GLR May June

18 / 52

LARRY 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-
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-
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-
ESSAY
America through a Gay Glass, Darkly
LEWIS GANNETT
Lewis Gannett is completing a book on the early love life of Abraham
Lincoln.
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-
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.
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-
Kramer is making the case
that America from earliest
times foreshadowed its
response to AIDS. ... Our
founders were uglier than
we imagine.
18 The Gay & Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE