by Larry Kramer
It would not be long before soldiers themselves were prescribed one or the other pill by their officers before being deployed on another of Hitler’s wars to take over the world. They came to depend on the drugs, which led to constant victories. The officers of Hitler’s forces were ecstatic. A couple of Pervitin a day for all the victorious fighting forces confirmed the Führer’s unshaking belief in Germany’s destiny. No one had told him the real reason. He prided himself on being abstemious, even though he was by now unknowingly addicted by Dr. Grodzo, so successfully attending to his leader’s extreme hypochondria. For the first time in Hitler’s life his body and its aches and pains were not his enemy. Grodzo was there with another tablet or a shot to return him to the forceful presence that his people expected and to which they responded with faithful devotion.
Your Grodzo, of course, was by now briefly addicted himself.
At this time I was looking after you at Mungel. Many of the marks on your body were administered or authorized by me in my ceaseless determination to uncover the secret of homosexuality. You would not remember some of this because I was also trying out various versions of Pervitin.
Today more than 100 million people consume various recipes that might include Pervitin and methamphetamine. It is called crystal meth. It is called OxyContin. It is called a number of things. But it is all based on the same original German recipe. It is this that killed Hitler and his National Socialism. Germany, land of much scientific genius, found the way to destroy its world. It was speed that had won his early battles, and it was speed that destroyed everything when too much of it was taken for too long and too many overdosed and collapsed and were killed in action.
It was the crystal meth that was given to you by your Grodzo that allowed them to scar your back at both Mungel and Partekla. This crystal meth is still manufactured by both Muck and Greptz and sold under the name Pervitin. Greeting, too, has a version.
But now it is most successfully manufactured in their own new doctored version by Presidium. Including an extract from a proton alpha, it is all now reformulated and sold as Peturba, a “cure” for UC. Your TAG has facilitated the great success of this Peturba. Presidium’s Peturba and OxyContin and your TAG are turning America into a country of addicts.
James Monroe is not only hugely rich but hugely homophobic. His own son had been fucked to death by a fellow faggot.
I am the “fellow faggot” who fucked his son.
I am also the doctor at Partekla who administered Monroe’s drug to you. That is the reason you recall so little, and perhaps why you are still alive. I am grateful you did not become addicted.
As I said, I am grateful to get this off my chest. I am grateful that we had a chance to become, for a while, friends.
I say goodbye to you now, with love.
* * *
These listed are the main strange bedfellows I accuse of participation in causing, so far, some billion deaths. Of course, the validity of this number, indeed all numbers, has already been questioned. As Fred has taught me, every step forward in the progress of homosexual acceptance has been checkmated for as long as possible by our enemies.
Now, of course, this Black and White Act is not being allowed to cooperate.
In the five years since I uncovered this law and the two years since I officially sued for its application, the Black and White Act has come to represent something else. Civil War historians point out the act was created only to protect the slave against his master. Legal scholars are responding that if this were so, that if the act was on the books, and known to be on the books, then the Civil War was, in essence, illegal. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. Somehow our judicial system fucked up royally. If Mr. Black (or Mr. White) didn’t want to be a slave, which would most certainly have been the case, according to the Black and White Act he couldn’t be forced to be one. And anyone who tried to make him one would be in violation of the law. And presumably open to punishment. Somewhere along these centuries the Black and White Act was silenced.
Legal scholars are also asking: Are these just a few words accidentally found, or left, on the statute books, ones that somehow weren’t excised completely for one reason or another, quite possibly because of their evident uselessness due to the numerous revisions of the Legal Code of the District of Columbia carried out over two hundred years since? It had, as Justice Punic said, “been on the books forever if anyone had ever bothered to look at the books.”
And gay rights advocates, in the person of yours truly, are maintaining that the Black and White Act was meant to mean something very specific: it was meant to protect a minority against a majority, many of whom were against this protection. The Negro might be the obvious original beneficiary of the act, but it need not be just the Negro. It can be any minority. Like a poor white man. Why, it can even be the homosexual.
