The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  So what the fuck is he worrying about? One thing he should have learned by now, in Washington fear comes with the territory.

  Besides, he’s got a new customer. Bart Shovels has heard about his skills.

  FRED WONDERS: WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ORVID GUPTL?

  Orvid is becoming stranger and more unpredictable. He makes up “facts” about the people he hates, to coincide with his hatreds. The latest is he’s convinced everyone in the CIA and the right wing are going to lock up all gays if we persist in making waves and fighting UC as a gay illness. So he’s manufactured a straight epidemic, the Chronic Exhaustion Epidemic (CEE), to get the right wing’s attention focused elsewhere. He thinks I’m dangerous because I harp on the gay community and the UC issue. He really hates FUQU. He beseeches me to use my voice to trumpet CEE or Chronic Immune Deficiency Syndrome (CIDS), which it would appear he’s made up as well, and which is what you come down with if you have CEE. “Both of these, only straights can get. Don’t you see!” he yells at me. It’s actually a very clever ploy, if he believes anyone is really paying any attention to him or The Prick, which, somewhere, maybe they are. “The Library of Congress still hasn’t canceled its subscription,” Orvid tells me.

  “You just called me dangerous,” I say to him. “After all we’ve been through together and how much you’ve supported me.”

  He holds up a copy of The Prick’s next front page, with a photo of Monserrat emblazoned with “The Prick’s Swastika Seal of Disapproval.”

  “Monserrat’s a particularly big enemy—because she knows that UC is not the cause and isn’t saying so. She wants ‘behavior modification’ of the gay world enforced.”

  “That’s not true and you know it,” I say.

  I try to take him to lunch.

  “I don’t eat lunch. What do you want?”

  “I want to know why you’re doing what you’re doing. We used to agree with each other. More or less.”

  “I don’t have any use for you now.”

  “Well, that’s certainly blunt and to the point. I’m sorry you feel that way. We were very useful to each other there for a while.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a minute. Then he says, “I have to do it my way.”

  And then, for some reason, because it has occurred to me recently that I’ve never dealt with this information in any … I don’t know what to call it, meaningful way, I hear myself saying, “Do you remember Masturbov Gardens?”

  “How could you forget that place. Gross.”

  “Well, we grew up together there.”

  “I know.”

  “And Arnold Botts was there too.”

  “I know. Snotty snit!”

  “You pissed on him.”

  “I did not.”

  “Yes, you did. I thought it was very gutsy. He’s going to be the new CO of Presidium. The word is they’ve got some new treatment discovery. And the guy with Coke-bottle eyeglasses is…”

  “Dodo Geiseric.” He gives me a piercing and challenging stare. “I’ve been doing my bit. I’ve run my Dodo Nazi cover three times. I also had Dr. Sister Grace on the cover. She was my babysitter too.”

  “Why did you make her a Nazi cover?”

  “You don’t think there are Nazis running around? She’s nuts.”

  “She’s dead. And she was a friend, not an enemy. She worked hard to save us.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s your opinion. She used to suck my dick. My four-, five-, six-year-old dick.”

  “I don’t believe that. She was a lesbian.”

  He shrugged and stood up.

  I shrugged and stood up.

  I made one last attempt. “You had something really important going. The best gay newspaper in the world. Why are you sabotaging it?”

  He didn’t answer. He wasn’t even looking at me anymore. His back was turned to me as he searched for something on a table on the other side of him. I waited a minute but he didn’t turn around.

  And that was that.

  BART SHOVELS’S LIST

  Dear Boss-to-Be:

  1. The mass media, owned by big business and cowed by government intervention and right-wing attack, will help us to bury radical activism by ceasing to cover it.

  2. Activists are ill-prepared for the struggles in which they find themselves.

  3. Covert action enables us to exacerbate a movement’s internal stresses until beleaguered activists turn on one another.

  4. Manageable disagreements are inflamed until they erupt into hostile splits that shatter alliances, tear groups apart, and drive dedicated activists out of the movement.

  5. All this is done without undermining the image of the United States as a democracy, with free speech and the rule of law.

  6. You will want to break FADS’s balls so drug companies can release anything and everything faster at any price they want to.

  Just to keep you apprised of what we’re looking forward to.

  JERRY LIES

  DANIEL

  Omicidio is on one of those Sunday-morning-in-Washington TV talk shows and lies. He says everything is being done to fight UC that can be done. He says he has enough money to do anything he wants to do. He says it is not so long until a vaccine will protect the unprotected, and a cure, which will keep people alive. Does anyone sense, can anyone see, if Jerry is conscious that he’s saying these words of untruth, to hope, for whatever this might be worth, that he’s aware that another person is saying them, another Jerry? Or is that still wishful thinking on my part? Since all his TV questioners are equally ill-informed about UC, and most uncaring, there’s not much “explain yourself” that ordinarily transpires, whatever issues are being discussed. The conservative guests (four out of five) are more interested in saying the words anal intercourse on national television.

  I ask him why he said the things he said.

  He answered: “I’m calming the waters.”

  I have sat next to this man long enough now and he is still a cipher to me.

