by Larry Kramer
“There’s a test but nobody trusts it and the word is we mustn’t take it.”
“Then we must fight for a test we can trust!” It all seemed clear enough to Jervis. “We mustn’t miss the boat.”
“Be very careful before you join any group that fights for anything,” Cocker warns. “They’re becoming both very political and increasingly powerful and Fred Lemish is their leader. He’s going to be making a big speech, I hear, one of these days.”
“Fred Lemish is popular?”
“I know it’s hard to believe,” Pubie says.
“When I left, Fred Lemish was a joke.”
“I know it’s hard to believe,” Cocker agrees. “Fred Lemish is paid attention to now.”
“So you indicated,” Jervis exclaims, unsmiling. He wonders again if he might have to return to Manila. Maybe Vogue could assign him to a more mainline edition.
“Fred Lemish has been getting his name in the papers and his face on television as if he were the only gay man in America.”
“The only one?” Jervis’s voice sounds to have lost some heft.
“He’s going around calling all his old friends murderers,” Pubie says.
“Goodness,” Jervis Pail says. Perhaps there is a reason for him to stay here after all. Not only to reestablish his residence and reclaim his literary preeminence but also to sweep Fred Lemish out of the way. He never liked Fred Lemish. Or if he did, he can’t remember when, or why. Fred always seemed like such a prude, criticizing him “for writing about sex so much.” Just remembering all this perks up Jervis’s juices.
“I’m going to write my Gay Pride feature on what a monster Fred’s become,” Pubie continues. “The Village Vice is putting him on our cover.”
“Exactly.” Jervis actually claps his hands. “Give him a kick in the ass for me.” And then he asks, “On your cover?” Jervis has never been on the Vice’s cover.
“Give him a kick in the ass for me too,” Cocker says. He feels a lot better now that Jervis Pail is home. No one reads The Village Vice anymore, so Pubie Grotty’s voice is negligible. But Jervis Pail is our Nabokov and our Foucault. Our Updike.
Cocker Rutt, full of pride, then tells them about the lollipop he’s been contemplating. “I want to start a new organization devoted to reclaiming gay sex lives in all their fulfilling glory. I already have a name for it. Sex Über Alles. And a catchy mission: “We must continue to fight for and defend gay sex.”
“Oh, I like that!” Jervis claps his hands again. He sees a vital and necessary new book to write about just this. He will retain his preeminence. His many fans will certainly listen to him. His voice is too important to ignore.
EAT, MY SISTERS
Clytemnestra Dunkelheim confides to her friends: “First it was the fegalim, then it was the junkies, now it is some schwarzahs here and there, and of course the kurvas. We are safe. You and I and our beloved families are safe.” Each mother present for monthly bridge at Clyt’s expresses her continuing gratitude that The Truth does not report “this awful story.”
Someone named Fred Lemish keeps sending her letters asking if she remembers Walter Duranty. “He was your liar, your apologist for Stalin. You are doing it again! All what truth that’s fit to print?” Today she received from him a book: Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Truth’s Man in Moscow. He denied there was a famine in 1932–1933 at the same time as Stalin was deliberately starving some 40 million people to death. “Russians hungry but not starving,” he wrote. For this reporting he won the Pulitzer Prize. He kissed Stalin’s ass in order to have access to him. There is lately mounting noise about rescinding Duranty’s 1932 Pulitzer. Has something like this ever happened? Certainly not to The Truth. Clyt remembers Duranty as such a nice man, even if he only had one leg. Push told her Duranty was “very big with the ladies.” She wondered with one leg how he did it. Not that Push was doing it with two. She wondered why Jews had such trouble with sex and one-legged goyim did not. Not that she wanted it. She just wondered. What in our history has made us so uncompromisingly unwelcome to sex? She thought briefly of asking her “sisters” if they might be interested in a colloquium on this subject but then thought, No, I am the person, remember, who forbids fegalim in my paper. She remembers she had a nice cousin who was a fegalim. She has heard he was killed by Hitler. She had been attracted to him. But her father had warned her. “I can tell a fegalim at a mile distance. A rabbi knows,” he told her. There is so much she and her sisters could talk about. Over bridge, one or two have even intimated that their sons or daughters might be gay. “But how do you know for certain?” Molly Karpilow had asked, directing her question particularly toward Clyt. “Clyt, why does not your paper talk about this and give us guidance? I want more, not less, from your fine paper.”
Thank you, Molly Karpilow.
AH, YES, ANOTHER CHURCH
Cardinal Bernard Buggaro, transferred by the Holy Father from Washington to Boston, walks beneath some olive trees donated by a Sicilian parishioner, trying to sort out un-sort-out-able things. Sicilian olive trees do not grow well in Boston, and these show it.
Thank God free speech is not something that accompanies any job description in our church, he thinks. This illness is a great embarrassment, he thinks. It embodies many things of which we disapprove, he thinks. My boys will keep their mouths shut, he thinks. Although today he heard about another one, a bishop in New Mexico who buggered (he hates that word) boys when he was young, and the story is surfacing in a local paper there some forty years later. I thought there was a statute of clerical limitations, he thinks. If we are going to be condemned eternally for every ding-dong, what’s the point of trying to sell salvation? He’s heard that even the New York City mayor’s a fairy. As was my predecessor there, now called to … wherever fairy cardinals are called to when they … pass.
Boston is bound to be a test of tests. I can only assume the Holy Father in his Infinite Wisdom has called me here for a reason. The Holy Fucker is rotten about giving me signs. Yes, the cardinal is angry. He can’t see any way out of this one. Every priest and cleric and father and brother has tasted somebody’s penis at some time in his Catholic career. It comes with the territory. And more than any place, Boston is the posting everyone prays for.
Boston’s always thought to be a safe diocese. The cardinal is from Boston. The pews and confession booths of Boston and its environs are stained with the semen of many decades of the love for Christ. We used to think there was safety in numbers, he thinks. We were wrong, he thinks. We were wrong, he knows. What does the Church do when it knows it’s wrong? Apologies are only for mortal men to make.
But now some of his brothers are getting sick and dying. Is God finally catching up?
PARLEZ-VOUS
Dear Fred,
It is awful here in France. Hospitals are overflowing and the gay discos are more full of sex than even in America. In fact, the bars and discos are overflowing with Americans! Your old trick from Paris you told me about, Jacques T., the famous fashion designer, he is dead. He fucked with dozens of people on the night before he killed himself. “If I am dying, then I die in the arms of my beloved countrymen,” he is said to have said. He threw himself from his balcony. Twelve stories. He landed in the Seine. He had dressed himself in one of his famous expensive ballgowns that were sold in your Bergdorf. What are we to do? Please tell us all! You are the only one anywhere who is saying anything. Even here in France, when I mention your name, they make faces. In France, every leader gets laughed at when they try to tell the truth. I thought you were the leader.
Love, Didier
P.S. Pierre Bergé and Yves S.L. give me money to keep our Gai Pied magazine going. What do your Kipper Gross and Sam Sircus do for you?
THE UC DENIALISTS
Why did it take so long? Dodo is full of shit. French scientists are full of shit. Dr. Anyone who claims that UC is the cause of UC is full of shit. Marty immediately christens them the UC Denialists. Fred asks Marty why he
takes them so seriously, why he even dignifies them by acknowledging their existence.
Laurent Lascivio, Dr. Pascall Dumtrum, and Orvid Guptl. They don’t know each other, but they all say the same thing. There is no such thing as UC. Orvid has suddenly decided it’s caused by pigs. (Something is beginning to happen to Orvid.) Laurent thinks it’s caused by Dridgies. Dr. Dumtrum thinks it’s caused by syphilis. Dr. Dumtrum is a distinguished scientist, with tenure at Yaddah. He even has a Nobel. The White House awarded him this country’s Medal of Freedom. President Ruester himself hung it around his neck.
Enter young, attractive, homespun Betsy Leadstrom. No one’s heard of Betsy, and she’s getting published in leading magazines like Playboygirl and The New Gotham. Who is she fucking to get into The New Gotham? Hadriana Totem? Betsy’s heard about ZAP and says it won’t work on UC because there’s no such thing as UC.
