by Larry Kramer
WAR
SPENCER: The bitter divides have erupted like the atom bomb over Hiroshima. TAG is now actively campaigning against FUQU, telling people that the days of demonstrating are over, and FUQU is dead. And the people in FUQU are now the devil incarnate. It just breaks my heart. I stop going to TAG meetings. I know Scotty and Sparks. We had all lived and fought together like brothers. We’d hugged each other and kissed each other and gotten stoned with each other and for all I know we fucked with each other. We all had the same dream, to cure UC. We didn’t have to destroy each other’s dreams. There are still plenty of us left who still want to demonstrate. Maria and others say our demos are what keep them going. We will continue to make gay history! History should not be about fighting and shaming each other. I don’t have much time left.
* * *
BILL SNOW: The rest of FUQU, which didn’t want to go to TAG or wasn’t welcome there, decides that our new project is to be like the Manhattan Project that Fred had already advocated for with an op-ed in The Truth. We went back to look at how it was possible for something so scientifically advanced to happen so quickly. We’d already studied HAH and FADS and NITS and COD. One of the things we isolated was that there were these systematic constraints on research, pressures that pushed research toward whatever was the fashionable thing being done at the moment. If you were a university researcher, you needed to get grants. And not only just personally for your own work, but also for your whole lab, your staff, and your grant’s matching funds that went to your university. Your university was counting on you. So there’s all this pressure on you. So you get steered toward whatever the mainstream thing is. The drug companies are looking for profits, so any of those things that don’t have a high profit potential … forget it. And then you had—the ways in which scientists were—the jargon now is they’re “working in silos.” The virologists are all talking to virologists, and the immunologists, immunologists, and the people who do oncology, oncologists. And they don’t have much interaction. And yet, when we were reading the accounts of the Manhattan Project, a lot of breakthroughs happened because they were sitting over lunch, because they were together so much of the time. And we’d already seen that at conferences, where a lot of the most important traction happened in the hallways between sessions. And one of the things we realized was, if—if—you had these scientists from all these different backgrounds, who had all the money and facilities they needed, and they weren’t going to have to hustle to get the grant because they knew it was all there; and they’re all interacting much of the time, from across all the disciplinary boundaries—when one of them spins out the idea, Oh, I’ve been really looking to do X, Y and Z, da da. And someone from another discipline says, Are you nuts? Don’t you know that such—? Or, they say, Now wait a second! See, I’ve been looking at—you just exponentially speed up the cross-fertilization, the possibility for changing the way science is done. The problem is, the Manhattan Project had been something to create this weapon of mass destruction. So some of our group said we shouldn’t call it that—and that was when I thought, oh, please. The Manhattan Project—people recognize what it means; you’ll actually be able to sell this better. But whatever. We went with the McClintock Cure UC Project, because Barbara McClintock—eventually a Nobel Prize–winning geneticist—had been iced out by the men. That was one of the things that inspired us. She was studying the genetics of corn. And trying to figure out how genes are passed from one generation of corn to another. And one of the things she said was if you find on this ear of corn that there’s one kernel that’s discolored, you don’t ignore that because it’s an exception and just construct your theory based on the ones that all fit the mold. No, you try to figure out that one. Because if you can figure out the exceptions, you get the rest.
