The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  “She said I’m an asshole, wasting my time.”

  “Well, don’t you have enough money to do whatever you want?”

  “Yes, I do. I am doing what I want. What would you like me to do with it?”

  “Would you do something substantive to help end this plague? That’s what I want. More and more women are coming down with UC. That’s why I’m here. I thought I could shock you into it, shame you.”

  “How can I help?”

  “You want your sex lives back, then we have to end this plague. It’s spreading all over the world. To both sexes and all colors. Go after the government, the evil Omicidio. Shame Trish for NITS dragging its ass. Coming from you, that would be a big deal. People would listen. They wouldn’t expect it, coming from you. Korah Ludens would be proud of you. Could you do this? Any of this?”

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s the least you could do.”

  “After all I’ve done. There you go again.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I don’t think I did anything bad or wrong or causative. My mother told me men just have to fuck. People do what people do, with or without Sexopolis.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “No? This plague, as you call it, would have happened no matter what. It was only a question of when, where, and how. Like the Roman Empire had to fall. It’s common sense. The human body can only take so much.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because Sexopolis continues to grow and flourish.”

  “You realize this and yet you perpetuate it?”

  “I’m not responsible for what mankind chooses to do.”

  “But I tell you that you are! And what you’re doing is evil.”

  “There you go with that word again. You seem to throw it around like Silly Putty, hoping it will stick against the wall. Give my regards to Daniel. What I did with him was quite … precocious. Come, let me show you around.”

  For a gay man the Sexopolis Palace is quite preposterous. Many dozens of naked, very blond girls, huge boobs, shaved vaginas, nose jobs, all parading around looking for a husband among the throngs of B-list celebrities. It sort of reminds me of Fire Island. I talked to some of them. Some were quite intelligent. Many come from lives they were desperate to escape. Each has to sleep with Mordy at one time or another. As he comes really quickly, it’s not that much of an ordeal. “It comes with the territory,” I hear from many of them. They’re all afraid of him. He punishes them if they get out of line. There are many rules to abide by. “But in the end it’s very boring,” one of them said. “There’s nothing else to do here but wait to see if he’ll choose you for a Sexopolis Girl photo layout. I’ll probably be grilled for talking to you for so long. There’s always a girl who will tattle. I’m up for a TV show about us. Wish me luck so I can get out of here. You seem real nice. Too bad you’re a fairy.”

  Sexopolis will mount a huge campaign. “Let Us Dream for You!” Whatever that’s meant to mean. It’s a big success. New subscribers galore.

  Mordy, Adreena, Rust Legend, Randy Dildough, Sammy Sircus, Jack Warner getting rid of James Dean: this town’s constipated with a bunch of not very helpful people.

  So it’s back to New York and our plague and our continuing FUQU.

  ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH

  And in Idaho, that blessed state of beauty, who meets there now in the vicinity of David’s first American incarceration? And what is this convention of people, all wearing masks and hoods, their bodies and faces shielded from sight and view? They are of course Furstwasserians, Klansmen, Black Nights, Adelphia Warriors, Stalwart Children of God, Lionhearts, Holy Nation of Yahweh, Alliance of Supreme Whiteness, and others, so many others, newer names from newer corners of our land, all now growing together into this monumental group, their membership increaseth a thousand thousandfold since that very first Herod not so long ago. Each week another group arrives to settle in. Each day more members move here permanently. Hate is even more enshrined here. Encore! Partekla Endures! Partekla Über Alles!

  All these people hate us.

  FREE GIVEAWAYS

  Continuing a tradition begun in postwar Washington, flyers covered with the names of specific targets of this week’s hate are distributed in the cafeterias of all government buildings. After the war it was “the commies” who were exposed, followed shortly by “the fairies.” Soon the fairies took precedence, Communists having lost favor. Your historian apologizes for neglecting to keep you up to date on all these perambulations of enemies and hate. Just know that once a week, in every government cafeteria, lists of names are handed out by men in black suits and ties. These are Brinestalker men. Minna Trooble occasionally passes along to Fred “confidential” reports about “The Comings and Goings of Government Employees” put out by a new Shovels front, the Personnel Tracking Division of the Government Services Administration. “It never stops—these lists,” she tells him, “immediately followed by the departure of a noticeable number of male employees, many in important positions. I wager there are very few homosexuals in government employment by now, after all these giveaway lists.”

