GLR May June

ESSAY America through a Gay Glass, Darkly L EWIS G ANNETT

L ARRY K RAMER ’ S FIRST NOVEL , Faggots , appeared in 1978. Its hero was a sleek gay hunk named Fred Lemish. On the eve of his fortieth birthday, Fred embarks on a quest. He makes the rounds of New York City’s sleazier hot spots—the baths, the kink clubs—to find as much sex as he can before tipping symbolically into middle age. But this isn’t what Fred really wants. He’s tired of mindless sex. In fact, he yearns for romance. Fred wants to settle down with a particular guy he likes, and lead a life of domestic tranquility. Faggots sold like hotcakes. Heterosexuals saw it as exotic anthropology, many gays enjoyed the attention, and everyone gasped at the lurid sex scenes. But a sizable chunk of the gay public hated the story’s moralistic tone. Who was Kramer to pass judgment on those exercising newfound sexual freedoms? Some of his friends shunned him. The local grocery on Fire Is- land declared him a persona non grata; acquaintances crossed the street to avoid saying hello. Then the plague hit. The gay world darkened. And Larry Kramer became a prophet. He went to work on his second novel, and time passed. Re-

ment about this book: it’s savagely, laugh-out-loud funny. Who would ever have imagined that? K RAMER LOOKS BACK AND ASKS : “What hap- pened?” Enter Fred Lemish, historian—or as he refers to himself, Your Roving Historian (YRH for short). Fred acknowledges that he initially brought limited experience to this role. But that didn’t stop him from thinking big. He enlisted the help of professionals, notably Dr. Sister Grace Hooker, Nobel-winning expert on infectious disease, and Dame Lady Hermia Bledd-Wrench, world authority on plagues. Dr. Israel Jerusalem, also a Nobelist, came on board to provide insight into sexuality. This book is full of medical luminaries with fancy names who labor at super-elite institutions and pub- lish in all the best places, such as The New England Journal of Evil . Does one get the feeling that Fred and his alter ego are in- tellectually sniffy? Fred also sought the help of professional historians. Here he ran into trouble on finding that historians knew little about gay people. Actually, gay history didn’t seem to exist at all. Fred con- The censorship extended to the lives of famous men who liked men sexually. It’s a lengthy list that includes George Wash- ington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Meriwether Lewis, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, Mark Twain, Chester Arthur, General George Custer, and others. Moreover, Fred learned that many of these guys’ sex lives got mixed up in skullduggery of one kind or another. Yes, it was dangerous to be gay. What a re- lief to read that “homosexuality does not appear to be woven into” the assassination of President McKinley, at least. Whew! Others weren’t so lucky. For example, John Wilkes Booth had a habit of murdering boy actors after raping them, possibly be- cause he had unresolved issues with his badly deformed penis, which bent to one side at almost a ninety-degree angle. How good is Fred’s evidence? On Benjamin Franklin he cites biographer Stacy Schiff. When Franklin served as Ameri- can envoy to Paris, according to Schiff, he made “regular late- afternoon visits to a white, canvas-covered barge” on the Seine. Adds Schiff: “Franklin was surely unaware that it was the city’s premier gay bathhouse.” Fred finds this hard to swallow. Did- ducted his own research, collecting informa- tion from disparate sources as best he could. He learned that, in fact, the American past teemed with gay life. But it was invisible. In part this was because gay people had been sys- tematically killed off, ever since Jamestown days in the early 1600s. Fred provides excep- tionally gory details about one massacre after another, all of them thoroughly covered up.

ports surfaced every now and then: the new book was to be titled The American People . It was about AIDS, and it was about the ex- clusion of gays from history books. More time passed, but the project remained a mys- tery. The only fact anyone seemed to know for sure: it would be a tome. Almost four decades after Kramer’s nov- elistic debut, his follow-up has at last ar-

Kramer is making the case that America from earliest times foreshadowed its response to AIDS. ... Our founders were uglier than we imagine.

rived—part of it, that is. Search for My Heart is Volume One of the two-volume The American People . At 880 pages it is indeed a fatty. Fred Lemish reappears as the protagonist. Once again he takes the reader on a sex tour, this time with a wider focus. Fred has become an expert on the history of sex in North America. He begins with monkeys in prehistoric Florida and closes with carnal politics in 1950s Washington, D.C. He is telling the story of “the underlying condition,” also known as the AIDS virus. But it isn’t just a medical tale. Search for My Heart tackles the primordial American theme of assimilation. This is Great American Novel territory, a saga of outsiders working their way in. They’re homosexuals, these outsiders, along with Jews and others. It’s not a success story, I’m afraid. It’s a struggle: a guts-splattered phantasmagoria of loathing and murder, occasionally softened by beams of sun- shine. Is that a surprise, coming from Larry Kramer? Perhaps not. However, it’s only volume one. And a final prefatory com-

Lewis Gannett is completing a book on the early love life of Abraham Lincoln.

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