by Larry Kramer
He then told me about the male children singled out to become “not a man”—the sect of men who wear saris and go out to be fucked by other men to honor a religion or a goddess.
“It is a tribute to holinesses long forgotten and even longer not understood. In your very city here of Washington there are a number of this sect as well. They are infecting each other here also. And no doubt infecting American men who pick them up by the river, where they gather dressed in their saris. Do you know that our clergy now want marriage sanctioned for a young girl at nine years old? The boy, of course, must be twenty. We have five million wandering monks. We have inquisitions everywhere and around every corner, persecutions of just about every religion we might turn up, and of course homosexuals are murdered everywhere, hung, poisoned, stoned, hurled off rooftops of big buildings. Not only in India but throughout the Subcontinent. I went to call upon several gay human rights organizations here, those that claim international atrocities as their purview, all to no avail. One chap actually said, ‘We are not interested in your country. We are hardly able to be concerned enough for ours. And we would lose the little funding we have if it was known we were helping those outside this country.’ This is no way to stop a plague. And so it will not be stopped. And it will be America’s fault. Your fault. Your fault. Your fault! You have given UC to the world!”
He was screaming this as he backed out of my office and ran down the corridor, so that heads popped out of doors to see what was making such a ruckus.
“It’s your fault! It’s all your fault! It’s all America’s fault!”
And then, just before the elevator arrived, he turned back to all of us now looking at him. He was bawling. “You gave it to me, too. I came to America to find love and freedom. You infected me with your poison and I took it back to my beloved India and I gave it to them, too!” And just before the elevator doors close, he manages a roaring, “America is murdering the world!”
Yes, welcome back. You are needed as much as ever. Tell my brother hello. I am so glad and happy you have found each other!
ISRAEL IS STRICKEN, AGAIN
“A country ages and becomes more and more diseased and dies. Just as a body dies.
“Do I die having like Sabin discovered something and been given little credit for it? Or will I die unheralded altogether?
“I discovered UC, you know. I discovered glause.
“And I am still in prison for it.”
“The loony is at it again, talking to himself,” one guard says to another.
“You’d think they’d take him out of a locked cell and put him in the ward,” the other guard says. “It’s not as if he’s going to run away. A couple nights I forgot to lock him in. In the morning, he thanked me and shook my hand. What’s ‘glaws,’ do you think? I went to the library in Anchorage and they didn’t know.”
Israel is on his deathbed. The one doctor from Fairbanks came and authorized his removal to the infirmary. Israel talks to the doctor: “Hitler won, you know. He destroyed all of a certain kind of Jew, the Jew who had soul, who cared. Those who came to America, they no longer cared. Those who went to Israel became crazy and loony. Hitler murdered all the Jews with soul and taste and humor. The ones he didn’t murder, the ones who made it to America, they got killed by the Americans.”
“That so,” the young doctor says. “Could be. I’m an Eskimo. You’re the first Jew I ever met.”
Israel recovers! In his illness, he’d been released from prison to go home to Washington, where someone else can pay for him. Under his wife’s care, he rallies, even though it has been so long since he’s seen her, he can’t remember her name.
But then the hideous story repeats itself. Once again his journals are “discovered” in the Admiral Mason Iron Vaultum Library. Only this time his journals are more liberally quoted. His beautiful love letters to his many “sons” that he had sex with in the upper Andes Mountains as children and brought to America to live with him, as he educated them all and sent them all to college. The tabloids have a field day. Who released all this to the press? Which taunting spectral rememberer of things past has never gone away and released this to the press again? Why? Why do some never cease their hideous persecution of imagined wrongs? Israel had sex with boys while on a government grant. In 1926. This is against a federal law for which there is no statute of limitations. The FBI is ordered to find living proof that will reentrap him. They find a man who claims to have had sex with Israel in the Andes. In fact, he still lives there. The man is now seventy-five years old. He does not speak English. Somehow a phone connection is pieced together so that Israel and this man can talk to each other. The FBI records the conversation between Israel and this man, speaking Pisthtu, the language of the Iwacky. Israel, deep in memories as the man’s voice rises in excited recognition, collapses. His wife summons an ambulance just as a dozen FBI agents and local police surround their house. Israel is sent to jail again. He is almost ninety years old. Once again he is disgraced before a world that doesn’t even know who he is, and doesn’t care.
Yes, he who discovered the origins of UC is once again being sent to jail for it. Even Rodney Pilts writes about it in The New York Truth. Israel had once written: “The love of these innocent children for me is exceedingly touching. That they offer me their bodies is the highest tribute their culture offers. It is considered a major insult to reject their offer. Their own fathers have been known to kill those who deny their young sons this ritual path to their maturity.” Of course, Rodney is allowed to print only the bare essentials of the imprisonment.
First Lieutenant J. J. Nopps, Jr., is awarded a Distinguished Combat Citation for apprehending “this notorious criminal who attempted to evade the law yet again.”
This time he is being sent down south, “so at least the old guy can keep warm,” Dodo cries when he hears the news. He flies back to Washington to catch him before he’s shipped out.
“You were a great man, Israel. I know. I know what it’s like to be a great man no one appreciates.”
Holding Dodo’s hand in the police van, Israel bolts up.
“Evvilleena Stadtdotter must be the conduit from Germany!”
“That so?” Dodo says. “Who is Evvilleena?”
“She was my first patient.”
“At Isidore Peace?”
“Isidore Schmuck! Schmuck!”
“Maybe they have your old records.”
“Stadtdotter!”
“How you spell that? What’s this got to do with Germany? You say UC came from Germany?”
“Why not? Why not? Why not?”
Goddamn Jews, Dodo thinks. They all believe Hitler started everything.
Dodo is holding Israel’s hand as Israel suddenly seizes up and dies, until the small shiver comes that rustles him back to another world, to his earlier life where he now thinks he was happiest. These two men who have seen the worst America can do to its men hold hands, each lost in his dreams of what might have been.
DEEP THROAT
I am still taking care of him. Peter Ruester, retired in Beverly Hills, parades around his house in cowboy gear, playing General George Custer, which for some reason he believes was one of his great roles that got him an Oscar. Fred tells me, “Custer was gay. And his lover was an actor named Lawrence Barrett, who was the second most famous tragedian of his time. (The most famous, of course, was Edwin Booth.)” I miss Fred. God help me, I miss Washington. Would that my new controllers at X-Seven let me retire. What I tell them about Ruester and NITS is no longer politically useful to them, and Ruester playing Custer they really don’t want to know about. Shovels told me it was too embarrassing even for them.
Mother is dead now. Floyd Harmish got rid of him to take his place. James Jesus knew it was coming. He was accused of being a gay Soviet mole, just as he predicted. I flew back for his funeral. Mother was all laid out in a coffin overflowing with his beloved orchids. Not many of we boys of his showed up. They’re all too afraid to be seen with him now
. Harmish was there, of course, along with his new buddy Dereck Dumster. I wonder what Mother did with all his notebooks. I hope in the end he didn’t destroy them like Clyde did with Edgar’s.
I hope I got it all down on paper, what I’ve discovered. Fred boy, it’s up to you now.
INT. FRED’S LOFT. NIGHT.
Fred and David are watching TV. The program is the Miss Russia contest.
A lineful of very buxom babes in bathing suits is parading in front of the judges, one of whom is Dereck Dumster. His father, Earl Dumster, is standing just behind him.
ANNOUNCER’S VOICE (he speaks in Russian with subtitles on the screen): And the winner … Mr. Dumster?
He hands the envelope to Dereck Dumster, who rips it open.
DUMSTER: Svetlana Moi … (He can’t pronounce it.) Selevitsnitskyavitch …
The sound of the big audience erupting in applause as Svetlana approaches Dumster, who puts a crown on her head. He gives her a big kiss and embraces one of her tits as he does so.
David suddenly jumps up.
DAVID: I know that man!
FRED: Dereck Dumster?
DAVID: No, that man behind him. Earl Dumster. He must be his father. When Gertrude and I made all those hotels in Europe …
FRED: I remember.
