The American People, Volume 2

by Larry Kramer

  INT. FRED’S LOFT.

  David is showing this map to Fred.

  DAVID: Look how many anti-gay ones there are. That’s a lot of hate. Is it genocide or a crime against humanity?

  FRED: What’s the difference? Or why can’t it be both?

  DAVID: That’s what I’m trying to figure out. In legal terminology they can’t be both. Just one or the other.

  ORAL HISTORY

  DONALD: When I came back to FUQU after Warren died, almost everyone I knew had died now too. I wanted to hug everybody and be hugged back. I couldn’t believe the fights and nasty letters. Nobody trusted anyone else. I’d needed FUQU to vent my rage and sadness. TAG would no longer talk to FUQU. Everyone hated each other on some subject or other. We were now all becoming like monsters in some deep ocean when no one could really swim. We had all been fighters together, side by side, once. There were no demos to go to anymore. After a while, I went back home to Podunk. I don’t know why it suddenly felt more safe. I need someplace safe to cry.

  * * *

  DUDLEY: Too many of us are still dying. No new stuff is good enough yet. The pharmas that make them all hate each other. Presidium’s shit will now cost $25,000 “a sequence,” whatever that means and whenever we can get it. And even more FUQU members are drifting away—partly in despair, and partly because they couldn’t take the fighting. Nothing was working. What else is new?

  MEANWHILE …

  At a meeting at the White House with President Boy Vertle, a Lovejoy representative is reporting to Gobbel, Shovels, Dereck Dumster, Floyd Harmish, and Omicidio. Minna Trooble is transcribing.

  “I am here to report that I believe we are most successfully demoralizing the gay population. More of them are dead. Fewer of the living are activists. All of the living will be offered a Presidium drug that is priced beyond their means, meaning they will have insufficient funds to keep on living.”

  “What about your list?” Gobbel asks.

  “Longer by the minute. Any time you’re ready to send out the troops.”

  “I’m not sending out any more troops,” Boy says. “The faggots already hate me enough.”

  Harmish says: “I think it best you continue to leave that with us.”

  Dumster says: “Count me in.”

  “Don’t I have any say in this?” Boy asks rather petulantly.

  Shovell answers him: “Not when you’ve been impeached.”

  “What do I do if they come after me?”

  Dumster answers him: “Deny everything. Never apologize. When someone punches, punch back ten times harder. Attack the messenger. Muddy the water. Accuse others of what you’re accused of. Win at all costs.” To Harmish: “Roy and Sam Sport taught me this.”

  FRED TRIES A GOLDEN OLDIE

  HE WRITES TO DR. GARTH BUFFALO

  You once announced publicly that you believed UC could be cured and you had ideas on how to do it.

  You are back on your feet again, in charge of yet another major research institution.

  I’d wondered if you were irreparably wounded by the Dingus mess. It would certainly be understandable if you were.

  I hoped, with your obviously good sense of self, of who you are, you would not have been wounded, and you would have emerged angry, and eager to stick it to all your critics in the form of renewed overwhelming presence in a field in which you are once again and still top dog.

  Instead I see you as having retreated into some ivory tower of safety, your mouth sealed shut, your brain idling on some sort of peculiar hold.

  I never see your name in the paper in any forceful way—that is, forcefully useful in the way a name like yours can be useful in the time of a worldwide plague.

  It always amazes me how people who have power often refuse to use it. I never understand why.

  You know our government is failing us, our politicians are a sick joke as they sit watching millions die, and that the pharmaceutical manufacturers are woefully and greedily behind.

  You have this opportunity to at last pursue your original inspiration.

  Why are you dithering so?

  Or have you lost your belief that UC can be cured and no longer have ideas on how to do it?

  Dr. Buffalo doesn’t respond.

  THE NEW YORK TRUTH

  UC 100,000 ARE DEAD

  UC Now Seen as a Worldwide Health Problem.

  Cases now reported in 33 countries and all inhabited continents.

  * * *

  Truth? You mean The New York Lies.

  INT. MONSERRAT’S LIVING ROOM. DAY.

  A very rich person’s town house.

  FRED: Monserrat, I thought you started an organization to fight for what we all believe.