* * *
The question I then raised is this: If there is a plague that wipes out generations of gay people (as well as many others), and the government and others can be proved to have not done their utmost to protect the gay population against this plague, both before and during it, then said government and others are as guilty of genocide of homosexuals just as they were of the Negro at the time of the Civil War, when the Negro was at the mercy of slave owners who no longer wanted them around having exploited them near to death. The Black and White Act certainly allows this interpretation.
But homosexuals were “not known, recognized, not in existence at the time of the passing of this bill,” as Aluto Allelelujah, a justice of the Supreme Court, immediately rules, in disallowing my argument to come forward for adjudication before this court. “And anyway, too many of your cast of characters have died.”
Thus much confusion has reigned since my suit was brought in law courts right up to the Supreme one, which finally ruled that the law stood on the books as read, but only if proof would be forthcoming about when it was drafted and passed, etc.; and only then could it be sought for safety by the “current aggrieved.” (Fred’s Volume 1 attempted to prove that homosexuality certainly existed in 1800.) If it is a fake, in that it was interposed on the books by forgery, then someone will have to prove that, and if there indeed was homosexuality at that time, someone beyond Fred will have to prove that, and to this end the Brothers of Lovejoy have set to work delving into their archives, reputed (by them) to go back to the beginning of the Christian era. They have thus requested “a pause in the proceedings” to allow for this investigation to be “thorough and fair.” This investigation will be supervised by one Delia Montagg Swindon, in partnership with Cardinal Blissful of the Vatican.
But as the plague reaches heights of almost unparalleled morbidity, a number of homosexuals, those worst stricken, citing the Black and White Act, have finally been granted legal permission by the federal district court to immediately bring suit against the United States government and Greeting and Presidium Pharmaceutical companies, both entities as joint representatives of the long list of others, dead and living, for alleged genocide, and for an unspecified amount of damages. “How do you put a price on a billion dead?” the chief lawyer for the accusers, Lucas Jerusalem, quite logically asked D.C. Chief Justice Detroika Flingge, who presided over this decision, assisted by her two associate justices, Verdant Rhue and Harry Lynn Thyme.
If any of the living defendants are actually found guilty of genocidal crimes against humanity, would they be allowed to walk away from the Punic Trials free? Or would they go to jail? Or be condemned to death? Could those alleged perpetrators who have died be condemned in absentia? These are not idle questions. Chief Justice Flingge’s decision “leaves many points unclear, while allowing me to proceed, with trepidation, I might add,” she wrote in her decision.
It must also be pointed out that there is still no ruling on any terminology necessary for differentiating between “genocide” and “crimes against humanity”—terms that remained purposely undefined or differentiated at Nuremberg itself.
So
now I await a court date from D.C.’s court, with its Republican majority, after which I shall again appeal to the Supreme Court, also stacked with Republicans because of years of monsters running our country, Dereck Dumster being the most recent and hateful: the justices he’s appointed have proven to be horror shows and are filled with hatred for almost everything.
So now, as with so many of the world’s tragedies, we wait to see if justice continues to remain unavailable even if and especially when it’s granted by a law that is hundreds of years old.
WRINKLES
The wrinkles are discomforting to look at, particularly the ones hanging from my tush. They look like bad drapery, hanging poorly, made of cheap, rough stuff. Attractiveness, if not beauty, if not perfection, has always been so important in the gay mystique. All people, to be sure, suffer aesthetic distress with aging. Still, it is uncomfortable to confront the mirror’s inevitability.
Love has become something different. It is no longer physical as in other days. David and I go seriously to a gym each day and work out as strenuously as we can. He’s over seventy (and I’m over eighty), but his body is quite a bit younger. He says mine doesn’t bother him, but I know he’s worried for me. We hug, we peck our kisses of greeting. I know he loves me as he knows that I love him. To say this after all we have been through should proclaim a certain triumph. As noted, we are even legally married. How did that sneak its way in? And how long before they take it away? Why after all these years are we still feeling so shy with each other? He is very happy. I can see that. He is a workaholic with much to work on as his case wends its way painfully slowly through the courts. He doesn’t like to sit still. Even when he comes home to our house in the country, my once fantasy now made beautifully real, he is too busy to relax much. To be grateful I am alive, as everyone seems to think one is or should be every day upon arising, has never been a part of my genetic makeup, I am sorry to confess, no matter the transplant, no matter the “lifesaving” meds, no matter the return of David, who saved my life not once but three different times, certainly surpassing any of my doctors.
