by Larry Kramer
Why is she doing what she is doing? Many of their friends have wondered. The very first day she heard about this dreadful disease killing gay men, Perdita joined the fight against it.
Other friends wondered if she is terrified her Sweets is going to get sick and she wants to be prepared to help him when he becomes skin, bones, pus-covered, and sore-encrusted. Well, there are worse motivations for the charitable life; this one, in fact, is quite touching.
“They’re letting him speak in the cathedral?”
“Ummmm.” She is applying lipstick. She blows him a kiss. They are safe here. “Thank you for being so understanding.”
We are safe here, his blown kiss says back to her.
He finishes helping her screw the Pugh diamonds. He reminds himself how much better this is than the fate of the emaciated “Little Whispers,” as she calls them, whom she visits morning, night, and noon.
“Frankie died today. Mushie will be dead by morning. I must pop ’round to Invincible on the way to the cathedral to say goodbye to Fritz. Taylor will die tomorrow morning at Adonai. Murray should go tomorrow afternoon at Holy Pope. Heinz in the evening at Our Mother of Munich. And, oh yes, Paltz on Sunday at Russia’s Spirit. Busy, busy days and nights ahead.” Folding back the Week-at-a-Glance page in her Filofax, she starts to cry. So many Little Whispers just disappearing! She is a good woman, a good person, and she is trying her best, which is more than anyone else she knows.
How did she know the instant she heard about what would become UC and GMPA that her calling had called? “Fate. Just fate.” She answers her own question without questioning herself any further about her never-ending vigil. Winthrops don’t usually ask the reason why. Winthrops are the reason why. She is leading actually and absolutely the very life she wants to lead, that she was bred and brought up to lead. The Winthrops are one of New England’s oldest families. Boston is filled with Winthrop achievements, huge piles of stone shielding many a worthy cause from the painful rigors of an alien outside world. No Boston Brahmin could ask for more.
Bruce Niles is very sick now. Fred is needed now at GMPA more than ever. He was voted out three times. Yes, she is frightened of him. She knows he wants more of her than she can give. Thank God that FUQU thing seems to be keeping him busy. Such a rude and awful name.
Miss Prissy and her Sweets, which is what they call each other, set forth into the winter night for GMPA’s Gathering of Remembrances and Renewal. She wonders if Fred will behave in a religious setting. St. John the Divine is usually her favorite place to gather her thoughts. Well, perhaps not tonight. The cathedral will be packed.
She wonders if she should tell him that Dr. Omicidio has asked her to serve on an important peer review panel at NITS. She knows nothing about science. She would have to leave her Little Whispers. She would have to journey constantly to Franeeda. Fred might have some good pointers. Fred might help her to make up her mind. But she is frightened of Fred. He will want her to confront Purpura and Taddy, both women she abhors.
NO SENSE OF URGENCY
This is going to be a repetitive, one-note, offensive, repellent speech. It contains words that many will find unsuitable for a cathedral. It is filled with a wrath that many will find un-Christian. Well, I state up front that I don’t believe in God. How could I after what is being done to our people?
It is very easy to be angry with the system and the bureaucracy, with those who hate us, with those who don’t care about UC or saving us.
I look at the two organizations I helped to start, GMPA and FUQU—my children—and I ask myself: What have we accomplished?
And I am forced to answer: very little.
People are still dying like flies. The White House is still as inaccessible as the moon. We have been unable to make the world pay attention, much less care. We are still pariahs. We have not stopped this plague.
I believe we do not understand how this disease, in all ways, is spread. I don’t believe the blood supply is safe. Only a short time ago four hundred thousand people in France were given infected blood because of stupid bureaucrats.
I don’t believe much of what any government agency tells me about anything: UC, statistics, safety, sex, anything. If you’d spent as much time as I have these past ten years dealing with bureaucrats, you’d know how second-rate so many of them are, how mentally, intellectually, morally, and spiritually bankrupt so many of them are, how inexperienced, naïve, and badly educated in their fields so many of them are. How could anyone possibly trust a government that puts out a definition of UC that denies that women can get it?
So ten years into a plague, here we are. It is exceedingly weird to picture, ten years ago, the start of GMPA in my living room, and to be here with so many of you tonight in this cathedral, telling you that everything we have done and we are doing has been useless.
The only thing that is going to make this plague go away is a cure at the most and successful treatments at the least. And UC research is still in the Stone Age.
There is not one drug that is any good.
GMPA should have been in the forefront. Dr. Krank’s UC Foundation should have been in the forefront, a dozen other gay and UC organizations should have been in the forefront, of being the furious watchdogs on UC research. It is painful for me personally but I must finally face up to the fact that someone as clever and well-connected and appealing as my friend Dr. Monserrat Krank, and her partner, Elizabeth Taylor, have proved little more than dilettantes. Did it never occur to Elizabeth Taylor, who has a daughter-in-law with UC, to have requested a meeting with her fellow actor Peter Ruester, who got us into this mess? I look at the long list of famous names on Monserrat’s national council. I ask myself: What have any of these people done for UC? Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Burt Bacharach, Rosalynn Carter, Douglas Fairbanks, Samuel Sircus, Marilyn Horne, Angela Lansbury, Lady Bird Johnson, Adreena Schneeweiss …
Every one of these people knows people in positions of great power. And not one of them will get on the phone and call these people up and say, “Let’s all work together to demand and obtain help!”
Brooke Astor was quoted in the paper talking about the New York City fiscal crisis in the ’70s and how New Yorkers from all walks of life banded together to fight for this city. “Labor unions, financiers, artists, writers,” Mrs. Astor said. “One just doesn’t see that kind of rallying together today. I don’t really know why.”
Two years of my begging GMPA board member Joan Table for a meeting with her husband, Bob, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, who was on Ruester’s cabinet, have resulted in nothing. Joan Table, I don’t think you or your husband want to end this plague.
Why haven’t Bob Table and Dr. Saul Farber, the head of your hospital, the Table Hospital, and Dr. David Rogers and Dr. David Ho and Dr. June Osborn and Dr. Monserrat Krank and Sammy Sircus and Dick Jenrette and Randy Dildough and Pat Buckley and Perdita Pugh and Michael Sovern and Barney Frank and Gerry Studds all talked to each other and gone as a group to tell Dredd Trish that because no one talks to anyone else and because no one is in charge of a plague, millions of people are going to die?
Shame on you, Bob Table. Shame on you, Joan Table. Shame on you, Monserrat Krank. Shame on you, Perdita Pugh. Shame on you, Sammy and Randy and Dick and Douglas and Elizabeth and Woody and all the rest of you. Good fortune has presented you with wealth and prominence and power and a platform and a voice and you refuse to use them to end this plague that I am certain has already murdered a number of your friends.
It’s ten years since my living room and everyone still doesn’t get it!
Everyone will call me nuts—boy, this time Fred’s really gone too far and flipped his lid, now he’s even biting all the hands that are giving us our only handouts.
There’s got to be a higher vision for your reason for being! You’ve got to want to end this! Instead I see thousands of volunteers spending hours and days at endless meetings—just like all the bureaucrats in Washington—meetings that
have nothing to do with ending this plague. Plus all those useless, well-meaning board members who have absolutely no sense of urgency, no sense of urgency, no sense of urgency, no sense of urgency, that 40 million people will die in a few short years’ time.
I tell you, it would make not one single bit of difference to the progress of this plague if GMPA wasn’t here, and Monserrat’s organization wasn’t here.
We suffer one defeat after another, one death after another, one monster in the White House after another, and we take it, we lie down and take it, and our boards of directors and our national councils go home to apartments on Park Avenue in their limousines instead of driving directly to the White House.
Dr. Omicidio, little Napoleon, the government’s great apologist, now admits publicly that ZAP still isn’t working and that ZOK and the D drugs are yesterday’s rotten tomatoes. Muck just canceled their L drug. There is not one drug that is any good! I am telling you research on this disease is still in the Stone Age! Why? You think it’s because science has to take its own time? Wrong! It’s because nobody’s in charge of anything! Nobody is watching the pot not boil. Nobody is sending the blokes into the lab with the marching orders: study this! We know what has to be studied. It isn’t being studied. The full pathogenesis of this virus still hasn’t been studied. Pathogenesis means what’s really happening inside us that leads to disease. It’s usually the first thing that’s studied. Ten years—it still hasn’t been studied. Researchers do not want to study the bodies of dying, infected, contagious faggots.
I go to NITS and one office doesn’t know what the next office is doing. This complete and utter lack of communication exists from the highest to the lowest, from lab to lab, from sea to shining sea.
For years I have been calling, begging, pleading, for a Manhattan Project for UC. Why does every board and every organization ignore such an obvious suggestion? Why does no one join me in this call? Bob Table, if the value of your real estate is going down because of UC, and this city, of which you are unofficial mayor, is going down the toilet because of fearful tourists, and your hospital is so filled up we can’t get into it, why don’t you and Dr. Farber join me in this call for a Manhattan Project? Bob Table, I implore you from this pulpit in this house of God to call this meeting!
Let me try and put it one last way. If we spent half as much time, energy, and money fighting for a cure as we do fighting conservatives on mandatory testing and condoms and education and where should the next international conference be held and who can legally attend, we would have that cure by now and the science at NITS would be better than the food at Bob’s Big Boy. We are fighting for everything but that cure, and we simply do not have time to fight all these lesser battles.
And you don’t want to fight for that science and that research and those treatments and that vaccine and that cure. Because it requires a real shake-up of the political and the medical establishments, and you don’t want to get your hands dirty. You only want to feel good and virtuous, which comes from attending events like this and writing a few checks.
I don’t want your dollars to help me die! I want your brains to help me live! I don’t want your dollars to build GMPA another building! I want your dollars to save my life and save the lives of 40 million other people, which you can do without buildings and a staff of hundreds. You can do it with ten, twenty, fifty important powerful board members who are willing, finally and at last, to open their mouths!
We can’t expect the government to get its shit together if we can’t get our shit together. And in ten years we have not got our shit together. The right wing and the religious right and the conservatives and all our enemies, they have got their shit together and they’re not half as smart or as rich as we are. All the energy and creativity that goes into the UC walk and the UC dance and the UC this and that, that’s not how you end a plague. That’s how you bury people pretty. People who bury people pretty are not serious about ending a plague.
How do I give you the guts to be heroes and leaders? When are you all going to do that? When!
Well, now you can go home and say I heard Fred Lemish really going nuts, out of his mind, downright crazy and blaspheming one and all in a house of God. And you’ll ignore me again until ten years from now, if a few of you are still alive, when you gather here for another one of these tender meetings of “Remember, Respond, Resolve,” you’ll say, “Oh, Fred Lemish, thank God he’s gone and we don’t have to listen to him anymore.”
DAVID!
In the audience, in the crowd, watching Fred speaking and riveted by what he’s hearing and seeing, is David Jerusalem. He is smiling.
AFTER CHURCH
Mike Grundy and Farley Falls and Melton O’Gresci had left the cathedral fast because Melton had fainted at the end of Fred’s speech and they practically carried him to some restaurant to get some coffee into him.
Melton bawled. “I can’t stand to hear Fred Lemish make one more speech. He depresses me and everything depresses me and all I want to do is die.”
Mike Grundy, who is Melton’s lover and very very rich, as is Melton, shook an antidepressant out of a Cartier vial full of them and gave it to his lover with a bottle of water. Melton grabbed the vial and the water and ran out into the street. It was snowing heavily and he managed to get away from his friends by dodging cars and taxis and buses quite adeptly for one who’d so recently collapsed. He ran back behind the cathedral and found a little nook and swallowed all the pills and was found dead in the morning covered in snow and ice.
Fred, who had a terrible cough and managed to make the speech all doped up on something or other that Rebby had given him to “squirt down your throat,” went home with Tommy.