  Deep Throat had told me: “The last government bureaucrat who told the truth on Sunday morning on national TV no longer holds his appointment. He was called into the White House within hours of his truth-telling and relieved of his duties by some tenth-in-command.”

  Jerry stares at me. He doesn’t blink an eye but his stare is boring right through me, which I believe is his intent.

  He gets up to walk out of the office.

  “Why don’t you fire me?” I yell after him.

  “I don’t know! You’re a very good doctor, an endangered species around here. Maybe you’re my conscience.” And the door slams closed really hard.

  FRED

  I don’t believe he said that about you being his conscience! I think you are now hearing things! You are seeing, still, only what you want to see. And I am seeing less and less in you of what I want to see.

  I write to understand and I don’t understand Jerry, no matter how much I write about him. I’ve always come to some conclusion about everyone I’ve written about. T+D is also trying to figure out the best way to deal with him and with NITS, which, as Iris tells us, amount to the same thing. He is Mr. Creepola and we have put our bodies in his jerk-off hands. Daniel, how can you continue to believe in this evasive lying asshole!

  SOME WOMEN OF FUQU

  JILL

  After another demo at City Hall, Arthur turned to me and said, “There have been hundreds of arrests this time. We have to go to the police station and see what happened to them.” That’s when I started doing my pro bono work to keep our kids out of jail.

  One thing that distinguished FUQU from other organizations was, not passion, but the depth of passion, because it really was life and death and no doubt about it. A lot of these guys were going to die, and they knew they were going to die, and they were already dying, so arrest was nothing to them. Nothing. They were going to participate in any act of civil disobedience until they were carried off. Rafsky, so thin and near to death, and others out in the frigid winter, s
hackled themselves to the axles of the pharmaceutical delivery trucks leaving Muck or Greeting in New Jersey at dawn in the snow and ice. They were prepared to freeze to death.

  I try to convey all this in my appeals to each judge. Your Honor, my clients are willing to endure harm, to endure police abuse, which is happening more and more. And I’ve learned through them something they never teach us in law school—that really it’s the fight that is important. The courage they give me, Your Honor, these men who are dying. I am proud to be their lawyer, to represent them in your court.

  How could I have any fear! It’s changed how I practice law!

  MARIA

  We read this article in Cosmopolitan by this guy who said that the vagina was so resilient that if you had sex with a UC-positive man and he came inside you, oh, your vagina was so resilient that there was no way you were going to—this guy was insane. We can’t even believe that they published this. Jean, myself, Rebecca, Maxine, Gerri, Ann, we looked this guy up in the phonebook, called him, and said we’d like to come and speak with him, we were part of the Women’s Committee of this UC organization. He lived on the Upper East Side. He was a slight man. He had gray hair, and he was quite gracious, and then as soon as we all sat down (Jean was recording this on her little tape recorder) we began to challenge him—what was he talking about, that the vagina is resilient? Where did he get that research? “Well, I read it.” Well, how could you read something that is not even corroborated scientifically and then put it in a magazine that millions of women read and allow them to feel safe when they have no reason to feel safe? We had a very specific goal. Dr. Gould, we would like you to write in Cosmopolitan and tell the public that you were completely wrong. And he refused to do it, and we were all hustled out very fast. We tried to have a normal conversation, we tried to treat him like an intelligent human being. He’s not. What are we going to do about it?

  MAXINE

  We marched on Cosmopolitan. Police had already set up barricades. They heard FUQU was coming. They immediately started asking for IDs, would not let us inside, and then they started pushing us off the sidewalk. And then a few of us got arrested and I started poking a cop, saying, I’m taking down your name and number. The one thing we’d decided was that the only person who couldn’t get arrested was Gerri, because her second brother who had UC was in the hospital. He needed a blood transfusion that day, and she needed to get there. She was going to just be marshaling so she wasn’t doing anything. I asked the cop, again, for his name and number, and Gerri saw that he was going for a nightstick that was in his boot. So she put her arm around me, to get me away from him. The cops were very nervous, because we had all these women. They had a police wagon there. Gerri saw that he was going to go and hit me—he had got his stick out, to hit me—and so she put her arm around me and she said, You don’t want to stand here, Max, you want to come with me, and she started walking me down the street. Well, they grabbed her, and they put her into the police van. And it was like all of us knew this was it. Maria climbed up on the hood of that police van. The rest of us surrounded it. Everyone was banging on its windows, screaming, Let that woman go! We were crazed. It was freezing. Jean with her camera was wearing the thinnest little shoes. It was five degrees. And we were all off the wall, shouting and banging. Then one of the cops said to his buddy, we better give these dames a warning ticket to get them out of here, because otherwise all hell is going to break loose. And so then they let her go. And Gerri came out. It was a wonderful end to our demo. This was the first women’s demonstration that FUQU did. It put the Women’s Committee on the map and made people in FUQU aware of us.

