01 May 2006
I Call Bullsh*%
So I went for my checkup with my doctor this morning and the results are in. My CD-4 (T-cell) count in March was at 925 and now they are down to 511 and my viral load which has been undetectable since August is now up to 4,000. Amazing that a “largely undetectable virus” or an “inactive virus” can deplete my immune system. Whoda thunk? I obviously am not dealing to well with the news. My doctor is doing repeat tests in two weeks to see in changing my meds needs to be the next step. Write more then.
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2 comments:
I think this has been the most difficult speech I have ever had to
write and to deliver. It is
a long speech. I pray you will bear with me until it's end.
It is an attempt to give you some idea of who and what we are up
against. It is also an
attempt to discuss our ability to deal with these.
I recently learned about two dear friends, both exceptionally smart
and talented and each
in his own way a leader of our community. One, in his middle age,
has sero-converted.
The other, in his middle-age, has become hooked on crystal meth.
Both of them are here
with us tonight.
I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we're better than other
people. I really do. I
think we're smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do,
I totally do. And I
think we're more tuned in to what's happening, tuned into the
moment, tuned into our
emotions, and other people's emotions, and we're better friends. I
really do think all
these things.
To us it defies rational analysis that this incompetent dishonest
man and his party should
be re-elected. Or does it?
I hope we all realize that, as of November 2nd, gay rights are
officially dead. And that
from here on we are going to be led even closer to the guillotine.
This past week almost 60
million of our so-called "fellow" Americans voted against us. Indeed
23% of selfidentified
gay people voted against us, too. That one I can't figure.
The absoluteness of what has happened is terrifying. On the gay
marriage initiatives
alone: 2.6 million against us in Michigan. 3.2 million in Ohio. 1.1
million in Oklahoma, 2.2
million in Georgia. 1.2 million in Kentucky. George Bush won his
Presidency of our
country by selling our futures. Almost 60 million people whom we
live and work with
every day think we are immoral. "Moral values" was top of many lists
of why people
supported George Bush. Not Iraq. Not the economy. Not
terrorism. "Moral values." In
case you need a translation that means us. It is hard to stand up to
so much hate. Which
2
of course is just the way they want it. Please know that a huge
portion of the population
of the United States hates us. I don't mean dislike. I mean hate.
You may not choose to
call it hate, but I do. Not only because they refuse us certain
marital rights but because
they have also elected a congress that is overflowing with men and
women who refuse us
just about every other right to exist as well. "Moral values" is
really a misnomer; it means
just the reverse. It means they think we are immoral. And that we're
dangerous and
contaminated. How do you like being called immoral by some 60
million people? This is
not just anti-gay. This is what Doug Ireland calls "homo hate" on
the grandest scale. How
do we stand up to 60 million people who have found a voice and a
President who declares
he has a mandate?
The new Supreme Court, due any moment now, will erase us from the
slate of everything
possible in no time at all. Gay marriage? Forget it. Gay anything,
forget it. Civil rights for
gays? Equal protection for gays. Adoption rights? The only thing we
are going to get from
now on is years of increasing and escalating hate. Surely you must
know this. Laws and
regulations that now protect us will be repealed and rewritten.
Please know all this. With
the arrival of this second term of these hateful people we come even
closer to our
extinction. We should have seen it coming. We are all smart people.
How could we not
have been prepared?
They have not exactly been making a secret of their hate. This last
campaign has seen
examples of daily hate on tv and in the media that I do not believe
the world has
witnessed since Nazi Germany. I have been reading Ambassador Dodd's
Diary; he was
Roosevelt's ambassador to Germany in the 30's, and people are always
popping in and
out of his office proclaiming the most awful things out loud about
Jews. It has been like
that.
All Mary Cheyney is is a lesbian! Even her mother is hateful! That
Cheney must be one
fucked-up kid to stick around that family. I hope she doesn't want
to teach school. One
of the reelected Congress persons vows to make it illegal for
lesbians to teach school.
I know many people look to me for answers. Perhaps that is why many
of you are here.
You want answers? We're living in pigshit and its up to each one of
us to figure out how
to get out of it. You must know that by now. Crystal meth is not an
answer. You must
know that by now. And quite frankly statistically it is only
happening to so few of us
that it is hard to get anyone worked up about that problem. Just as
it hard to get worked
up about a middle-aged man with brains who sero-converts. You want
to kill yourself. Go
kill yourself. I'm sorry. It takes hard work to behave like an
adult. It takes discipline. You
want it to be simple. It isn't simple. Yes it is. Grow up. Behave
responsibly. Fight for
your rights. Take care of yourself and each other. These are the
answers. It takes courage
to live. Are you living? Not so I can see it. Gay people are all but
invisible to me now. I
wish you weren't. But you are. And I look real hard.
3
No one likes to be told to grow up. It's insulting. But these are
always the answers. They
will always be the answers. The only answers. There will never be
any other answers.
Grow up. Behave responsibly. Fight for your rights. Take care of
yourself and each other.
Be proud of yourself. Be proud you are gay. I don't know why so many
find all this so
complicated. But then I am 69 years old and have less patience for
the many problems I
had myself when young. It is one of the privileges of getting old.