  TOMMY: Easy, sugar.

  MONSERRAT: Elizabeth and I are doing that. But there are certain things I cannot bring myself to publicly discuss. (Holds up a poster.)

  MEN USE CONDOMS OR BEAT IT. (Poster is very graphic, showing an erect penis half covered with a condom.)

  REBBY’S VOICE: Monserrat would not let “her” foundation support my insistence re advising safe sex and using condoms. In Britain the women newscasters went on the air, on the BBC itself, to demonstrate how to put a condom on a banana. She was not amused. She was offended that we used words like rimming, sucking, coming, and, horror of horrors, rectum and anal intercourse. She said using such unspeakable words was bad for her fund-raising, which is geared toward straight people.

  THIS SHOULD NOT BE NEWS

  FRED: It’s now “discovered” that drug-resistant strains of the virus are being spread from cock to asshole. Who’s the stupid doctor who figured this one out. Guys on various bootleg combinations who have reached the state of being drug-resistant (as noted: certain drugs only last so long) are fucking and infecting guys who are not drug-resistant. This should not be news to anyone. More guys now have no recourse to any trial, official or bootleg. Bootleg drugs are appearing, stolen from a pharm and knocked off or imported from places like Mexico and China. “Studies” are going on in all kinds of crazy places all over the world by an unheard-of cast of characters. Jon wants to list all the rumors in Monserrat’s directory “as a heads-up warning if nothing else,” but she won’t let him.

  * * *

  PERRY: Sparks pooh-poohs drug resistance as “just a phase we’ll grow out of,” and Scotty refuses to criticize any sexual act. He has come to jokingly calling all the fellows who are still orgying, including himself, “sluts.” I don’t know why I ever found him sexy. Few in either of our organizations want to confront or object to or even just discuss anything sexual. “Would you send your dying baby to Dr. Puffington?” is the kind of headline Orvid would have put on the front page of the gone and forgotten New York Prick.

  * * *

  DAVID: Tina Rosenberg wrote in The Haunted Land that any country that did not write an official accounting of its holocaust was doomed to fall back into terror and chaos. That maybe sounds a little over the top. But what are you supposed to do when what you know is over the top?

  INT. T+D MEETING ROOM.

  The group is all ears. Sparks is holding a magnum of champagne.

  SPARKS: We did it! FADS has finally approved Presidium’s protease inhibitor!

  He pops the cork.

  CLAUDETTE (Her hair is now dyed turquoise): Taken with a combo.

  SPARKS: Shut up. That’s not true. (Toasting:) Here’s to Peturba!

  SCOTTY: We have a drug that works! We did it. We got it. Our meetings with all the pharms worked. (Toasting:) To Presidium and Peturba!

  CLAUDETTE: It didn’t save Spencer.

  EIGO: It didn’t save a bunch of people in Levi’s trial.

  PERRY: It didn’t save a lot of people.

  SCOTTY: Stop it! It’s enough to keep guys alive.

  EIGO: We don’t know that yet for sure. And it’s only a treatment. We don’t have a cure.

  SPARKS: TAG’s gamble paid off. Fuck you, FUQU. Thank you, God. (He takes a huge drink from the champagne.)


  EIGO: Sounds like another royal pain in the ass in the pipeline. And we don’t have enough FUQU to protest with when something goes wrong. Which it will. I don’t trust Presidium.

  NIGHTMARES

  INT. FRED’S BEDROOM. NIGHT.

  Fred and David are naked in bed. Fred is asleep, rather restlessly. David is holding some pages, which he’s just finished reading. He looks down at Fred. Fred opens his eyes. He sees what David is holding and tries to grab them away from him. David pushes him away and starts to read them aloud. Fred buries his head under his pillow. David yanks the pillow away and continues to read.