“You were brilliant, honey. One of your best. Did you see how they all stood up for you and cheered louder than I’ve ever heard before? A standing ovation in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine!”
“I don’t want a standing ovation! I want them to listen to me and do as I say! And they don’t. They fucking don’t.” He took a sleeping pill too, but only one and just to calm him down enough so he could sleep until tomorrow.
FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF JAMES JESUS ANGLETON
CODE NAME: MOTHER
So our leading characters are busy, which is what leading characters do or we wouldn’t need them for leading characters. It pains me to know what’s been happening and is going to happen.
I have seen power all my life. I have seen the mighty fall and the fallen rise and return to avenge. I have seen presidents too dumb to wipe their own asses. I have been called upon to save several of these.
There is not a person or place or drama (potential, incipient, on the verge of exploding) where I cannot summon a contact or expert or lackey. I have fashioned this world with my instincts and brain. I know I am the most powerful of men. I know I have saved my country more than once. And certainly more than my predecessors, for whom I have little if any respect.
I have never been afraid a day in my life. I was made for this. It came too naturally for it to have been a choice. I have loved every minute of it, challenging myself to sort out the impossible. If I fear anything, it’s that I’ll lose my protective cover because of those in power that I have saved. Loyalty is a nonexistent commodity in my line of work.
There is a plague. Until Deep Throat, I’d not paid sufficient attention to it. World peace, certainly this country’s, had not been threatened enough by it to bring it to my attention. Purpura facilitated much of this plague. Another foolish but very adept person who kept the country going, her way. She and Sam Sport had spoken every day. They each knew there are more idiots than usual running this world and capitalized on it. Neither had warned me about UC. Now Sam Sport has died from it. He’d been a horrid and evil fool, but useful.
I have known many evil men. Dictators only want power, so they could be tricked and bought. They’re usually dumb. Evil people are often but not always dumb. Through the war years there were enough educated men I could call on
. I’d brought many of them along from Yaddah. For years Yaddahites provided the intellectual grease that oiled every trouble spot in the world as we saw it. Now there are fewer men willing and open to such patriotic devotion. Tom Jones had located all the brains from Yaddah to work for our organization. I miss Tom Jones. We hadn’t been such good friends after Hoover made everyone sign his pledge of allegiance against the Communists. No, that hadn’t been one of Edgar’s best ideas. You can’t win them all, and James Jesus Angleton has won most of them. Beauty, too, can be evil, as is often the case in a plague. Ezra Pound was evil. He wanted to destroy every artist’s beauty but his own. I’d published him in my student literary magazine at Yaddah. I’d had to have him murdered at St. Purdah’s. He’d gone insane and treasonous. Tom Jones was dead now too.
Dredd Trish ran the CIA. I knew him well. He was a lousy spymaster. He was a lousy vice president and is a lousy president. He’s ignoring this plague too. He’s got a gay son he’s going to make president. That will prove very dumb. I have always smelled the stinkers coming. That’s how I know this UC will be a worldwide plague. Yes, I miss Tom Jones. Homosexuals have certainly been a complicated puzzle for this country.
Deep Throat’s suggestions are too expensive and controversial and hence difficult to execute. I fear it may be too late anyway. I’ll see.
These gay UC warriors are a touching and I fear a pathetic bunch. They are fighting with all their might. They can’t get near a president or any real seat of power. Between Ruester and Trish it’s one long kick in their asses. These poor kids are hated indeed. But I shall see what I can see.
These notebooks must be my elevation to a realm of unchallenged reliability heretofore unknown to CIA directors. Hans Frank laid waste to most of Poland and detailed every bit of his hateful crimes in hundreds of daily notebooks. They were his attempt to ascend to the Olympian Parnassian heights of immortality. He’d be there right alongside his Hitler, who had ruled his world. Perversely, Hans thought his notebooks would save him when he came to trial at Nuremberg. Well, my notebooks will give me the benefit of truth. I know my enemies will want to put forth quite a different story.