It is 25 years since 100,000 of us marched on Washington.
The Aids service organizations are all about to collapse. No money.
And the problem is
too big to handle anymore. We have not slowed this thing down at
all. $100 billion we're
spending on Iraq. This is a conscious choice by our "leaders" and by
a large portion of the
population of this country. They have in their infinite and never-
ending cruelty decided
this was the most effective thing to do with 100 billion dollars
that might also end Aids,
and a few other things like worldwide hunger. But the cabal doesn't
care about these.
People say: well we can't take care of the rest of the world. That
is so stupid. The rest of
the world is us. We are so intertwined geopolitically that we cannot
separate ourselves off
into parts, into sections. Those days are over. If they ever were
here. We have everything
required to save the world except the will to do it. In a recent New
Yorker piece Michael
Specter writes that because of Aids Russia is on its way to
disappearing. Disappearing.
Imagine that.
The immense knowledge we have learned about Aids has provided us
with precious little
more than that knowledge. HIV/AIDS is now the worst disaster in
recorded human
history. In parts of Africa 7000 people are infecting each other
each and every day. We
who are here are idiots if we think this fact is not going to alter
our lives mightily. If your
company loses enough world markets, which it most certainly will,
you are going to lose
your job. You will not have health insurance, for a start. And for a
finish. Economies are
simply going to collapse. This is already happening.
In 1990, that is some nine years into what was happening, 46% of gay
men in San
Francisco were still fucking without condoms.
60% of the syphilis in America today is in gay men. Excuse me, men
who have sex with
men.
Palm Springs has the highest number of syphilis cases in California.
Palm Springs?
I do not want to hear each week how many more of you are becoming
hooked on meth.
HIV infections are up as much as 40%.
4
You cannot continue to allow yourselves and each other to act and
live
like this!
One of these days the miraculous drugs we have to keep us alive are
going to stop
working. Our systems cannot process these extreme chemotherapies
indefinitely. That is
what we are on. We are on daily chemotherapy. No one wants to call
it that. We call it the
cocktail. We are on chemotherapy! Chemotherapy either kills the
disease or kills us!
What are we going to do when they don't work any longer?
Some 70 million people so far are expected to die. "July 3, 1981,
Rare cancer seen in 41
homosexuals." When I first started yelling about whatever it was
there were 41 cases.
THERE ARE NOW OVER 70 MILLION WHO HAVE BEEN INFECTED WITH HIV.
Somebody up there is really listening, don't you think? There is no
way that all
infected people can be saved. No one ever says that out loud. Have
you noticed?
Somehow in some dream world we are going to get treatment into 70
million people. It is
never going to happen. IT IS TOO LATE. We told them. But they didn't
do
anything. Did you notice? Nobody every does anything. I hope it's
finally dawning on
you that maybe they didn't and don't want to. So, in case you
haven't noticed, we have
lost the war against Aids. I thought I'd tell you that, too. I hope
you might have noticed. I
can't tell.
The President refuses to buy generic drugs for dying people. He is
still saying he is
waiting to hear if they are safe. These drugs have been approved. In
some cases for
several years. Does this sound like a President who wants to save
anyone?
I do not understand why some of you believe that because we have
drugs that deal with
the virus more or less effectively that it is worth the gamble to
have unprotected sex.
These drugs are not easy to take. There are many side effects. Not
life but certainly
comfort threatening. I must allow at least one day out of every week
or two to feel really
shitty, to have no sleep, to be constipated, to have diarrhea, to
require blood tests and
monitoring at hospitals or in doctors' offices, and to have the
shakes. The shakes, which
come often, are not useful with a mouse or reading a newspaper or
with a lover in your
arms. And I don't enjoy eating anymore. Keeping on weight is a
constant problem. I have
dry mouth. I get up six or seven times a night to pee. Many of the
meds we are now
taking are new meds and were approved quickly and side effects have
a sneaky way of
showing up after FDA approval, not before. I recently discovered
that I was taking an
FDA approved dose of Viread that has turned out to be five times the
amount I actually
need. We are all probably taking too much or too little of every
single one of our drugs.
Doctors don't want to test for this; tests are not readily
available. You have to do a lot of
homework yourselves on these drugs. Is a fuck without a condom worth
not being able to
taste food? Obviously for too many of you it is.
5
My lover often sits on top of me to make me eat. The first time this
happened I was in
the hospital just after my liver transplant and I wouldn't eat and
Dr. Fung said I had to
eat, or else I would die, and I just couldn't eat (do you know how
strange this is to
someone who was always on a diet?). It was New Year's Eve. We were
in beautiful
downtown Pittsburgh. David had brought a hamper filled with my
favorite dishes. And I
could not eat anything. Furiously he crawled into bed with me, boots
and all, and started
to cry. "We haven't come this far for you to die because you won't
eat," he screamed,
tears streaming down his face. I will never forget that. I will
never forget this man I love
so much in bed with me with his snowy boots on starting slowly to
spoon into me
whatever he'd made and I trying so desperately hard to swallow it,
looking at him, this
man I love so much, doing this for me, both of us now bawling our
eyes out and hugging
each other in this strange bed in this strange town, wondering how
we got here.
