by Larry Kramer
And where was I while my organization was beginning to fall apart? As I seemed to be perking along okay and my liver seemed to be holding out, I elected to use my energy for what I thought would be the best use of my time. Nineteen ninety is a year of some acceptance of me by those who had earlier shunned and ignored me as a nutcase. I am increasingly asked to lecture, at places like Amherst, NYU, Yaddah, Oberlin, even Miss Porter’s. I give my Student Speech to seventeen different schools. People magazine does a spread. I get a few more op-eds published in The Truth. I’m now seen, by some, to be right, for a change. I’m trying still to get a film out of Adreena. My book of my reporting is out.
But it’s one thing to be right and another thing to force the system to finally do what we’re asking. We’re still out on our own in the world, and I’d left the kids at home.
And they are falling apart. Or about to.
You could research everything until you are buried in it, and you could talk to everyone still alive, and you would never, could never, get right the history of what’s happening right now. Is that the way with all history? Or just the history of wretched events? Which events aren’t wretched? No meaningful historical event is not in some part wretched. Hermia certainly bugged me enough about that fact.
When I go back to our meetings I hear the rumblings of approaching disintegration. I try to make nice. I try to get the sides I see forming up to talk to the other sides I see forming up. I recognize the signs of what I am hearing. I have been down this road before. How does one prevent a collision?
As if I could have made a difference. As if I could have put things right.
David will be critical of my inadequate behavior when he finally arrives. Just as Tommy was. And is.
ZIP
PERRY
I am driven in my bewilderment to set down at whatever cost the growing history of this latest drama and my part in it. It’s the least I can do for Francis and what Fred is beginning to call “our people.”
I am sitting in a corner, taking notes. This group of men are sitting in a private room at the Waldorf. They have completed the launching of Presidium Ltd. on Wall Street. Dr. James Monroe is the big head honcho who called Presidium into being and is the major shareholder. He’s meant to be very very rich from developing compounds and licensing them to pharmaceutical companies. A drug Greeting gave to some guy named Arnold Botts has turned out to have worthwhile potency against UC. Dr. Monroe evidently immediately recognized the profitable market for this compound and bought it from G-D, which was busy betting on ZAP.
Arnold Botts is scary. He was vice president of Greeting, where he worked to develop the drug Von Greeting said he acquired from Czechoslovakia. Botts and this Dr. Oderstrasse reformulated it to be fast-tracked as an inhibitor for the treatment of cancers, no mention of UC.
Dr. Schwitz Oderstrasse is Presidium’s chief scientist. He was a graduate of the Max Planck Institute in Germany and a staff member of Blood of All Nations, before joining the Partekla Institute in Idaho, where he and Botts tested this Adelphi on patients there. He’s scary, too. He then followed up these results with tests in both Germany and the Congo. He believes he has amassed sufficient convincing results to put it into human trials. A controlled clinical trial must somehow commence. FADS regulations of course require it.
Dr. Stuartgene Dye as Presidium’s chief scientific adviser urges caution. The good results thus far have been achieved in a hardly kosher fashion. Dr. Dye is now a Nobel Prize winner for his discovery of the primary mechanism for gene eradication and is considered an expert big deal. I don’t trust him either. He’s the strong silent type. He stares at everyone with piercing eyes.
The co-chairman of Presidium’s board is Linus Gobbel, late of the White House, another impressive name to bolster the new company’s respectability. “Fuck caution,” he says. “We know enough important people to skirt a few rules.” Bart Shovels is on the board as well.
This is big-time heavy-hittersville. And they’re all in this room.
Dr. James Monroe opens the door to an adjoining room. He looks like some TV star playing the head of the hospital, very trustworthy and noble. Waiting to enter are Scotty and Sparks, and Dr. Levi Narkey.
Monroe addresses his people. “Gentlemen, here is our next step.”
Monroe ushers in the T+D group. “Come in, come in.”
He then summons in a man pushing a table on which are stacked boxes of drugs.
