by Larry Kramer
It is against our religion to be a homosexual. Such a crime is punishable by death. We stone and shoot and kill and hang and decapitate homosexual men and women. Because you are not interested in us, you do not hear this in your country. But it is so, and true, and right. And it will continue, as will our efforts in your country.
Keep up your cooperation!
C. George Aziz
President and Convener
The Muslim Confederation Against the Homosexual Scourge
DEEP THROAT LECTURES FRED
Why has this poison only now begun to knock your people off en masse? You haven’t figured this out yet? Because up until recently there simply hasn’t existed a population large enough for this underlying poison to “contage,” i.e., be spread around with enough generosity to keep it alive before it dies from lack of what is called “cuddling,” to use the technical term.
A population, to “extinct” itself, must engage in nonstop lethal interactions, over and over, day after day, around the clock, for an extended period of time. Otherwise the poison can’t spread. It will die out in its group of hosts and be unable to continue on its journey. It is very “site-specific.” Grace told me it started with one kind of monkey. It didn’t like other kinds of monkeys. Now it apparently likes human beings. Lurking here is the reason its targeted victims are so specific. It isn’t so much that it’s gay men who are the central core of victims. It’s that they are a specific community. A population, if you will. All doing the same things to and with each other. Yes, straight men are going to get this. Because Kinsey told us there’s no such thing as a totally straight man. You know that.
You are being extincted.
My boss points out to me there was and still is much bad feeling between the FBI and the CIA, each fearing destruction by the other. Each has been and still is involved in many “extinctions.”
BEST BE ON YOUR GUARD!
HERMIA
I have been in touch with an old chum from Cambridge, the renowned hematologist Dr. Abraham Karpas, who has this to say about your Dr. Dodo Geiseric: “Dr. Geiseric is a crook, a charlatan of the most heinous order. Best be on your guard!”*
The nooses are tightening. Forces are continuing to make you disappear!
The passivity of your people continues.
Where is every gay person’s determination to stay alive!
I know Fred will cry out in despair, “How many ways can you say, get off your fucking asses or you are going to die,” to quote his recent article in The Prick.
I put to my old chum Abe Karpas the information in Grace’s letters as well as Fred’s. He was aghast. He could not speak for several minutes. “Are we still connected, Abe?” I had to ask several times before he responded.
“I fear this plague will never end,” he answered.
BOSCO DRIPPER IS DEAD
He is found dead on his monkey farm in the Everglades, where his arching negritas are dead as well. He had crawled out to join his monkeys because he knew he was dying. He had gone to sleep with his monkeys, all of which were dead by his side, having starved to death for lack of food and supervision. They had evidently tried to stay alive by eating parts of him. It was not a pretty sight.
He’d learned that his monkeys were no long needed by NITS. A friend from France said, “This is a retrovirus, not a virus we are dealing with.” And therefore Koch’s Postulates, the bible of whether a disease is contagious or not, don’t apply without complications. Animal models will evidently no longer be necessary for this coming plague he’d hoped to figure in so importantly, so front and center, so worth the long wait for his day in the sun.
An anthropologist at HOW in Geneva, Melanie Poussin Abstruse, had sent him a copy of her report on a recent trip to Africa. There is no question, she claims, that “the current plague of The Underlying Condition stems from Africans eating ‘bush meat,’ including chimps. I do not know why this information is not being promulgated throughout the world. Dr. Vitabaum was taking this information to the home office in Washington but he appears to have mysteriously disappeared and has not yet been replaced.”
Abstruse is never heard from again.
Bosco wrote on the cover of Abstruse’s report, “I no longer want to live if my chimps are responsible for this plague. Whoever finds this, please know that I have lived my life for nothing, that I have loved in vain and lost, and that I no longer wish to live.”