He says to stop worrying. “Don’t worry!” I often find on little Post-it notes he puts on my desk when he leaves early in the morning for another task, and I am alone to revise my book with finality for submission to my editor. “I love you,” they say. “Write well.”
Yes, I believe him.
How lucky we did not murder each other.
How excellent that we at last found love.
* * *
And we can all live happily ever after. Like in all the best, how you call them? Fairy tales.
INT. SUPREME COURT. DAY.
The courtroom is packed. David and Lucas sit up front awaiting the arrival of the justices. Fred sits along the aisle beside them.
CLERK: All rise for the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America!
Everyone stands as the justices enter and take their seats on the dais.
CHIEF JUSTICE: Mr. Jerusalem, are you ready to present your case?
DAVID: I am, Chief Justice.
CHIEF JUSTICE: You may proceed.
Suddenly a man in the audience stands up and shoots David Jerusalem.
Fred rushes to cradle David in his arms. But David is already dead. The assailant has disappeared. Fred buries his head in David’s body.
* * *
Yes, we can all live happily ever after. Like in all the best fairy tales.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This has been my history of the plague I lived through, a brutality few ever dreamed of.
I do not pretend to have given an inclusive picture. There is no one who could give an all-embracing recital. I hope this book will encourage others to add their own experiences and histories so that the world will never forget.
While it is my story, my history, I am grateful to many others who contributed their voices and experiences to it. To particularly: Dame Lady Hermia Bledd-Wrench, Daniel Jerusalem, Dr. Sister Grace Hooker, Ianthe Adams Strode, Patti Montgomery, Sarah Schulman (The ACTUP Oral History Project [www.actuporalhistory.org] by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman), Minna Trooble, Ann Fettner, Maxine Wolfe, Joy Johannessen, Laurie Garrett, Hannah Arendt (how many of them are women!), Craig Lucas, Rodger McFarlane, Dr. Cecil Fox, Jon Cohen, Norman Ohler, Dr. Jacques Pepin, Will Schwalbe, the inestimable Alex Star, Jonathan Galassi, George Sheanshang, Ryan Murphy, Peter Staley, Ron Goldberg, Edward Alsop, Jim Eigo, FUQU Brothers and Sisters all, and of course the memories of so many dead friends. I have been cared for by too many doctors to name. And I have been particularly cared for by my beloved husband, David Webster, whom I have loved for many years, and who has literally saved my life a number of times.
ALSO BY LARRY KRAMER
FICTION
Faggots
The American People, Volume I: Search for My Heart
NONFICTION
The Tragedy of Today’s Gays
Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist
DRAMA
Women in Love and Other Dramatic Writings (Sissies’ Scrapbook, A Minor Dark Age, Just Say No)
The Destiny of Me
The Normal Heart
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Larry Kramer is a writer and an activist. After graduating from Yale College, he worked in the film industry and received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. In 1981, he and five friends founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and in 1987 he founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). His writings include the novel Faggots; the plays The Normal Heart, The Destiny of Me, and Just Say No; and the political works Reports from the Holocaust and The Tragedy of Today’s Gays. He has received two Tony Awards, an Emmy Award, a Lucille Lortel Award, a PEN America Award, an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Yale University. In 2019 he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. He and his husband, the architect and interior designer David Webster, live in New York City and Connecticut. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Part I
Part II
Acknowledgments
Also by Larry Kramer
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2020 by Larry Kramer
All rights reserved
First edition, 2020
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-72064-3
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* Dr. Karpas will be the first to provide confirmation of the French discovery that the causative agent of UC is a distinct virus and not, as Dodo will claim, his KGLV.
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