GLR May June

look for, straight ones not so much. The same applies to evi- dence concerning any particular background: natives have a keener sense of their own kind. But this cliché doesn’t take us very far. Fred Lemish points to something more serious: the fact that straight scholars can’t even get the implications of a gay bathhouse in Paris. I F S EARCH FOR M Y H EART WERE A MOVIE , it would un- doubtedly receive the most restrictive rating. How re- strictive do ratings get? This movie would rate off the charts. Imagine crashing dreamscapes painted by a psy- chotic Marc Chagall. Imagine scenes too fiendish to film, too hardcore to show. For instance: “Dr. Dye then severs the penis, the scrotum and testicles. He flips the body over and eviscerates the various canals utilized in anal sex from

the kid’s rear end. He labels the parts and freezes them and locks them in a thermal chest.” Extreme as this is, Kramer goes there with a certain logic in mind. He’s making the case that America from earliest times foreshadowed its response to AIDS, and indeed facilitated the development of AIDS. He wants to show that America was ca- pable of such things. Our founders were uglier than we imagine. White America hated Indians, blacks, Jews, gays, hated the in- coming frail and helpless and diseased, loathed the weirdoes from backwater Europe. Fondly though we cherish Ellis Island, there was mass murder from day one. We perfected internment camps at secret locations in Idaho and exported them to the Nazis. We assembled high-tech lists of “those deemed worthy of riddance.” After World War II we imported German scien- tists and their mad new medical formulas, projects that Rocke- feller and Ford had seeded. Within it all an entity has lurked: the virus, one gathers. It tirelessly observes, and learns. Without using the lingo, Kramer suggests something quite plausible: that history is a series of post-traumatic stress disor- ders. His portrait of postwar Washington revises the notion of that era’s triumphalism, darkening it to reflect a people who can’t fathom the atrocities they’ve committed. They don’t remember their past very well—including the war they’ve just fought—be- cause it’s just too horrible. As to building Auschwitz prototypes in Idaho: let’s see how that theme plays out in Volume Two. A stylistic element deserves a word. Characters have fan- tastical names: Horatio Dridge, Anushkus Rattlefield, Evvilleena Stadtdotter, Hadrianna Totem, the Masturbov tribe. Also, many real names take new forms. Yale is “Yaddah,” The New York Times is The New York Truth , Glaxo Wellcome is now “Greeting.” Substitutions like these pervade the story, giving it the air of an alternate world co-captained by George Orwell and Ronald Firbank. The effect is whimsical, which concentrates the horror. Or does it dilute the horror? Readers will have dif- ferent reactions. The odd names help with keeping track of who’s who—and this book contains a cast of thousands. My favorite character is a boy named Daniel Jerusalem. Daniel is the least crazy person here, the dreamiest, the wittiest. At age thirteen he gets a crush on Mordy Masturbov, whose ti- tanically rich father owns Masturbov Gardens, an apartment complex where the Jerusalems live thriftily in suburban Wash- ington. Daniel says this about Mordy: Mordecai Masterbov is the first person I know I want to fall in love with and have love me back. I want to touch him all over. He has skin like marble. He has skin like velvet. He has skin I desperately want to touch. He looks like the Greek statues in the Mellon Gallery downtown, which I pretend is where I live, walking regally down the majestic staircases in the empty mammoth halls, going into rooms to stare at Roman and Greek men with lost penises. Daniel gets into all kinds of situations with Mordecai and an amusingly self-possessed girl named Claudia. They discover things in ever-proliferating tunnels under the ever-expanding Masturbov Gardens outside the rapidly growing capital of booming 1950s America. What lovely, disturbing adventures they have; but little do they know what’s in store. At halftime in this brilliantly written story, neither do we. Whatever is coming, it clearly will be astounding.

Songs BY A NTÓNIO B OTTO

1 Continually You come speak to me About the triumph of your youth Sung And revealed by me To those— Who then opened the market To your flesh nibbled In the secrets of lust... I understand perversity... I understand it, my friend; And, I also understand —I forgot, excuse me..., I made an oath, I say no more. 2 Tall, with brown hair, And the slender, abbreviated mouth Recalls an exotic flower Already a bit faded... The proportioned body Of a Greek statue; the voluptuous And pausing gait Like a certain aching melody On a violin... The long, beautiful hands, And a smile in the eyes —That gentle, feline gaze (from Dandismo [Dandyism])

T RANSLATED BY J OSIAH B LACKMORE

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