ZAP is once again making its way out of the shadows into life, or death. The first two sets of trials were such a mess that new trials are set up. There must be a trial that will produce more favorable results. Von is losing patience with Dash. Betsy is not the only one who’s calling ZAP poison. Michael Callan of NAPWUC is calling it poison. Even Fred, in one article, has been far from neutral: “I am only positing this as a possibility: this shit isn’t good for you,” even though, as he often makes a point of saying, “I try never to take a stand on anything medical.” Dash and Debbi and Maggie and Hube and Von and Daniel and Jerry huddle, liaise, brainstorm, ignore each other, save for one overriding principle, to nip this bad publicity, including these denialists, in the bud before it’s too late. The only way to do that is to present a united front that ZAP is good for you.
Up to now it hasn’t been.
They’re going to try again.
A LOVER’S LAMENT
How do I love you now, my sweetie? With your vomit and your blood and your shit so messily adhering us to each other. Our love was always messy, wasn’t it? But not like this. It was messy because of sweat and semen, passion’s fluids, not death’s.
HUGS
“Still no reason for hysteria!” So proclaim headlines of the Brothers of Lovejoy press in their 242 newspapers across the country.
The writer of this, Ortus Grumpp, had a great-great-grandfather who came west with Herod from Fruit Island. Today’s Grumpp is an Elder Ancient (EA) of the Church. So much of history is filling in the gaps. Gaps are holes left open on purpose so the Grumpps and Elder Ancients of this world can fill them in. All the best histories have them.
“In spite of fears that it’s spreading to heterosexuals, it isn’t. Jesus has told me. He actually hugged me, He was so very pleased and excited.” It should be remembered that one of the tenets of this religion is the freedom to talk directly to God, to Jesus, to angels, to anyone of authority in Heaven.
An article in The Truth by Dr. Dearie Fault himself raises the issue.
“Is it possible that heterosexuals do not get The Underlying Condition?” The Truth is now giving Dearie more latitude. Ortus is pleased to see that that Dr. Jerrold Omicidio has this to say: “We continue to see cases in homosexual men and drug addicts and find little supporting evidence that the heterosexual population is adversely affected.” Good for Omicidio, Ortus thinks. Guess my boys in D.C. got through to him.
Yes, Jerry did say that. Daniel watches him. “It breaks my heart,” Daniel tells Fred. “He’s no good at politics. I sense he wants me to hug him and make it right. He is a cold and protected man. We have to have hope.”
Fred screams at Daniel: “You’re a fucking dreamer!”
Daniel ignores him. They speak to each other; they don’t speak to each other; each day brings a different act in their own drama.
“What are you doing!” Jerry said when Daniel did try to hug him after a particularly nasty swipe at him in The Prick. Daniel told him he needed a hug because he was taking so much shit, “It has to be hard on you.” “Keep your hands off me!” was Jerry’s reply.
Fred goes apoplectic. Something is happening to Daniel. It’s like an exposure to UC itself, the way he’s being poisoned by some infection. Fred wonders if he’s already lost him. “Can’t you see there are many ways to lie and this is one of them! Why is Jerry saying this? He’s very good at politics! Hermia’s discovered that his wife’s brother is a rabid right-winger. What separates the great men from all the rest is that they make the right decisions. That’s definitely not been Jerry. Oh, Daniel! I can just see it all playing out. Jerry is a lie, a lie to society, to dying people, a helpmate to continued dying and death. A great man would have chosen other great men to work with so they could challenge each other to find a cure. Jerry does not want to be challenged. He acts as if he wants us dead. We continue to be in even bigger trouble. Deep Throat agrees with me. Oi and double oi!”
Again, Daniel doesn’t respond.
Fred is sort of pleased with this reading of his tea leaves. He’d not put a few pieces together in quite this way before. How can anyone find anything hopeful at present? The notes for his speech are getting longer. By now more are impatiently awaiting it. Eric promised he’d have a full house.
So what is he waiting for? The former moviemaker is still telling him the timing isn’t quite right yet. But he thinks it may be getting closer. Fewer guys are saying nasty things about him. One old ex-friend even reached out to him on the street and silently gave him a hug.