  DAVID: “He began having nightmares about David’s back. Not only could he not save his friends or himself, but he could not save this new great love of his life who had suffered so mightily. He would punish himself instead. He would jump from their roof. One night he could hardly sleep for fear the suicidal feeling stirring inside him would return again and pick him up out of their bed and take him to the hall and to the elevator and up to the roof and throw himself into space to punish himself for his failures. It was the Yaddah freshman fear returning to claim him at last and finish the job off once and for all. NO! He mustn’t disappoint David! How could he abandon David! To leave him suffering on his own! David’s already more than paid his dues in the tortured department. It doesn’t make any sense, any of this. Why is self-punishment in order? Why is his own pain so unrelenting? He was afraid to discuss all this with David, who anyway is busy supervising the building of their new home. He longs to kiss David’s wounded back. He must stop crybabying. He is so unused to actually being loved by a wonderful man that he can’t see how selfish he’s acting. He had to make both their lives worthy of saving, worthy of honoring what they’ve been through. That is what he must do before he jumps off a roof. He must stay alive long enough to lasso the answers and pass them on to history. He’d always wanted to be famous for something. He wants David to be proud of him.”

  (Both have tears in their eyes.)

  We must never, never leave each other. Do you hear me? Do you promise me?

  They are in each other’s arms and shaking with tears.

  THE WORKINGS OF THE SCIENTIFIC MIND ARE MANY

  Dodo addresses the Walla Walla Medical School faculty. Way out west they think he’s great. He draws crowds to his new institute. They don’t understand a word he’s saying. Here is what he’s saying: Shit doesn’t work (at least not yet) but piss does. Piss does something. Pregnant women’s piss, to be precise. Pregnant women’s piss from the first trimester. In other words, specific piss. If this specific piss is taken at a specific time and introduced into the UC lesions, the purple becomes less purple. How he discovered this, and what the mechanism at work is, are not revealed. Why the first trimester? Why not the second? Or third? He has Poopsie working on this.

  ORAL HISTORY

  SARAH SCHULMAN INTERVIEWING FOR FUQU’S ARCHIVES

  Sarah is interviewing Kersh. They are being filmed by Jim.

  * * *

  SARAH: The thing that I’m not understanding is, here you are, you helped start the T and D Committee, you were fundamental in getting the government to pay attention to really important issues that have changed UC and history. Suddenly, a disruptive FUQU group with not your kind of history and legitimacy is opposing you and … and I don’t really understand what changed … that would create … it’s just that it seems unfortunate that you felt you had to leave FUQU at that time because a group of people were harassing you on some level or disrupting your work.

  KERSH: I didn’t think I could be effective anymore.

  SS: So, you just stopped going?

  KERSH: I just stopped going.

  SS: And what was that like?

  KERSH: It was hard. Because I thought I’d given a lot and I enjoyed it a lot and was doing good a lot.

  SS: And you had been there for how many years?

  KERSH: Seven years.

  SS: And how many days a week of those seven years were you spending on FUQU?

  KERSH: Probably most of them.

  SS: Were most of your important friendships inside FUQU?

  KERSH: A major portion of them, yeah. Pretty much all of them.

  SS: So, did you just have to walk away from your life there? You felt like you had no choice?

  KERSH: Yeah.

  SS: So how did you adjust? Did you stay involved in UC on any front after that?

  KERSH: I became really close with Rebby. I attempted to do a couple of research projects with him. And then he walked away from everything.

  SS: Tell me about it.

  CUT TO:

  Sarah interviewing Matt E.

  * * *

  MATT E.: I remember the first time I walked into Capriccio, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It was the most beautiful assortment of amazing-looking men I’d ever seen in one place. I had never seen anything like it in my life. I was, I was eighteen. I’m like, whoa, this is overkill. And then—I don’t know. The dance floor, it was the perfect symbol of the FUQU crisis. Because gradually and little by little, it just thinned out and thinned out and thinned out, and soon it was next to nothing. Nobody was dancing at Capriccio. I’m sick now too. And the Greptz protease isn’t working fast enough to save me.

  SS: And what are you going to do now to fight? With whom?

  MATT E.: I … I don’t know. I … I’m scared.

  DANIEL HAD DISCOVERED THE TRUTH ABOUT ISRAEL

  Daniel had written this for Dr. Sister Grace and for Fred. David discovered it among his brother’s papers:

  I couldn’t remember the last time I saw him. I heard he was dying, so I went to see him. But I didn’t get to him in time.

