by Larry Kramer
Tallula then says: “He’s abusive to women. He fucks a lot of them when she’s away. I don’t think he’s going to get away with it. His enemies are whispering about impeachment already.”
“For screwing women in the White House? Nobody said boo when JFK was so … busy.”
“I think Maude should be president. She’s very smart,” Viv says.
Pam says: “But she’s a dyke!”
“She’s got several gorgeous assistants and best friends,” Tallu tells them. “A sex-obsessed hillbilly and a dyke, forget any attention to UC. I don’t care what he promised.”
“Where is our organization in Washington?” Viv asks. “All they do is kiss asses.”
They haven’t been with women, alone, for quite some time. Lesbians are different from gay men and they appreciate, cherish, and defend this difference, as they should. If they are to be lumped together taxonomically with “our own sex-crazed goofuses,” as Pam, who is a stand-up comedienne and very funny, calls gay men, “endearingly, of course,” then that is that. But few of them feel like Maxine that they have to stand up with and for the boys, especially now it’s more widely known what awful things are happening to them because of sex.
“But we cannot continue to stand by doing nothing,” Viv, the most maternal of the three, declares. “I must confess that after all these years, I’m beginning to feel guilty. I should not have left FUQU. I was there with Fred for the first meetings. I should have visited Bruce. Fred almost died from his transplant and I never even sent him a card.”
“He made a good speech today. Amazing, after what he’s been through,” Tallula says. “The organizing committee refused to let him speak and he just went right up there, grabbed a mike, and did it. Same old, good old Fred. I hear he’s finally found a lover.”
Then she says to Viv, “May I remind you that I, too, was there with them from day one of this shit. I personally presided every single Friday morning at the UC Network meeting of diverse voices that felt uncomfortable with GMPA. I personally negotiated the salvation of jobs for our food handlers. If you recall.”
“That was many years ago, Tallula,” Viv responds. “Matters are much worse now, and lesbians still haven’t moved nearly close enough to them in friendship and support. Is this proper behavior on our part?”
“Well, whatever we do, we must not chime in with ‘We told you so,’ which is what I find myself more and more wanting to do,” Tallula, the most politically adept of the three, declares.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been dying to stick it to them, they’re such assholes,” Pam also declares. “With humor, compassion, and understanding, of course.” Pam has a growing reputation for her take-no-prisoners comedy routine about “the gay lifestyle,” whatever the fuck that means.
These years of UC have presented lesbians with enormous problems. UC has swept every other gay issue off the map. Women have been unable to insert their own special concerns into the national gay agenda. “If one could locate one,” says Pam.
“And it is not as if we have received their support or they’re asking us, ‘What can I do to help you move forward on any of your own vital issues?’” Pam also reminds them, not that they need reminding.
“They still can’t keep it in their pants,” Pam contributes again, referring to some new numbers from COD attesting to same.
“Don’t, won’t, can’t, mustn’t, shouldn’t—we must try not to be negative, as we tell them to stop it and grow up and behave or there won’t be any of you left,” says Viv. “Don’t you think?”
“We are not talking constructively,” Viv then says, no one having answered her question.
Tallula is looking at the Capitol. “This town is useless. We have no one here. We have no power. It makes me sick. The first time I came to Washington to protest was when Roosevelt was president. Where have we found ourselves after all these years? Right back where I started from when I first started growing my boobs.”
“What do you think we should do, Tallula?” asks Pam. “Be specific. Now that you’re so close to power.”
“That fucking LAGU that I started in my backyard in Brooklyn has all that fucking money, and from fucking dykes, too. What’s wrong with those girls?” Tallula is referring to the Lesbian and Gay Union, which now raises more than she ever was able to. It’s now fashionable to hate LAGU “because they don’t do anything to change our lives.” Fred has been particularly critical of them on the UC issues, and has been since his days at GMPA. “I was out of a job because my own board couldn’t raise my salary,” Tallula is reminiscing. “Is that specific enough?” Tallu struggled valiantly for many years at LAGU, “while continuing to starve to death. Now I work in the White House and I’m fat as a horse.”