DR. ISRAEL JERUSALEM IS ARRESTED AND SENT TO PRISON
He misses Grace terribly, to share this with, to hear her say, “Congratulations, you fucking old Jew. You carry on the great tradition. We all were once medicine men.” He remembers the first feelings of excitement that came from scientific discovery, from being with the Iwacky, where he got his first inkling of UC. Israel can see it as he sees a dark cloud in a bright blue sky. His medicine man past is living with him today, as if they are one and the same. There is still time enough for him to make his name for history. He is preparing to announce his great news about its origin, to take that dark cloud away.
He had not paid enough attention to UC. There had been a war on. His practice was sick soldiers, and old people’s ailments, arthritis, liver, indigestions. A steady flow of aging patients all with bad tummies is enough to keep a doctor too busy. He is now shaking with excitement. When Israel unearthed his ancient lab notebooks of more than fifty years ago, he finds that he saw the same in the blood of Evvilleena Stadtdotter, Mercy Hooker, and now Darcus Charles Graves, that all match the blood of the Iwacky and the blood that Deep Throat brought back from Africa. The cancers of this world work this way! He will be a Nobel Prize winner for Isidore Schmuck yet!
But Israel is suddenly arrested by federal police and Minutemen from the Tricia Institute for having sex with minors while being employed under a United States government contract to research the Iwacky tribes in the upper Andes Mountains when he was nineteen years old. The statute of limitations doesn’t exist if the “crime” happens while on a government grant. His diaries for those years, so beautifully written that Margaret Mead herself cited them as “among the most important and sensitive of anthropological documents,” had just been uncovered in the Admiral Mason Iron Vaultum Library by a Lovejoy graduate student, Nestor Fetman. Fetman had been tipped off about them by one of the ten Iwacky children Israel had brought to this country and adopted and educated as if they were his own. Fetman passed these diaries on to the more rabid branch of Lovejoys, the Furstwasserians, who have quietly sucked up a great many positions in the Ruester administration. Attorney General Manny Moose signed the warrant and President Ruester himself made a point of publicly ridiculing Dr. Israel Jerusalem as “a shameful, sinful man who has besmirched the face of American science.” Once upon a time when he was young, Israel wrote in his diaries about his feelings for the boys who were throwing themselves into his arms, as was the Iwacky custom (and still is, in the Andes and Africa), which still requires such “rites of passage for all young men” or ostracization, both for th
e recalcitrant youth and the unobliging adult who is found guilty of insulting their culture. These young men, who so hungrily sought his body to give them theirs, touched his heart deeply. And he wrote about the experience in startlingly beautiful prose. And so now Israel Jerusalem, at seventy-seven years, is incarcerated in a prison in Nome, Alaska. No one from the media would hear his side of the story. Dr. Geiseric, to his credit—“Why is it to my credit? Israel was my mentor!”—tries to arouse some scientific support for Israel’s release. “The man is seventy-seven years old, for Christ’s sake. Since when do we put people in jail when they are seventy-seven years old?” There will be a trial, perhaps, if Israel lives long enough, but let’s not count on it. How long will he be in jail before they bring him to trial? No doubt, at his age, it will be for longer than he can live.
You have to wonder. Fred, the always suspicious, wonders. It all happened so fast, and just after Israel got so excited over his realization about glause. Israel had called to tell him about it, “since I know from Grace that you are involved in telling the truth.” Both Fred and Israel are still reeling from what Hermia told them about what had happened to Grace after her work at Partekla. “Sooner or later they always get you,” both Israel and Hermia had said to each other and Fred.
Like Grace, Israel had seen the face of UC and been silenced.
So much for his decades of work and discoveries, for all the patients and young men he saved, for all the life he gave to others.
ANOTHER PIECE OF AGING VURD
By a vote of 94–2 Congress passes a revised and more detailed amendment banning any funding of UC programs that “promote, encourage, condone or mention homosexual activities.” Introducing the amendment, Sen. O’Trackney Vurd said, “We have got to call a spade a spade, and a perverted human being a perverted human being.”