  He was, after all, my cousin in a strange family of unhappy men and women, not counting myself, of course, who’s escaped being crazy only by being boring. The more I look around me as I age in my profession, the more I see that most doctors are boring. Israel wasn’t boring. That I knew from hearing about him from friends at Schmuck, and that’s why I stayed away from him. He was a crazy recluse, they said, distinctly unfriendly, and “sour,” which they would further define as “like someone who’s been overlooked so long that he’s turned sour.” Dodo is now being heard calling Israel “my hero” and “my role model” and “perhaps the real co-discoverer of UC.” Israel always appeared to me as more modest than anything, shuffling around medical meetings. He would wave and smile and say things like “Hi, cuz,” but he never came closer, so neither did I. It must be genetic in the Jerusalem family.

  I’d heard Israel made major discoveries early in life. I decided to investigate what they might be.

  I went to Admiral Mason Iron Vaultum and found his study of the Iwacky children:

  “I discovered that these young people had participated in what were called ‘mortuary feasts,’ before missionaries suppressed this ancient tribal custom. The victims descended into trembling madness before they died. These young boys and young men had all exposed themselves to the brains of their ancestors as a sign of respect for the dead, for these ancestors, for those whom they loved who had come and gone before them. It was a cultural custom, and quite touching, albeit an exceptionally dangerous one. They had cooked and eaten the bodies and brains of tribe members who had died, including their feces. At autopsy, I found their own brains to be shot through with spongy holes. The killing virus in these spongy brains had overtaken them and plunged them into orgies of sex and more sex. At death their bodies were encased in purple scabs.”

  The stuff about the spongy brain virus won him a Nobel Prize. I wonder why he never spoke of it.

  He named it glause. Yes, the mechanism of what was going on was not dissimilar to various mutations of The Underlying Condition.

  Strangely, he saw himself as an anthropologist. “My biggest contribution was showing that you could take someone born in a Stone Age and bring them to this country. Someone could jump through five thousand years of human society in one lifetime. That is what my
sons did. That is what I did for my sons.” He had brought some dozen young men to America. I wonder where they are, what happened to them, why no Jerusalem ever knew or talked about them.

  “The Truth comes to interview me,” he wrote. “Some man asks if I repent my sexual relationships with my Iwacky sons. I tell him that America and Americans are too prudish to hear that sex with young men was normal in the cultures I studied, all the way back to classic ancient Greece, which is the foundation of Western Civilization. What has America given the world to match the gift of ancient Greece? They taught men to love each other, and we have destroyed that love.”

  A MESSAGE TO DAVID

  Your Grodzo writes to you from his homeland to tell you that he thinks of you often and misses you. But it has been good for me to be back home. I think sometimes I beg you come back to Germany and we live together but I respect your wish voiced to me that you would never come back here.

  I write to tell you things you do not know. I tell them now to you because much is being written in Deutschland about Mungel, about Hitler, what was happening. There are fewer secrets as we grow older, me, Germany. Much of this will become known. It is best you hear from me before the Oxford and Cambridge chaps get their own histories of us out and into … circulation. Already a German scholar, Norman Ohler, has written a book that is attracting great praise and attention.

  Hitler—he had difficulty urinating and had frequent infections in his bladder. We know now he had an abnormal urethra. He washed his hands a lot and it was thought had difficulties with anything sexual. He had inflammation in his arteries, which is an autoimmune disease, as is UC, which could explain many of the maladies of which he always complained. We thought he was a hypochondriac but perhaps he had a genuine affliction, causing his endless headaches and troubles with his body and organs and digestion. He was convinced his father was Jewish and had died of syphilis, which he believed he inherited. He always called it “the Jew disease.” He believed it was this syphilis that caused him such difficulty to urinate. I found an old gypsy who instructed him to take a bath in his own urine, to prevent his syphilis from becoming active, which many gypsies believe. I gave him such a bath, several times. I could never locate his syphilis. But even with the abnormal urethra and something inherited called spina bifida occulta that can cause many things, that plus constipation and the fact that he was always farting (but who wasn’t then?), these don’t necessarily add him up to such a monstrous murderer.