe now he feels it again. A little bit, maybe …
Of course, Junior Ruester is not considering these personal issues as he is wheeled into Dr. Vetch’s presence and strapped down under the Neutralitron, a heavy machine like an iron lung I saw in some movie about polio. Vetch is very ordinary-looking. You’d lose him in a crowd. He inserts tubes into Junior’s arms and into his chest. One is funneled through his throat into a lung, I guess so he can breathe. And another tube is stuck up his ass. He’s conscious because Dr. Vetc
h said consciousness is necessary for V-200’s best results. The look in Junior’s eyes is pure terror. I know he has all his fingers crossed as best he can. We both stare wide-eyed as we watch the path of his blood going through yards of tubing out of him and into a big vat.
This vat is filled with boiling water, and the irradiated powder made from his last shit that he brought in a container is dumped and sprinkled into it lovingly by Dr. V. before he switches a switch and it’s pumped back into Junior. “A ‘fewtra’ of hot shit is being administered every ten seconds,” Vetch proudly tells us. It’s very painful and Junior screams as best he can. I wish I could be holding his hand.