  MARIA

  I had to go to a temp job, and this girl walks by, and she has all this dry cleaning and she goes, Maria? Don’t you remember me? We went to Smith together. And she was this girl who had taken the path that a lot of girls took. She’d gone to Wall Street, she’d become very successful. The dry cleaning was the thing that got me because I didn’t own anything that could be dry-cleaned. I was still sleeping in the same clothes so I could just get up and go the next day to another of our actions, and she had dry cleaning. And she said, what are you doing? And I said, I’m in this protest group, here’s our flyer. And she said, wow, I really envy you, you’re doing something important. I had defaulted on my student loans. I never had enough money to pay my rent. I did not have a job or any kind of career path. But she thought I was doing something really important.

  JEAN

  Did I have sex with other women in FUQU?

  Yeah, I did. Not enough, really not enough. But I did. The men were having sex with men, the women were having sex with women, men and women were having sex with each other, and there were people who were migrating back and forth. It boiled down to the Emma Goldman saying: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution.” If we can’t fuck, what are we doing here? Bordo and I have a long history of working together. We’re very dear friends. But there was one time being on a subway platform with him when I really wanted to throw him on the tracks because I found out that he had basically slept with all the women I was attracted to.

  REBECCA

  FUQU was very sexy. Its lack of compromise was very sexy, at a time when some of us were still hovering around an attitude of does the gay community like us. And FUQU said, Well, so what? Why do we need to be liked? For a group that had so much sexual energy I think that’s important to understand in context. Here were all these people coping with an illness that is transmitted sexually. So to be happily sexual in defiance of that was extremely bold. It was radical to say that you were still going to have safe sex and fuck and be a cocksucker and all these things when there was so much shame attached to the fact that this disease was sexually transmitted.

  Every moment everyone felt fear.

  Which made us love each other more.

  REVENGE FOR WHAT?

  At the next Issues Committee meeting, this guy Kenneth suddenly speaks out for the first time. “You know, I bet that Jerry Omicidio wants to kill us for revenge.”

  “For what?” The question immediately comes from several in the room. FUQU has its first office to be used for committee meetings. It’s way over near the Hudson, a very inconvenient neighborhood. But cheap.

  “Well, you know, revenge is a funny thing. It doesn’t have to be for anything specific. It can be a ‘just because.’ A ‘just because’ doesn’t have to have any basis in reality. He could just hate us. He could be a fervent right-wing Republican. Someone in his family could be dating faggots or be gay themselves. Maybe his wife’s a lesbian. Maybe he’s gay himself. I’m just saying all this because so much of our energy is going into wondering why he’s behaving like he is, and I’m just saying”—and here he shrugs—“people are going to be what people are going to be. Why, somebody murdered somebody last week at this place I work at. And he’s claiming to be not guilty.”

  “Actually murdered? In cold blood?” Sparks asks. “I’ve never worked at places where murders happen.”

  “Where do you think you’re working now?”

  “Good points, Kenneth,” Scotty said. “Sparks doesn’t live in the real world sometimes.”

  “Fuck you, Scotty.”

  “Fuck you, Sparks.”

  Kenneth now suddenly says, “Do you think we’ve been infiltrated by some spy who works for Jerry?”

  Fred suddenly wonders if Jerry actually wants his kids murdered. That possibility hadn’t occurred to him. Revenge for what? Daniel said, “God, it really is like some spy story. Maybe Russia has infiltrated some moles.”

  “Do you believe in revenge?” Fred asks.

  Daniel answers, “I think by now not only would I believe anything, but I wouldn’t rule anything out. I’m tired of you calling me Mr. Pollyanna or Mr. Naïve.”

  Sparks and Scotty have each started thinking about that word, revenge. Each tried to discuss it with Ann, who’d been a big-deal TV news executive. “So what?” she answered each separately. “Hate is h
ate, and too many people hate us. Don’t you listen to Fred? We have to hate back bigger than their hate of us. I don’t see that happening yet.”

  “MY GOD, OUR GOD, MAY WE NOT HAVE FORSAKEN THEE”

  This is a speech delivered in the Herodian Amphitheater carved into the mountains near Etalba, on the Utah-Colorado border, by Dr. Ekbert Nostrill of NITS, on the occasion of his being raised to the Ninth Level of Theodicy of the Disciples of the Brothers of Lovejoy Church. Dr. Nostrill is by now a four-star general of the U.S. Public Health Service. The audience is composed of ten thousand young people, evidently singled out somehow for their appropriateness to hear these words:

  I express my love and total respect to my young brothers and sisters struggling with same-gender attraction. You who are true to the faith and obedient to sacred covenants are not few in number. I commend you for your unshakable faith in the face of the unwanted feelings you did not choose to have. I commend you for never forgetting that God loves you and that you are His sons and daughters. I commend you for not forgetting your magnificent divine potential for resisting temptation and evil. Deviations from God’s commandments in the use of sacred procreative powers are grave sins. Sexual sin is not new to the world.

  The Lord’s law of moral conduct is abstinence outside of lawful marriage and fidelity within marriage. Sexual relations are proper and appropriately expressed only between husband and wife within the bonds of marriage. Any other sexual contact, including fornication, adultery, and homosexual and lesbian behavior, is sinful. Those who persist in such practices or who influence others to do so are subject to Church discipline. Immoral behaviors, regardless of their cause, can and should be overcome and sinful behavior eliminated.