DAVID: We sold them all to him and his company. Gertrude made him pay a fortune. It’s money I’ve been living on all these years. I remember he was always complaining about his son who was out fucking every babe in Paris. He was actually pretty funny. Like a Jewish mother. Except he wasn’t Jewish. After he bought all our hotels he wouldn’t rent rooms to “kikes or niggers.” He was meant to be one of the richest men in America and a big crook.
AT LAST?
Fred is in one piece. Being with David he’s overcome the peculiar feeling of being brought back from the dead, which had been freaking him out. “We’re both longtime survivors, honey bunny,” David points out again.
Fred has always been such an absolutist. Facts are facts to him even when, especially when, they aren’t for anyone else. He takes down his book about “the summer of our lives,” as he can still hear the Divine Bella calling it.
He updates the closing list of the book that he’d written called Faggots, which had upset so many people, his first exposure to being a pariah:
“Fred is here, and so is Mikie (dead) and Tarsh and Bo Peep (dead) and Josie (dead) and Dom Dom (dead) and Frigger and Fallow (dead) and Gatsby and Bella (dead) and Blaze (dead) and Sanford and his snake (dead) and Laguna beauties (dead) and Dick and Dora Dull (both dead) and Bruce Sex-toys (dead) and B.L.T. (dead) and Irving (dead) and Hans (dead) and Timmy (dead) and Charlie and Alex and Tidgy Schmidge and Toney (dead) and Olive (dead) and Dennis (dead) and Laverne (dead) and Robbie (dead) and Morry (dead) and Hubie (dead) and Jefferson (dead) and Montoya (dead) and Lork (dead) and Carlty (dead) and Yo-Yo (dead) and Dawsie (dead) and Pusher (dead) and Tom-Tom (dead) and Yootha (dead) and Rolla and Feffer and Vladek (dead) and Cully (dead) and Midnight Cowboy (dead) and Lovely Lee and Garfield and Wilder (dead) and Harold (dead) and Anthony and Wyatt and Boo Boo (dead) and R. Allan (dead) and Billy Boner (dead), and the ghosts of palest Paulie and Patty and his Juanito and remember Winnie Heinz (all dead), and Leather Louie (dead) and Lance Heather (?), Adriana, Dordogna, Randy Dildough, S.S. Berliners all (?), the Gnome (dead), Derry (?), Floyd (?), Sprinkle, Tad (?), Kristos Rosenkavalier (dead), Canadian Leon (dead), Pinky and his cymbalettes (dead) … and and and the group keeps growing, friends, and new friends, joining every moment…”
He now opens the datebooks, the years of Filofax pages, that had been waiting for him. They’ve been there on his desk for quite some time. Slowly he goes through each day and each night. A lot of the faces were still clear and he was glad for that. He often forgot faces and names because he was too wrapped up in himself.
He realizes that he is truly in love for the first time in his life. He also realizes that he’s getting more and more depressed as each day passes and more people die because this country doesn’t care.
Tommy had said to him: You owe it to your new liver to shape up! Otherwise it should have been given to somebody else more useful.
FRED’S THOUGHTS AS HE, DAVID, AND TOMMY GO TO A FUQU MEETING
It’s pathetic. Now that TAG has depleted us and Sparks has put out that there’s a great new drug coming, our numbers are diminishing even more. I don’t recognize most of the faces. The discussions are about non-UC-related issues, all concerning social justice to be sure but not about UC and a cure for UC that really works, which is why I started FUQU. A few people who remember me come to tell me awful stories about the terrible stuff they’re taking, “but TAG’s putting an end to that!” “We miss you at our meetings,” a few say. A few know I’d been sick. Eric had actually said to me before my transplant, “Fred, you look like you’re dying.” Eric isn’t here. Maxine, Ann, Vincent, Maria, Gerri, Suzanne, Avram, Perry, the short list of the stalwarts is painful. I blame myself that I wasn’t here to stem the tide. Tommy said as much. I took it as a criticism from him. “How could I be here? I was getting a fucking new liver!” David calms me down.