“We are going to call it ZIP. It will zap the shit out of ZAP. Dr. Narkey will commence to continue your private clinical trial but now using the real McCoy and not your bootleg version. We shall provide our own data. Fuck FADS. In return for our supplying you with ZIP, we shall contribute fifty thousand dollars to your new organization.”
He then hands a check to Scotty, who gives it to Sparks.
Scotty says, “We had suggested a larger amount.”
Sparks says, “And to be consulted as equal partners in your research and plans for its testing and release.”
Dr. Monroe says, “One step at a time. Take it or leave it.”
Sparks folds up the check and pockets it.
A CALL TO RIOT
OUT AGE MAGAZINE BY FRED LEMISH
With this article I am calling for a MASSIVE DISRUPTION of the Sixth International UC Conference that is being held in San Francisco, June 20–24.
Every human being who wants to end the UC epidemic must be in San Francisco, either inside or outside the Moscone Convention Center, or the Marriott Hotel, screaming, yelling, furiously angry, protesting, at this stupid conference.
Dredd Trish has refused to speak at the opening of this conference. Dredd Trish has been a fucking shithead about UC, ignoring it just as much as his doddering, imbecilic predecessor with his Machiavellian wife.
This conference is about as “International” as the Ku Klux Klan. Dredd’s government now forbids anyone who has UC or is UC-positive from entering his wonderful country. Dredd is punishing us for having the naughty UC virus in our system.
We are being INTENTIONALLY ALLOWED TO DIE.
HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO HEAR THIS BEFORE WE ALL RISE UP AGAINST IT!
THIS GOVERNMENT OF SHITHEADS WANTS US DEAD.
WHY CAN’T EVERY GAY MAN AND LESBIAN GET THAT THROUGH HIS/HER HEAD? DREDD AND TADDY WANT ALL FAGGOTS, NIGGERS, JUNKIES, SPICS, WHORES, UNMARRIEDS, AND THEIR BABIES DEAD.
HOW MUCH MORE EVIDENCE DO WE NEED? WE ARE LINED UP IN FRONT OF A FIRING SQUAD AND WE ARE NOT ALL FIGHTING BACK!
WE MUST RIOT! I AM CALLING FOR A FUCKING RIOT!
We must scream and fight for our research and our cure AND OUR VERY LIVES!
BE THERE!
LEAVE YOUR FARTS IN SAN FRANCISCO!
And this is a shortened version. One way or another my call for a riot is printed everywhere.
That this all coincides with a return of my own body’s decline is ironically aggravating.
* * *
Dr. Gerta Helgobottom at this COD place now says there are fifty thousand cases of me, and Dr. Eugene Madagascar from your Harvard says there will be one billion of me before you know it.
FRED CHICKENS OUT
I didn’t go to San Francisco.
I chickened out.
I hadn’t given any thought to what I meant by riot. Or rather I knew what I meant but what others thought I meant and what the word means were construed very differently by many people. I just wanted a gigantic FUQU disturbance that would not allow the conference meetings to be held in their passive, unquestioning, business-as-usual, uncomplaining, never-ending denial of what was really happening. I didn’t mean violence, though I can see where it’s possible to read that into my text if you’re prone to it, by all means …
All hell was breaking loose in San Francisco. This was one time when my hyperbole was taken for fact. San Francisco went nuts. The news programs were filled with stories about what awful things might happen. Police were given extra training. The conference center was cordoned of
f and security beefed up. Everyone was expecting bombs and guns. They should have known that gay people just don’t do that sort of thing. I got so many interview requests that I whipped the frenzy up even more. It was almost funny to turn on the evening news in New York and see yet another step being taken to prepare against what Lemish was calling for in San Francisco. They were preparing for a massive riot! Barricades and expanded police and calling up the National Guard. One newscast showed the insides of the jail cell they were preparing for me.
I suddenly feel utterly powerless. I feel my liver dying inside me. I knew I wasn’t going to go to San Francisco. My liver is … no, I will not use that as an excuse. For some reason I think a lot about David, about what he endured and survived. I wasn’t in a Nazi concentration camp and yet this is how I feel. I try to calm myself by walking around all the time condemning Ruester and Trish and Omicidio and Geiseric for murdering me.