  DR. SALK CALLS UC “THE METAPHORIC DISEASE OF OUR TIME”

  “I see people acting like retroviruses. You might think of the regulatory system as being overly protective and becoming the equivalent of an autoimmune disease.” What is this once-great man talking about? He said he could do it a second time, rid the world of a scourge. He presents his theory at a conference where he’s the surprise guest speaker, all eyes on him. But his theory of the cause of UC has feet of clay and facts of sand. His experiments can’t be replicated by others. No one has the heart to tell him. Sad. Sad man. Sad end. Like Bosco’s. Everything is so fucking sad.

  SO WHAT ELSE IS NEW?

  DANIEL THE SPY: Even more lawyers! Most insulting to the French is that the American patent office officially acknowledged Dodo’s patent for his blood test and ignored Bordeaux, Nappe, Françoise, et al. When they complained by pointing out that their own application for Jacquie’s test was submitted some three years ago, the patent office discovered that the French application indeed had been on someone’s desk since its receipt. The French finally get really angry. The fight long squelched in French hearts is now beginning to erupt. Now so many new lawyers are turning up here that it’s impossible to remember not only who’s representing who but also for what, i.e., which part of which suit and countersuit. Ironically, both Jacquie’s test and Dodo’s test are manufactured by Audacia, the former by their French subsidiary. Lawyers for each are running around here. There appears to be bad blood between Audacia France and Audacia USA. To even suggest we use the “already accepted and approved” French test available out of Quebec, instead of the “new and improved” Dodo test, which we still know is neither, is tantamount to being an everywhichway kind of traitor. Jerry isn’t interested in this issue. “This is Dodo’s ball game,” he tells me.

  * * *

  DUDLEY: Gretta Lell is the ZAP queen. She’s one of Jerry’s PIs. She’s partnered on the biggest ZAP study with that big hunk from San Francisco … Obernought. She has a big gay practice in Miami. Jerry keeps funding more studies of ZAP. Why? Well, a lot of times someone would do a study because they needed to eat. Which is pathetic. Or they didn’t have anything else to do and didn’t want to look like they weren’t doing anything. Which is more pathetic.

  By now more of the scientists know about FUQU and they agree with what we’re doing. FUQU is a good guy to them. We could scream about the study that was getting funded that shouldn’t have been, and about the study that deserved to be that wasn’t. And we didn’t have to worry about stepping on someone’s toes because, you know, that’s exactly what we wanted to do.

  Levi says he’ll bet a million dollars Gretta’s study will turn out to be full of shit. We won’t find out for sure until Berlin.

  DEAR PERDITA

  Perdita Pugh is rich, old New England rich, Park Avenue rich, always dressed in
jewels and designer clothes, her hair famous for its unwavering upsweep, her crowning glory. For some reason, and from its very beginning, UC touches her mightily. She not only joined Tommy at GMPA as a crisis counselor but soon she’s in charge of all crisis counseling, devoting more time than most people who work for a living give to their jobs. As more and more of her clients die, her daily schedule now includes longer visits to their bedsides and attendance at their memorials. Though proud, inherently because of her Boston Brahmin background, she is modest and desperately wants to please her world, whatever she thinks it is. Her husband is also rich, though less so. I am in awe of her and she is frightened of me, I suspect because I’m one of those she wants to please but is terrified I might single her out for criticism, which I am now all too famous for providing in print. Perhaps this is too fancy a way of saying I think that anger terrifies her, and that is what I have to offer. Why am I in awe of her? Because I have never known any straight person so committed to helping sick gay people to die. It almost appears a perversion of sorts. GMPA by now has thousands of clients. She knows all the sick ones, most of whose counseling she’s supervised, and that is a lot of the dying and the dead. I have no idea what propels her enormous energy for this task. I don’t think anyone else does either. I know she’s often the butt of jokes as the “Angel of Death.” Occasionally I’ll run into her in a hospital corridor just coming out of a patient’s room. She will have stopped by a wall or a corner, taken out a lovely lace handkerchief, dabbed tears from both of her eyes, blown her nose delicately, tucked the hankie back up a sleeve of Chanel, waved to me with a beaming smile, and carried on on her rounds to other rooms down this very same hall.