AND THIS IS JUST THE READER’S DIGEST VERSION
We can’t do anything until we find the virus, right? Well, the answer to that question, which will take over three more unnecessary years to disentangle and be approved, is embedded in what follows. And this is just the Reader’s Digest version:
DANIEL THE SPY LAUNCHES US INTO DODOGATE
At our next meeting, house overflowing as usual, in front of all of us Middleditch tells Dodo to “cut the crap and get to work on UC. Get to work! That’s an order! You are meant to be a genius. Prove it!” Roscoe Middleditch really thinks Dodo is a genius, which is why he puts up with such a strange, cantankerous man. Dodo knows that Middleditch doesn’t usually talk this commandingly. He also knows Roscoe hasn’t anyone else to assign to this. On the one hand, that’s a compliment, meaning he’s the smartest guy at NITS, which he certainly believes. On the other hand, it’s an insult. I suspect he doesn’t really want to do it, and nobody asked him about that. Either he’s a good Catholic boy uncomfortable with homosexuals or he’s a good Catholic boy all too familiar with homosexuals. The few hints he’s dropped here and in The Prick about “stay tuned” are lies to protect him should any competition show up. Whichever it is, he does not like to be a loser.
Grebstyne comes to me. Sherwin Grebstyne is now Roscoe’s executive coordinator of infectious diseases. “You and me,” Sherwin says to me, “we’re the two Jewboy outsiders here. We got to keep our eyes on Dodo.”
Jerry laughs out loud when I relate this to him. “Dodo isn’t our department. I’ll tell Roscoe.”
“I hear Roscoe’s on his way out.”
“You what? He’s got seniority. They can’t fire him.”
“He’s been caught manipulating stock.”
“What the fuck? Roscoe Middleditch’s ass is cleaner than the Ivory baby. Where did you hear that? Manipulating how?”
“He’s being charged with profiteering on the stock market. Insider trading with Greeting stock.”
“Jesus, Jerusalem, how do you know all this?”
“I can’t tell you.” Actually, my brother Lucas is representing Roscoe—I put them together when Roscoe came to me in a panic and had read about my tough brother’s firm—and Lucas wants me to “see what you can sweat out up there.”
A young man named Mount Vernon Pugh, who is some cousin to Sir Norman Treadway, whose wife is a British Greeting, was found dead and with his balls cut off out in some gulch in Fille de Maison. It wasn’t reported anywhere. Some lab reports indicating that Greeting’s Childhood Cough Syrup is poisoned were found on him. Roscoe signed these reports. It’s even more complicated. Howie Hube had been in charge of those childhood whooping cough trials for Roscoe at NITS. By all accounts Howie had done a decent job, which is why Jerry is using him with Debbi to set up a system of clinical trials for us, to be ready if and when. But the report in Mount Vernon’s pocket indicated that Greeting’s kiddy cough syrup, well, two young girls in Lithamgrove have died from it, while taking it on one of Hube’s trials. Jerry frowns but doesn’t reply.
In the late ’70s, Dodo made two “discoveries” in his lab, only to have both be, he says, “sabotaged”—once by a refrigerator being turned off for an entire weekend, thus killing “important assays” that for whatever reason could then not be regrown, and once by actual culture dishes being contaminated with various monkey viruses appearing, it would seem, from out of nowhere. Dodo asked Middleditch and was turned down for a permanent guard for protection. A few years later a flight to London he was booked on but did not fly on blew up from a bomb and cr
ashed into the ocean. It had been announced that he was flying on that plane and that he was going to make an important announcement. Dodo is always making important announcements. He loves to see his name in the papers and his face on TV. Dodo is now maintaining that “someone was and continues to be out to get me,” and that any work he was and will ever be doing will bring the wrath of someone down upon him. Lucas was the lawyer for the plane victims’ families and got a monster settlement for them, which brought him to the attention of Roscoe.
It’s even more complicated. This kid Mount Vernon also had a summons in his pocket to appear before the Tricia Institute. This is the renamed Office of Unnatural Acts. They’re giving summonses now. (How can they do that?) The summons was to come for “an interview about your activities while on government time. You are suspected to be homosexual. You face possible arrest.” This is scary. (Who authorizes the dispatch of threats like this?)
Arnold Botts slips Poopsie, who runs Dodo’s lab and hardly speaks English, money to tell him what’s going on in their lab. And Poopsie slipped Mount Vernon money to tell him what he finds out from Arnold about what G-D is up to. Mount Vernon also makes money giving blow jobs, evidently to Arnold and Poopsie. I guess the Tricia Institute got wind of this. Minna Trooble, a girl I used to know in the Jew Tank and in high school, is my source on this dish.