And so our whole thing was that we had to create a system that would allow people to study the exceptions, to study long-term nonprogressors, say; to study sick lovers whose partners were fine, say. At one meeting Maxine suddenly said, You know, what do we know about what happens when a penis ejaculates into a vagina or a rectum? Where does the UC virus go, and what does it do? And we find out that you can never get research money for anything that deals with our sexual organs, so no one is studying this whole area. TAG, of course, thinks we’re crazy. TAG believes they are doing what’s right. And they are willing to be really underhanded about it, not to let the two groups just be out there, coexisting in one organization, but to play hardball with another group of activists, who also think they’re right and believe they too have the approach that worked. So it was arrogance. Because by now TAG had been so intensely involved in the design of individual OI drug trials, they couldn’t see there’s a need for more than one approach. When you go, as they did, from creating Parallel Track and Compassionate Use to being on institutional review boards, and being on various committees, and then critiquing trial after trial after trial—I think it was extraordinarily difficult for them to step outside of it and say, we may be putting this intense effort into something that is almost certain to give us more of the same. And they kept saying to us, well … that’s pie in the sky, what you’re talking about, it’s pie in the sky. And we continue to make arguments that had been so key in FUQU, that if you actually can get enough people in the streets again, you can expand the bounds of what’s possible. But TAG is saying the time for the street demonstrations is over. You boys and girls go home now. And to say FUQU is dead, which is what they’re saying, more and more and over and over, is an indictment of all FUQU accomplished. Just as they felt that our not fully appreciating them was an indictment of their work. And when you forget that it needs to be that inside-outside thing, especially when you are there talking to Jerry Omicidio or some pharma … It’s a very hard thing to face up to the fact that getting a seat at the table means, really, almost nothing. The reason you’re given a seat at the table is to get you to stop pushing so hard and being so obnoxiously in-their-face.
I’m just, I’m sad that we—we can’t find the way to work together.
We’d lost our integration. We were unable to sustain the things that we’d learned. I hope I’m wrong. But the worst horror stories are real. I find that I only have two emotions anymore. Grief or rage. I thought burying one lover at the White House would help. It didn’t. And the new guy I’m seeing is suddenly sick now too.
Thank goodness, we still have Maxine. She keeps us going. She said she’s not surprised what’s happening. “Sooner or later it always turns into war.”
GAY HISTORY WILL NOT BE TAUGHT!
FRED
Donald cried when he talks about how we’re destroying each other. “And that we are doing this to each other,” he kept mumbling over and over. I had become close to him because he wanted to teach gay history and had been unable to. He fell in love with gay literature at Princeton and then at Berkeley, where he got his Ph.D. in gay lit. of the eighteenth century. I had been having my own horror story up at Yaddah about gay history. My brother had given Yaddah $1 million to set up anything I wanted. I wanted gay history to be studied. Yaddah was terrified, not only of me, but of the subject, of the very word gay. This was the first time they had an actual big donor gift for something “gay.” After too many turn-downs by too many deans and officials they finally agreed to setting up the Fred Lemish Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies and had actually employed somebody gay to run it. Well, he, Jonathan David Katz, a cool and very smart art historian who gave up tenure elsewhere to come join this crusading new thing at Yaddah, well, he had to get approval from one of these shitty second-class deans every time he wanted to go to the toilet. FLI went from bad to worse to worst. I discovered to my horror that what they were studying wasn’t gay history but all this queer and gender shit, not a whiff of gay Abe Lincoln at all. Constructionists. That’s what the gender studies folks are called. They had made up their own “discipline” that dealt with all the nonspecifics of gender and none of the specifics of identifying who we really were and
are and what we did.
I started losing my cool. I am not known for having much cool, so it wasn’t hard for me to lose it. It was not ten minutes before I told them that what they were teaching was bullshit and not what my brother’s money was meant to pay for at all. We never got much further along than that. The Fred Lemish Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yaddah, a part of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Yaddah, was kaput and that was that. Yaddah closed it down. They would not allow Jonathan’s exhibition of the love letters between Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg to open. They would not allow Abraham Lincoln to be taught as a gay man. They were particularly incensed when we uncovered that Yaddah’s primary benefactor, John Sterling, had been a gay man all his life. Our website disappeared overnight. I believe I now called the associate provost a shit. But Jonathan said it was the president himself, Bendon Noduell, whom I called a shit. Well, you get the picture. FLI and its founder were not wanted on another voyage.
I took it all very bad, really hard. A mini-nervous-breakdown sort of thing. (It still pains me to think about it because they still don’t teach gay Abe Lincoln etc.) How was I ever going to be able to get the history of “my people” out there?