  * * *

  Dear Perdita,

  We are desperate now. I don’t have to tell you how awful everything continues to be. This plague is becoming even more monstrous than all the monstrosities it’s showed us so far—and we have both seen many of them, far too many for sane people to witness and endure.

  Through these years you have been among the most courageous of all. You joined our fight when few others would. Your courage and your energy and your love have never faltered.

  I am asking you—no, I am begging you, to lend your remarkable voice and personality to another challenging task.

  The ignoring of this plague at the highest level must simply not be allowed to get any worse. You know, we all know, that no one is in charge.

  It is time to use all our energies to pressure the White House and the president for a UC czar. We must at last have someone who is given emergency powers to cut through the red tape and attempt to put some order into dealing with UC.

  It is impossible for most of us to get anywhere near the White House. Our voices in Washington are not heard, certainly not to the extent that our enemies, organized into a rigid army, are heard, and unfortunately listened to.

  You are a woman of great social prominence. You have grown up in this world of the rich and famous and powerful and you are connected to many who inhabit it at the highest levels. If you don’t personally know them, you know people who do. You know how to get to them.

  I am begging you to use this power, this power that we don’t have. We must start fighting UC in this way—going after the people on top to do their jobs. Could you in any way add this charge as your cause? We need you to do what perhaps is uncomfortable for you, but what you were born to do—use your name and prominence, and gather with you others like you, to get us where we’ve been unable to go. I think particularly of Joan Table, who is on the GMPA board with you and whose husband is on the president’s cabinet and to whom I have written a similar letter.

  I know that a desire to help right terrible wrongs is the motivation that drives so many of us in the fight against this awful scourge. But we must look for the ways we can be the most useful, even if those ways are uncomfortable to us. Believe it or not, I do not like my role of angry man or bully, but I discovered early that at least this way my voice gets heard.

  Yes, I beg you to try a new role, perhaps one less suited to your personality but not, I hope, to your conscience. That you and your husband come from old American families makes your efforts in the direction I am begging you to aim for a continuing fulfillment of your heritage.

  Could I share with you some of my ideas on how to do this?

  Yours truly,

  Fred

  She never responds. Nor does Joan Table.

  MICHELANGELO

  We’d formed this Outreach Committee. We prepared this program to take to the schools, “What Didn’t Your Child Learn in School Today?” The Truth hears about it and writes an editorial headlined: “Why Make UC Worse Than It Is?”

  FRED WRITES ANOTHER LETTER

  Dr. Omicidio, what does it feel like to have so many deaths on your hands? What’s it like, Dr. Omicidio, when you talk with Gretta Lell, who has many hundreds on hers, and Obernought, with several thousand of his own? Do you all play Can You Top This? I’ve got more patients than you have! I’ve killed more people than you have! I’ve murdered more people than you have!

  Dr. Omicidio, tell me what you do all day when you go to your office?

  TOMMY REPORTS TO THE GMPA BOARD

  You asked me to put down a few words about what I am feeling and seeing.

  The sad passion of being around all these young men, each and all of us pining for answers. They want to love each other again. What is love all about now? It’s about holding each other in the dark. It’s about not being able to get an erection. Or not wanting to get an erection. Or being afraid to get an erection. It’s about being afraid to kiss, lest saliva be poison. It’s about being afraid to take another’s cock in your mouth, or anywhere else. It’s about being afraid even to hold someone in your arms. Imagine being afraid of holding someone in your arms.

  This is love in the time of plague.

  You continue to oppose our taking our struggle to a higher and more public level. We cannot continue to remain so closeted, just holding each other’s hands.

  We must be stronger than ever.

  THE STORMING OF NITS

  ANN: To make a long and painful story short, no one came to see us. There was a big fire in downtown D.C. and the media all rushed down there. The best demo we’ve ever had played to an empty house. Every one of us deserved an Academy Award, for acting, for scene design, for costumes, the nurses and doctors and patients and corpses we portrayed literally littering the pathways with death, with those fucking police horses clumping through us, crapping their shit all over the place. No TV trucks or roving reporters to get all the sound bites I’d taught everyone how to deliver. There wasn’t anyone watching us except for some employees looking out their windows. Oh, well. Catherine and Bordo and Jean and Maria and their gang shot tons of footage, and it will wind up in some library, for the future, if we have one.

  It was the Big Show that no one came to. Not even Fred, who was in the hospital again. But his friend Daniel, wearing a Dredd Trish mask, came.

  Once again Scotty managed to get himself hauled up to the overhang above the entrance and wave our banner, so at least we had a bit of a charge.

  Piercing sound of an ambulance siren.

  INT. HOSPITAL ROOM. DAY.

  Emma is in an iron lung. Only her head is completely visible. Her breathing is very strained, and her speech is guttural and filled with pauses and coughs. Buzzy sits with her, not knowing what to say or do. Fred and Tommy are standing beside her.

  EMMA: Buzzy, come here.

  BUZZY: Yes, ma’am.

  He puts his head near hers.

  EMMA: I think you may die before I get out of here. Your labs are very bad.

  BUZZY: Oh, dear. You not expecting to get out of here?

  EMMA: It could be a while. Thank you for everything. You were an excellent assistant.

  BUZZY (he kisses her): Thank you, too.

  EMMA: This monster contraption was invented in 1927. Would you believe that because of two vacuum cleaners pow
ering it I can breathe?

  (Two doctors enter. Her voice becomes sharp and clear as she confronts them.)

  I know more about what’s happening to me than you do. So go away. When I need you I’ll let out a piercing scream. You’ll hear me.

  (The doctors withdraw. When they leave, her cough and breathing become labored again.)

  (To Fred:) Your liver numbers are getting too low. That NITS drug isn’t going to save you. You need a new liver. No one’s transplanting HIV cases. (To Tommy:) You keep an eye on him, you hear? (She has a coughing fit.)

  BUZZY: She hasn’t been in an iron lung since she was thirteen. She’s forty-three. She went home to her house on Cape Cod about five or six months later. She was gardening. She loved to garden. She had a stroke and her mom found her sprawled out in her wildflowers. She loved her wildflowers. “They grow good in Cape soil,” she said. She left me some money, “So you won’t have to go into a nursing home. Stay home as long as you can with Wilber. He won’t let you down like some boyfriends do.” Trouble is, Wilber died. These two important people in my life, gone. I can’t wait. I really can’t.

  FRED TO FRED

  The tidal wave of what T+D is learning and saying and trying to act upon and against is causing internal breakdowns. The women feel left out, sold out while the men go inside to deal with other men at NITS and the pharmas. The women now attack all advances as crumbs from the tables of male power. T+D members are now castigated for having “sold out the ideals of our movement.” Calls by Maxine and Harriett and Hettie and Tracy and now a Hester and others on the floor for a “moratorium on ‘going inside’” begin to frighten T+D, particularly Sparks and Scotty. People of color likewise begin to feel sold out and enraged. We’re not paying sufficient attention to UC among people of color. Once again I see gay people beginning (?), starting again (?), trying (?) to destroy each other. It’s heartbreaking to watch, if anyone is even looking at what’s really happening. Which right now I wasn’t.