Yes, I chickened out of my own call to riot.
In the end, nothing much happened except that Scotty made a ringing speech, and a projection of Dredd Trish on the giant screen was ridiculed, and the surgeon general at HAH, Dr. Louis Sullivan, was booed so loudly that his words were completely drowned out, though he continued undaunted to the end of his speech. (The result was that Dr. Sullivan paid scant attention to UC throughout his entire tenure and made no bones about the fact that he was punishing us. A great attitude for a doctor to take, particularly one whose own population—Dr. Sullivan is a person of color—is particularly hard-hit by UC.)
No, I didn’t go to San Francisco. I received a number of phone calls warning me I’d be arrested at the airport and incarcerated until the conference was over. It didn’t occur to me to sneak in like a guerrilla and direct my troops from some secret hideout, or that I could have given some nifty press conferences from that jail cell. I caved. I am ashamed of myself. Some warrior, me.
I’ve often wondered why when we are most assuredly being murdered, someone among us doesn’t start murdering back?
The San Francisco disruptions didn’t occur. There were plenty of activists milling about, many thousands of them in fact registered for the conference. But by the end doctors and activists all marched in solidarity, led by Dr. Farrell Obernought! And Scotty! Arm in arm with Omicidio! With a bunch from T+D! I stared at them on my TV. I was in Table Medical having another procedure. I couldn’t believe what I was watching.
DANIEL TO FRED
So neither you nor I made it to San Francisco. What kind of spies are we? I’m not allowed to go. Why? No reason, Jerry says.
“Oh,” I respond.
Another interaction as nonspecific as this.
Our morgue’s told us they can’t handle as many as we’re sending. We have to outsource our corpses! Seventeen patients died yesterday. Jerry watches as Deep Throat, who’s been called in to help, and I check each one out. He’s expressionless. Like the dealer in a high-stakes game of poker.
And he smiled, the fucker smiled. “That’s why you’re here, that’s why I need you both here. To bear witness.”
Even Deep Throat did a double take on this one. Doesn’t Jerry remember cutting his balls off?
STEVEN’S SUICIDE
AVRAM: Steven committed suicide on the eve of the conference. We had our tickets to San Francisco and I thought he was looking forward to going. He’d been a presence and force in FUQU since our beginning. In a way, he helped to birth us, to form us, perhaps more than many others. He had studied political science at Ohio State and volunteered at our first meeting to draw up our charter, our rules and regulations, our Robert’s Rules of Order, which we came to call Steven’s Rules of Order. He came up with something that sounded just right for us, amazingly so. I want to say—and this is not meant to disparage his contribution but to give you an idea how gay men often operate, and FUQU was certainly no exception—that he was very handsome, Steven was, with a friendly kind of handsomeness, not snotty, as beauties often are, or visibly racked with insecurities, as many beauties also are. I think what I’m trying to say is that because Steven was so handsome (as well as smart), he got listened to more. You’d look at him talking in such an erudite fashion and be blown away. I was. We were lovers pretty quickly. I was intensely drawn to him and he responded. He had sandy wavy hair and a gorgeous body and I had a scrawny hairy one, and such a combo for a couple is unusual in the gay world. Steven was insecure, but he kept it to himself and no one would have believed him if he’d confessed it, just because he was so gorgeous and everyone wanted to sit beside him on the bus, say, when we traveled to out-of-town demos in Albany, say, where he was the first to force entry into the House chamber and lead the troops.
He didn’t smile much. I would discover he had little to smile about. But as for so many of us, FUQU came to be his whole life, the outlet for his anger and frustration, and he threw himself into it from day one.
It was a love like I’d never known. He was so beautiful and it was so beautiful and I still cannot bear that it was over so fast.