Donald was suffering the same problem. He couldn’t get arrested teaching anything near gay history either. He wrote, in defending his Berkeley dissertation: “what we are forced to teach is awful; can’t we move on to the full truth.” Well, this is heresy, what he was saying, and what I was demanding. After finding gigs at a few second-rate schools, he gave up teaching. So much for the magna cum laudes from Princeton and Berkeley. Heartbreaking. So much of what gays care so deeply about is heartbreaking. If the TAG boys are not destroying the FUQUs, the Yaddahites are destroying the History of My People.
Same thing, really.
MOTHER’S NOTEBOOK
Intelligence is, of course, evaluated information. If a sequence of events is open to different interpretations, each will have its champion, and that coexistence can be destructive to the agency. Thus counterintelligence contains the seeds of its own contradictions and perhaps, were it not for the likes of me, its own destruction. Tom Jones taught us this. I guess Freud did as well. Did these poor FUQU kids Deep Throat keeps telling me about know they were courting their own destruction? It is as if they administered this fatal virus into their very own bloodstreams. Who and where is their effective Mother?
JOE KIDNEY HAD PUT HIS PIECES TOGETHER
There’s no there there, as somebody clever once remarked about somebody or other. I finished my book about Ruester. There was no there there. That’s the big secret I discovered about him and the big secret I wrote about in some thousand pages. It was not well received. It was faulted for being short on details and shy on specifics, as if I’d left many things out. I had broken my nuts trying to convey this point exactly. But I was to be made the fall guy. Papers syndicating my column are gone with the wind. Along with what had been a record publisher’s advance. How dare I take so much and provide so little, I guess you could say was the charge against me. Of course, now that he has Alzheimer’s in the eyes of his millions of die-hard believers, I’m really a shit. They should only know how he set in motion financial destruction by reapportioning the wealth of our country. I certainly included that. One day my book will appear prophetic. By then the rich will own us lock, stock, and everything else. Ruesteromics will lead to Trishomics will lead to … 3 percent of our world owning 97 percent of it.
COMBOS, COMBOS, WHO’S GOT THE COMBOS?
PERRY WRITES IN THE TAG POV
FADS approves DIP from Bumstead for Parallel Track, even though the trials revealed it’s not much of anything great by itself, so we are pressing BMS that it be put in a combo trial with ZAP. Greeting-Dridge and Bumstead-Muck-Squish are of course violently opposed to their drug being “contaminated” by “the other company’s product.” “Let’s look at this another way,” our Dr. Levi Narkey says to Drs. Tallu Sve of Bumstead and good old Dash Snicker of G-D. “I now have sufficient supplies of both of these drugs to institute our own little combo trial. In fact, I have already started. Want to come on board, or continue to kvetch and oppose us?” In fact, bootleg DIP has been available. Levi had someone smuggle pills out of Bumstead’s Mexican plant, “and it’s taken me a while to get our stuff duplicated precisely right.” Tallu Sve is beside himself. He didn’t believe anyone could duplicate it. Now he knows we can destroy his market unless he gets his DIP out there fast. He agrees to work with Levi on setting up a combo trial with ZAP. And that’s how our own Dr. Levi Narkey immediately gets fifty guys to go into an immediate under-the-radar trial out of his office. TAG’s first two-drug combo trial. So far it hasn’t done much except kill a few more people. You really shouldn’t take ZAP with DIP, because each competes for the same target, so all you get is something too weak. At least we found that out. Dash is thrilled when he hears this news.
Then FADS out of the blue approves something called ZOK for “Treatment IND,” for people who have failed ZAP and ZAP and DIP, which is now pretty much everybody who takes them. This pleases Interswiss Pinkus, of course, which makes ZOK, having copied it, more or less, from various analogues to ZAP and DIP. (You wonder when they are going to start suing each other for copycatting.) Interswiss Pinkus, however, also will not allow its ZOK to be used in any combination trial with any other company’s product. They are then accused of working with another product of their own to combine it with, though they deny such chicanery. “You make us sound like monsters,” says Dr. Fehrheit Pinkus at their Basel headquarters, “when in fact we are attempting to secure the validity of our product.” Whatever that means. We have not been able to bootleg ZOK, so Levi and his team of guerrilla doctors are unable to combine ZOK with ZAP and DIP, but since ZAP and DIP trials are nothing to write home about, Bumstead is furious and Dr. Tallu Sve is transferred to another division. Nordlinger Astor, the new chair of Bumstead, orders an all-out assault on getting “that next thing in our pipeline up and at ’em ASAP.” To which his scientists rub their heads in wonder: What next thing in our pipeline? Nordlinger himself is already retiring. He is said to have cancer and all of BMS’s various anticancer drugs have been unhelpful.
