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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.
20
The Gay & Lesbian Review
/
WORLDWIDE
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.
(from
Dandismo
[Dandyism])
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
T
RANSLATED BY
J
OSIAH
B
LACKMORE