Greeting stock lost a bundle when the whooping cough deaths leaked out.
Roscoe Middleditch is accused of insider trading of Greeting stock.
Grebstyne’s now in charge of Dodo.
Howie Hube should have been fired but wasn’t.
Who murdered Mount Vernon Pugh?
What did Poopsie find out from Arnold to tell Dodo?
* * *
DEEP THROAT: Nobody in America knows that throughout laboratories in and around Paris, Drs. Gaston Nappe, Astolphe Bordeaux, Jacqueline Françoise, and Franc Giblette, along with their associates, had started immediately in 1981 to biopsy lymph nodes of sick men they’re seeing in increasing numbers, all of them gay. (No one in America had thought to biopsy anyone. Biopsy? Biopsy who and for what and why?) Lymph nodes clog French worktables, in their bottles, petri dishes, refrigerators, freezers. Day by day all findings are meticulously recorded in all workbooks. My friend Marcel Schwartz-Levinsky has a go at writing an article about these explorations, which he submits to Dr. Nutrician Valmont Peersie, the editor of Medicin et Action (M&A), who rejects it even though his publication usually has the guts to publish “cutting-edge” (“à l’avant-garde”) submissions in France. Although Gaston Nappe tries to keep an eye on everything that goes on in his lab at Centre Curie-Cassatt (CCC), he is not an able man, in either medicine or administration, or in public relations, but he has learned how to “fake it,” as he’s heard we Americans say. Keep your eye on Jacquie, his instinct tells him. She is the cleverest, and the least likely to raise objection when, as head of the lab, he gets his name first on any discovery. She is meek and quiet, a good Catholic girl from the provinces. She also seems to know a lot of gay young men who are sick and can convince them to “come in and give me one of your nodes.” French boys aren’t frightened yet. “Yes, they’re still having naked orgies in discos on weekends,” a French journalist friend of Fred’s, Didier Lestrade, told him. They are evidently more sexually sophisticated than American disco dancers, if you call disco orgies sophisticated. Well, the French boys think they are. Your popular gay writer Jervis Pail has affectionately written about this “touching remembrance of things past” in Philippine Vogue in one of his “Letters to America from Abroad.” My wife read it to me from under the dryer at her hairdresser’s.
No one in America knows about anything remotely scientifically interesting that’s going on in Paris, and that’s the way Gaston wants it until he’s ready. As does the White House. And good old boy Von Greeting. You heard me correctly.
And the CIA. Linus Gobbel. Let’s backtrack to about 1960 before we can go forward.
Before I wound up here, I studied and learned and taught pathology in many places that excited something in me that said, “Let’s go there and take a look.” I’d been in Iceland diving into the innards of some mighty strange sheep I’d heard about, all dying from unknown causes. Sure enough, I found the culprit for them, a virus of sorts. Since there was no cure for it, and since it was obviously transmittable, the entire sheep population of Iceland was put down and they started anew with “clean” sheep from Greenland. Dr. Lief Ovo, Iceland’s chief pathologist, told me some interesting things about what he’d heard about the Belgian Congo, so it’s there that I decided to go to continue my education. It was not a safe place for anyone. The Belgians had raped the country in every conceivable way. When Léopold II began lopping off the hands of every worker for not producing enough raw rubber, revolutions started to occur, bloody ones. The Belgians bailed in 1960, taking everything with them that they could. The CIA had jumped in before the Belgians left. The U.S. Army was called in to run some “peacekeeping” missions as cover. The spook in charge was Linus Gobbel, currently a powerful resident in Peter Ruester’s White House. The CIA had helped build the Belgians an air force and then provisioned the various combatants. It participated in the grisly killing of Patrice Lumumba. I had discovered that apes were dying, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii chimps from Mombasa and Pan troglodytes chimps from Cameroon and Gabon, about a thousand miles to the west. The Pasteur Institute in Paris had even written about this. I had to get out of the Congo pronto or I would have been butchered, along with all their civil servants dashing to return to the safety of their homeland, Haiti. Gobbel got me on a U.S. Army plane back to the States. (Actually, Mother got me on that plane. He hates Linus Gobbel.) I did manage to take some samples of the apes’ blood. They didn’t make any sense to me until UC came along and I shared my samples with Grace.