Von Greeting is said to be sitting back patiently waiting to see the next one he’s going to have to battle with. ZAP is still the only thing out there; unapproved officially beyond Investigational IND as it is, it is somehow available to be sold and it’s been a big seller for G-D. It’s priced now at $35,000 a bottle. Von is in no hurry.
Okay. Now Levi has ZAP and DIP and ZOK. I am helping Levi do a secret combo trial. Rebby is helping now too, after being a bit standoffish because what we are doing is not so kosher hot. It is like we are spies, sneaking around in raincoats and with slouch hats covering our eyes. We think the pharmas are spying on us, which of course they are. So we act more spylike than ever. Levi has contacts helping him in every pharm going. The good old gay grapevine!
Some guys get rises in T cells and lower viral loads on this triple-drug combo, but it doesn’t last very long. So Levi and Rebby fiddle around with the dosages of each. Levi seems encouraged, even though some of the side effects are gross. “There will be side effects, from anything and everything,” says Dr. James Monroe at Presidium, who then refuses to talk to us. They’re upset their secret drug got lost in this mix. Bumstead needs stuff for its pipeline so it sells itself to Interswiss, such a safe and calming name. These places change names really fast. But ZOK is actually owned by Yaddah University (where a visiting Czech scientist is said to have developed it), which only licensed it to BMS. Yaddah had become unhappy with BMS and vice versa so ZOK was relicensed to Presidium. At least that’s the gay grapevine’s scenario of how Dr. James Monroe got his hooks into ZOK, which is not the scenario that Fred will discover to be the case.
Sparks hates it when I condemn the pharms. Suddenly they’re our friends. Scotty claims he’s got half a million dollars in commitments from two dozen pharms, i
ncluding Presidium, which he says has increased its contribution to us now that Levi’s started three-drug combos.
Rumor now has it that Presidium has something that will work. ZOK is meant to be some sort of camouflage hiding the “something” from view. I ask Scotty and Sparks which drug they slipped to us at our meeting with them and was told to shut up. Levi Narkey says he can’t get anywhere near wherever it is they’re producing it. “It must come from another country,” he said. “Isn’t Dr. James Monroe from someplace like Czechoslovakia?” And someone named Arnold Botts has actually threatened to have Levi arrested if he doesn’t “cease and desist.” One of Presidium’s head honchos is Floyd Harmish, a buddy of Trish. Fred had been warned to be careful of him.
Meanwhile the PIs at all the UCCTGs haven’t anything new to test. FADS has not officially approved anything. Leaving only ZAP, which plenty of guys are still taking and dying from, hoping against hope.
It all really is like some complicated spy thriller. I wonder where’s the truth and where the red herrings.
* * *
SPARKS: Perry, I told you not to give so much away in our newsletter. You do it one more time and you’re fired.
* * *
MELVIN: What nobody is noticing except me, an accountant with very rich clients, is that the stocks of the manufacturers of ZAP and DIP and ZOK and ZAG are going up and up. The guys on Wall Street that sell them are surprised. The rumor about DOT is sending Presidium stock way up and ZOK and DIP and ZAG aren’t even out there yet, really. I mean officially. But Wall Street hears fast about our little trials. Guess we have more members who work on Wall Street than I knew. Can’t hurt. The power we increasingly have is remarkable. Now, if only some shit would work. Yes, we have power. TAG has maybe a hundred of us in and out. I tell Sparks all the time to be careful, he’s going to piss it all away with his arrogance. He’s now saying trials have to be made longer, not shorter. That doesn’t go down well with a lot of us. He and Scotty aren’t talking again.