“Who precisely is ever on our side?” asks Pam. “We always think we know and then we’re disappointed when no one shows up … anywhere.” She too has many memories of cries for help, all alas unanswered.
As do they all. As does every lesbian any of them knows.
Each has labored, one could almost say monstrously hard (yes, let us say monstrously hard), in the gay vineyards of hope and aspiration, only to suddenly stop, exhausted, when recognizing that no progress was being made and that not enough support for their efforts has been forthcoming. No one, and Fred has written about this, over and over, endlessly, ad nauseam, no one who has spent any time working for “the gay movement” has ever encountered anything but similar “get-losts.”
“It makes you cry,” each has said at one time or another, each of these three warrior women, correction, once warrior women, because each sits at this parade more as observer than participant. They had participated in many marches over their years.
Pam reminds them. “Another parade. Great. Everyone then goes home for another ten years.”
“I take it back,” Viv says, referring to an earlier inquiry. “I don’t feel well at all. The minute some food goes down, the gas comes back.” She no longer enjoys discussing community politics. “They’re all jerks,” she says now unwaveringly. She pops another Tums into her mouth. “Why can’t we just have our own national dyke organization, period?”
“Because the only members we’d have are us,” Tallula points out. “We have been here many times before, need I remind you. I am thinking of moving completely out of the city and into the country. Upstate. Way upstate. I will start a local dyke organization up there.”
“What makes you think there are any dykes upstate?” asks Pam.
“We are everywhere,” Tallula responds. “Or so it has been my experience.”
“Well, when they pay your salary let me know and I’ll move up there too.”
“Why aren’t we helping Fred in his FUQU thing? I hear it’s falling apart. This must be breaking his heart.” Which one of them cried which one of these sentences out loud? Each knows it doesn’t make any difference. The three all sit in silence as each recalls earlier days of much the same.
“We were younger then,” Tallula says.
“And I didn’t have two kids,” says Viv, “and a lover to support.”
“Why doesn’t Mary get a job?”
“She runs the house and our two kids, for God’s sake. Lay off Mary.”
Of course Fred had asked these three women to join him in FUQU. They are among the three most intelligent women he knows, dyke or non-dyke. Each had been by his side in the earlier years of this fight, at GMPA, now laughingly referred to as “the good old days.” They may not have been mentioned in this chronicle but it’s difficult to keep all in attendance in attendance. Along with everything else, gays are their own worst historians.
As the parade dithers to its close, dusk is falling on this city. But numbers of both women and men still roam the streets, looking for some place to rest themselves, but perhaps not. No one seems to want to sit down or go back to a hotel or home. Our three women have remained together, sitting and watching the marchers from the sidelines, waving to a few old friends, realizing how many
women are younger and much more pretty, and of course, thinner, and how much older they have become. The parade has been longer than they thought.
And then there appears what none of them expected to see, a contingent of sick men marching as best they can or being pushed in wheelchairs, some carrying GMPA signs, some with FUQU. A big banner is carried that reads IN SUPPORT OF OUR LESBIAN SISTERS!
“It is a bag of blessings, today, to remind us,” Viv says.
A group is now seen carrying another banner. It reads TARGET BOY VERTLE AND IMPEACH THE SEXPOT.
“I am readier for upstate than I thought,” says Tallula, wiping some tears.
“Girls! Snap out of it,” says Pam. “We are alive!”
EXT. MASTURBOV GARDENS. DAY.
Fred and David are walking among the buildings, this enormous warren of garden apartments where each once lived.
FRED: There! That’s where I lived. Forty-two twelve. Where was yours?
DAVID: There! Across the street. Until I was six years old.
FRED: How amazing. Both of us being here again after all these years.
DAVID: I hated it here so much.
FRED: So did I. So this is where Daniel grew up?