* * *
FRED: Steven wanted very much to be a writer. He was already freelancing, for a medical encyclopedia, and the stuff he showed me was as clean and direct as the charter he drafted for us. I suggested him to Pubie Grotty of The Village Vice, now that even they were writing about UC, and Pubie met him and gave him an assignment to write a short piece about a health bill pending in Albany. Steven showed me what he wrote, and it sure looked good enough to me. When he turned it in, Pubie was exceptionally abusive to him, going so far as to say that Steven would never become a writer, he had no talent, and then wound up the meeting by ripping the pages to shreds. Pubie confirmed these actions of his to me almost proudly when I confronted him.
“Why did you treat him that way?” I asked sharply.
“Had to do it. That’s how you learn what they’re made of. Do it to all the tryouts I am considering for further work. Sounds like I was right. He doesn’t have what it takes.”
* * *
AVRAM: Because Grotty destroyed his dream of being a freelance writer, Steven had to go back to his old job of being a booking agent for a “modeling agency.” He booked women hookers. He hated it. He thought he would never have to go back and do it again. “No one knew he was doing it,” I was told by his roommate, Kerry, a doctor who was writing the medical stuff for Tommy at GMPA and who knew Steven was back at his old job and hated himself for it. Kerry also told me that Steven was being kept by “a creepy ugly middle-aged married man who lives in our building who pays him for letting him suck him off so he can pay me some rent. I kept telling him he didn’t have to pay me any rent.”
“And he tested positive for UC. He has nimroids up his rectum,” Kerry said. “It’s been a tough few weeks.”
Then Kerry called me to say “Come over,” that Steven was lying dead on the floor at the foot of his bed. He’d taken pills from Kerry’s medical supplies. I went over and lay on top of him and beside him and kissed him everywhere. He was still warm. “Oh, please come back,” I kept crying over and over.
I fell apart. I was inconsolable. Everything was going great. We were going to move in together. “I make enough for the two of us,” I told him. “Let me help you get on your feet.” He was afraid to trust people. After all, his own father threw him out of the house when he found out he was gay. “I don’t know why you love me,” he said every time after we made love.
You want to know how Daddy found out? He found Steven in bed in a deep embrace with Daddy’s assistant football coach. Daddy was head football coach at Ohio, and Steven was having an affair with his assistant coach, who was Daddy’s best friend ever since college.
It just goes on and on. When will we stop being hated so.
I tried to deliver the ashes to Steven’s parents. I went to Ohio and located the house. Mommy and Daddy wouldn’t let me in, just like they wouldn’t talk to me on the phone when I called and identified myself. They hung up after I told them their son killed himself. They came out of t
heir house to confront me. I tried to hand them the urn with the ashes. They wouldn’t take them. Daddy was an older version of Steven, very handsome, wavy hair, muscles. Mommy looked pretty long-suffering. She didn’t say much. I put the urn down on the ground in front of them and started to leave.
“Don’t you leave those here!” Mommy screamed after me, choking back tears.
Daddy picked up the urn and rammed it into my hands and pushed me away from them and the house, yelling, “Go away, go away!”
I got really angry then. I shoved the bastard back. Then I ripped the top off the urn and started throwing the ashes all over the place, running around like a fairy distributing fairy dust. Mommy was moaning and Daddy—well, you wouldn’t believe what Daddy was doing. He was lying with his face in some flowers the ashes had fallen on and he was crying out, “Oh, my son, my son, my precious son!” I knelt beside him to comfort him, and he jumped up and threw me down and screamed, “You get out of here, you dirty faggot, or I’ll shoot you. Now get!”
I got.
WOULD THAT WE HAD
Tommy had been a Navy SEAL on submarines and all that high butch stuff. We’d sit around and talk about murdering our enemies. We would have an ultra-secret covert group, and just go out and shoot them dead. Who’d be expecting nice gay fairies to be so butch? I brought up the notion on the floor and those interested met secretly to discuss it. We had about two dozen or so. I began investigating the legalities of owning guns. It all became quite complicated too quickly. Unless we could find a way to steal them, there was no way we couldn’t be traced. I chickened out on this, too. Even as I write this many years later I wish I’d been able to murder a few of our murderers.