Jerry, of course, didn’t want to know about this. “It’s not our department.” And Gist was still saying that whatever it was would soon fly away. Jerry said to me, and I quote, “You’re a real troublemaker, aren’t you?” He didn’t mean it as a compliment.
I suppose in a place like this I am weird. I’m a romantic. The sudden appearance of UC is a drama and a cause I can now understand. Its complexities are unknown and arcane. It’s an intellectual challenge. I want to know its structure, its culture, its history. I want to find it in the bodies of the Pauls and Kevins who are beginning to appear in our clinics with Kaposi’s sarcoma devouring their skin and guts. To do this, I’m once again serving a kind of apprenticeship, learning about the down-and-dirty of molecular biology and immunology while we await Dodo’s “discovery.” And just as the White House and the Congress cast exceptionally longer and more menacing shadows. As does Jerry.
* * *
DANIEL: Roscoe Middleditch recognized in Dodo the ambitious pain in the ass I hear he once was himself. That’s how he became chief of Cancer. As he quieted down he thinks he lost his touch, which he probably has. I’m beginning to see how full this place is of once-geniuses who have lost their touch. You can see it in their faces, and how they walk the corridors, less and less proudly the older they get. He compensated for this by backing winners. He’s good at this, so good that Cancer at NITS has a pretty good reputation. Not as great as Hopkins or Cambridge, but this is not a top-drawer posting, which I’d also been surprised to learn. And no one talks about all the vacancies that the Ruester cutbacks prevent from being filled. You come here to work if you want security, not to work with “the great ones,” because most of them are somewhere else. I can’t remember if Goffman noted anything like this in that Asylums book of his.
UC didn’t have to be discovered for the smart ones to know it would be a virus. Dodo knew. Roscoe knew. Your Dr. Brookner knew. Grace knew. Rebby knew. Hokie Benois-Frucht knew. They all just knew. Jerry, who is an immunologist, didn’t know, and wasn’t going to back any horse so specifically yet. Deep Throat calls him a “fence-sitter.” Immunology is one of those newish specialties where, fo
r those not in it, it’s hard to understand what’s going on. To the outsider it doesn’t seem to have much to do with viruses. At first Stuartgene wanted to assign UC to Roscoe instead of Jerry. Jerry got very pissed off. “‘My’ division is meant to be in charge of all infectious diseases.” Jerry won that one. But only, I think, because Stuartgene isn’t around here very much. He’s taken a bigger interest in Alzheimer’s and Congress is backing him up for it. Anyway, Middleditch will be out of the loop soon.
* * *
DEEP THROAT: At NITS viruses and cancer are not dissimilar but they are not the same, and though they cross over, everything in nature crosses over, and it is up to the clever ones to know where to draw the line, or rather where the invisible line is drawn, and then to respect the boundaries and somehow still come up with something. The subtext of this is that this place is as regimented as all hell and this kind of puts a damper on all-out enthusiasm. You can get yourself knifed in the back in many professional ways. Cooperation is no one’s middle name. Stuartgene encourages all this because he belongs to another school, which is to pit all the bulls against each other and the devil take the hindmost. That there has never been a cure for any major anything that has come out of NITS is a fact to which no one pays any attention, including Congress, which understands NITS about as well as it understands everything else it funds.
* * *
DANIEL: Dodo believes everyone is out to get him because they are. I’ve never seen a more unpopular guy. I gather that’s been useful in the past to get his juices going, the fuck-you, I’ll show you mentality. He’s made major discoveries. He’s written important papers. The trouble is that now more people are seeing that he’s an asshole. Roscoe knows that he’d best scare Dodo into a higher gear pronto. “I don’t feel and hear your heart in this, Dodo. You’re relying too much on Poopsie. I don’t smell the Dodo touch yet. You spend too much time talking to reporters. Stop all that shit and really get to work. You know what I’m talking about.” All this before another packed auditorium. Attendance at our now irregular meetings is still standing room only.