DAVID: And Lucas and Stephen, too.
FRED: They ran with an older gang, I think. There were lots of kids here then.
Fred takes David’s hand as they continue on their walk.
EXT. MR. HOOVER’S WHOREHOUSE. DAY.
David and Fred looking at the now very elegant building.
DAVID: It’s sure been gussied up. It used to be sort of hidden behind a lot of bushes and trees. And there was a big parking lot for the clients. And there was a special private space for Mr. Hoover and Clyde. I wonder who lives here now.
FRED: She’s a rich heiress with a famous art collection. It’s open to the public. It’s very popular, listed in all the guidebooks.
DAVID: I wonder if she knew what she was buying. Maybe our spirits haunt the place.
FRED: What do you think really happened to you here?
DAVID: Besides fucking with all the strangers?
FRED: Yes. Looking back on it all, what do you think?
DAVID: I was another person. I was Mr. Hoover’s person. I thought he was nice to me and I wanted to please him and he would … I don’t know. Every teacher I’d ever had was … strange. So I guess I never questioned them. They kept me alive. I almost fell in love with one of my clients. He was a major in the Army and I was the first man he ever had sex with. Like you, he kissed my back all over. That had never happened to me before. He fell in love with me and wanted to take me far away so we could live in peace. He was found dead somewhere. Mr. Hoover knew all about it, which scared me. But he paid for me to go to college in San Francisco. He said I could further my education there.
FRED: I wonder if Hoover knew a virus was being spread in this house. Or in San Francisco.
DAVID: But he was gay! Did he want me dead too? They gave us lots of shots to protect ourselves.
A tour bus pulls up and disgorges a crowd of women who rush to go into the house.
ARKANSAS TRAVELER
There is a now-famous Monument op-ed piece by the late Sen. O’Trackney Vurd written just before he died that concludes with the challenging question: “Do you want to visualize your president masturbating in his toilet in the Oval Office,” referring of course to President Boy Vertle’s troubles with the voluptuous White House intern Tynada Day, young enough to be Boy’s daughter, “because that is what he’s doing?” It is unclear if Vurd is implying that because he himself doesn’t jerk off nobody else should either, or he is just upset Boy’s doing it on the job, and at taxpayers’ expense (though who hasn’t wanked off occasionally in an empty office or employee restroom when on a break?), or he’s disgusted that “you” are even allowing yourself to visualize this act at all. No one’s suggested that after a full day in that office from which he ran the world Boy still had enough energy left over for an orgasm, and that might be a good thing. No one was in any way happy that Boy and Tynada were trysting while Maude Vehemoth Vertle, Ice Queen of the Ozarks, was off in arms of her own, those of Renna, the youngest daughter of Pugh Harnett, the seventh-richest man in America, which is probably not such a bad thing either because Maude had heretofore evinced little facility for either warmth or affection, and it might be a good thing for history if someone warmed her up a bit before she’s launched onto stage center to attempt a more enduring role.
Get the picture? Boy Vertle does not have UC on his mind.
You want to know what genocide looks like? Come to New York. Ghost Town. Death City. And this president, whom gays helped put into office because he made them promises, has done nothing to honor a word he said.
Boy Vertle is no better at ending this plague than Peter Ruester and Dredd Trish.
And lest we forget, his very first kicks in gay asses came when Boy signed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” after promising he would allow gay soldiers to openly serve their country.
Boy Vertle will smile his lovely smile and say, “Well, I tried, but ‘The American People’ won’t let me.” If this isn’t another act of a slippery-slope president, what is?
Gays have helped to elect a coward who will say the right things and do none of them. Sound familiar?
ONE BILLION!
On the op-ed page of The Truth, Dr. William Haseltine of Harvard predicts there will be one billion UC-infected people by the new century.
Fred reads it. He just stares at it. David gets angry at him for just staring into space. Fung warned of the possibility of dementia after a transplant. David will have none of that. “Somebody put his mind to work!” Fung prescribed. “Doctor’s orders!”