Tommy says, “I was just saying that without you constantly on top of things it couldn’t be expected, all of this, to be such a surprise.”
I am surprised to learn that Monserrat was partners with TAG in this dethroning of Jerry. Like GMPA had done to me, she’d also shut out her dear old friend and fellow scientist Rebby from the organization they’d both started. GMPA hadn’t even sent me a card. I figured if Elton John himself could send me a bouquet of flowers every week for six months in Pittsburgh (and I don’t even know him), GMPA (and Monserrat, come to think of it) could at least have sent a card.
The nonstop ganging up on Jerry has unfortunately dissipated. Sparks says, “We no longer give a shit about Jerry.” Sparks is now the titled executive director of TAG and is paid rather surprisingly a lot. Yes, it’s already being funded. A gift from Sammy Sircus is announced with much fanfare: this strange man (Why? Why is he strange? He just wanted to be rich and famous, and he is) is actually giving money to something gay. Sparks has a paying job for the first time in his life. “It is very easy for you who are independently wealthy to criticize,” Sparks says to me. “I just said I don’t think when you get paid you can call yourself an activist,” I say back, echoing Maxine. I remind him that when we first met he said something like “I want to be your son. I want to be by your side every minute so I can learn from you.”
“I think you must be thinking of some other guy,” he says.
No one asks to see my scar. I have a gigantic scar. For some reason I thought folks might want to see it. Scars used to be a turn-on on the beach to some. Thinking this makes me giggle. Then, thinking of David’s back, I stop.
I am looking better and younger. I can eat a quart of ice cream and a big chocolate cake and not gain an ounce. Fung can’t figure this one out, or why the white hair on my chest has grown back the black of my youth. The wish I’ve had all my life, to be able to gorge and not get fat, has been granted. As with many wishes that come true, I’m not getting all that much pleasure from it. Except for David, of course. Without him eating the gallon of double chocolate fudge with me I don’t know what I’d do for fun.
Got to finish this fucking book fast in case something happens to one of us.
Tommy and David have been incredible. The transplant brought into operation all Tommy’s skills as care provider and nurse and hospital administrator. He dealt with all the mounds of paperwork and permissions for the whole ordeal, which in the end totaled $500,000!—I saw the final bill—and was paid for, every penny, by my insurance. Tommy is still worried that I won’t survive, despite Fung’s reassurances that “you are as old as your liver.”
“You know you took a liver away from someone younger and…” Tommy’s pointed out a few times.
“Are you trying to make me feel guilty?” I interrupt.
“You know, I do
n’t know. I just know there are a lot of moral issues involved in getting an organ when tens of thousands of other people desperately need them too. And when once again you’re not looking after your health. Have you been back to the gym, or met with your trainer, or talked to a nutritionist?” I remembered all the terrified and forlorn faces showing up at Fung’s clinic, begging to be told something hopeful. “Our whole town pitched in to pay for mine,” a decaying woman not doing well post-transplant said to me. “I simply must pull through!” She didn’t. Then there was the Arab prince whose huge jet was parked at the airport and whose elaborately robed retinue of several dozen kept vigil day and night outside his hospital room until Dr. Fung made his determination. “He’s not in good enough shape.” Everyone expected the departing Arabs to blow up the hospital. I remembered all this and Tommy reminded me of all this and “all of this should have made you grateful.”
I still feel guilty I’ve survived when all those men I’ve danced and fucked with haven’t. I don’t talk to Tommy and David about this.
As I was recovering in the intensive care unit of that medical center in Pittsburgh that gave me this new liver to live with I came to realize that completing this history is the thing that would provide me with the path back from the dead to the living. Along with David, of course. For as I lay there I’d not only thought I’d die but I heard all my dead friends beckoning me to visit them again. But I came to, almost ruefully, accepting that what I still had to do was stay alive because my people are still dying.
Of course I must live for David! He’s working on developing something he won’t tell me about.
Now, is FUQU resuscitable? Has UC activism really gone bye-bye?
Eric came back just as the meeting was ending.