There’s nothing wrong with Fred’s mind. He’s having another attack of overwhelming sadness about so many dead friends he’s been unable to help save.
David finally picks up on it. “Survivor’s guilt, it’s called. I’ve had it since I was born. You’re depressing the hell out of me, my honey bunny.”
“Honey bunny” makes Fred laugh.
David says: “Tonight’s Tommy’s show.”
Fred jumps up: “Let’s go dancing!”
EXT. ROSELAND. NIGHT.
An enormous line waiting to get in. Everyone very up and ready for fun.
Tommy is greeting Fred and David and ushering them in. A huge poster: BROADWAY CARES PRESENTS BROADWAY BARES!
INT. ROSELAND. NIGHT.
Tommy, Fred, and David are standing at the front of a balcony looking down at a huge spectacle of hundreds of half-clad youngsters performing a pageant for a huge cheering crowd all packed on the dance floor. The music is deafening!
TOMMY’S VOICE: They’re all kids working in Broadway shows. They break my heart. Fred, I’m on my way to turning this organization into a huge moneymaker for a hundred different UC places desperate for funding. I’ve already raised a couple million with events like this.
DAVID’S VOICE: You really are excited. That’s great!
CUT TO:
Everyone is now dancing, including Fred and David, who are doing it cheek to cheek. Tommy is looking down on them from the balcony.
DANIEL THE SPY
Welcome back to the world of the living, Fred. Your article in The Avocado was impressively and refreshingly full of your old vigor. Yes, I’m still hanging in, trying to update whatever history’s being made here. Tommy said he was worried because you rarely smiled and cried a lot. Jerry says a transplant can depress you but you should be strong enough …
Jerry’s not in day-to-day charge anymore. In the strange determination of this place, this is considered a major promotion. “Of course we have studies of how to treat patients on antivirals!” Dr. Homer Herky, now appointed the first director of DUC (of course everyone now calls us “duck,” and I mean the verb not the fowl), defensively maintains when pressed for an estimate of how long it will take these studies to yield data. If pressed further Homer mumbles uncomprehending
ly because he knows what I know. It will be two to three years after the one year needed for planning and designing any study, plus the one year to honor the law’s requirement that information be posted around the country so the contract can be bid on by anyone, plus the one year it takes to sift these bids, plus the one year it takes to obtain suitable candidates for the winning trials as judged by the peer reviewers, not one of whom knows their stuff enough to make such a judgment. It’s just like that now famous rant by Emma Brookner a hundred years ago at that very first NITS site visit in New York. Yes, any UCCTG trial to obtain answers to what’s a right combination can still take from five to seven years, by which time whatever’s been learned is no longer of use because it’s either already been learned by self-treating patients and/or because newer treatments have come along that should have been tested first.
Homer is a drip (originally Gist’s gay ex-boyfriend), and I work beside him every day and even told Jerry that Homer is a drip, which only provoked, “So what? Do you know how many unfilled job slots we still have here? We’re lucky I could sneak him through.”
A strange doctor from India arrived unannounced and insisted on seeing me.
“G-D won’t help. They want full price for ZAP. My country will have fifty-five million infections. You must help us.” He was really hot under the collar, sweating, his eyes ready to pop out. I figured I wasn’t the first place he’d come begging.
I protest that we can’t even help our own people. “No, you’ll find no help here in Washington,” I told him when he said all his visits have been shunned.
“We have more than three hundred cities each with over one million population. We have almost one billion people. China will be just as hugely infected,” he said. “And of course the Soviet Union.”
I admit that I hadn’t been thinking much about the cases so far away.
“Do you know why it is so bad in my country? Because we have more men than women. Women are murdered as infants because parents know a woman’s lot in our country is so wretched. So, when the young men come to the city, there are only other men to have intercourse with. It is not homosexual; it is pragmatic.”