It's so wonderful being a gay person. I said that before. I'm going
to say it again. I love
being gay. And I love gay people. I think we're better than other
people. I really do. I
think we're smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do,
I totally do. And I
think we're more tuned in to what's happening, tuned into the
moment, tuned into our
emotions, and other people's emotions, and we're better friends. I
really do think all of
these things. And I try not to forget them.
Since the very first day of this plague we have been given, almost
as if by some cosmic
intentionality, American leaders who most assuredly wish us dead.
There can no longer be
any way to deny this fact. Each day brings more and more acts of
hatred. Tell me it is not
so. Tell me that the amount of good that is being attempted is not
totally and
intentionally overwhelmed by the evil. Point out to me how this is
not so. I cannot see it.
I have been unable to see it since July 3, 1981. I thought it was
because it was a tricky
virus. That is what we have been told. It's a very tricky virus. I
hoped for a while. But
we are being played for chumps and it has been so since July 3,
1981. And we never saw
it.
We of course continue to be in our usual state of total denial and
disarray. Whatever
structure the gay world had, if we ever had one, is gone. Our
organizations stink. Almost
every single one of them. I cannot think of one single gay
organization that despite the
best will in the world is now anything but worthless to us. Oh maybe
one or two. We
have no power. Nobody listens to us. We have no access to power. The
cabal disdains us
totally. We are completely disposable. It is a horror show. There is
not one single person
in Washington who will get us or give us anything but shit and more
shit. I'm sorry. This
is where we are now. Nowhere. And you expect me to cry for you if
you get hooked on
meth or can't stop the circuit parties or the orgies. OK, I feel
sorry for you. Does that
change nything? I would say I feel sorry for myself, but I don't. I
know I am fighting as
hard as I can. I may not be getting anywhere but I am trying. It's
exhausting and I have to
do it every day, every single day, like taking my meds which if I
stop I know my body
6
will cease doing something or other. I have accidentally missed a
few days of meds and
boy do I know fast that was a mistake.
I fear for us as a people. Is that crazy? I am always being called
crazy by somebody. I
love being called crazy. That's a sign to me that I'm on the right
track. Maybe it takes a
crazy person to see into the future and see what's coming. Straight
people say "my how
much progress gay people are making. Isn't that Will and Grace
wonderful." If it's so
wonderful why am I scared to death? More and more I am filled with
dread. That is my
truth that I bring to you today. Larry is scared. Do you see what I
see? I don't think so.
Most gay people I see appear to me to act as if they're bored to
death. Too much time on
your hands, my mother would say. Hell, if you have time to get
hooked on crystal and do
your endless rounds of sex-seeking, you have too much time on your
hands. Ah, you say,
aren't we to have a little fun? Can't I get stoned and try
barebacking one last time. ARE
YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND! At this moment in our history, no, you
cannot. Anyway, we had your fun and look what it got us into. And it
is still getting us
into. You kids want to die? Because that's what I sometimes think.
Well, then, die.
You cannot continue to allow yourselves and each other to act and
live
like this!
And by the way, when are you going to realize that for the rest of
your lives, probably
for the rest of life on earth, you are never going to be able to
have sex with another person
without a condom! Never! Every time you even so much as consider
this I want you to
hear my voice screaming like crazy in your ears. STOP! DON'T! NEVER!
NO WAY,
JOSE! Canadian scientists now warn that even partners who are both
un-infected should
practice safe sex. As I understand it, more and more new viruses and
mutant viruses and
partial viruses that are not understood are floating around. Are you
ready for that one?
Does it ever occur to you how much you have been robbed by both your
country and
your behavior? America let the men who should have carved out a
space for you in the
social discourse, the development of your history and being, America
let these men who
should have been your role models die. So there is this big empty
space in which you live.
And you don't know where to go or how to fill it in. This is not my
original thought but
Michael Brown's of the NYU gay student organizations that helped to
bring me here,
who gave me this to think about. It is sad for a young gay person to
feel this way.
I had people to follow and many of you have not. No baton was passed
to you. In a way
you must start everything over. You must invent a world from which
you can move
forward from. This is both an extraordinarily exciting challenge and
a terrifying one, one
that can just as easily leave you by the wayside as make a new man
of you. I say man
because it is gay men who appear to have the greatest difficulty, it
seems to me, in
moving forward, getting off their particular dime.
7
Many of you deny the horrors of what happened to your predecessors.
That is
something I do not understand. Every moral code I know of requires
respect for the dead.
I often hear that many of you don't want to know about them or admit
to them. You
disdain anyone older who was there.
This is denial of a most destructive nature. You cannot move forward
without accepting
your past. I am going to say that again. We cannot move forward
without accepting and
understanding our past. We were as varied as you are. We were no
different, really. We
were very different from those who preceded us. We were the first
free gay generation
and we were murdered because of our freedom. And yes you were robbed
of this freedom
that for obvious reasons could not be passed on to you as your
heritage. So instead of
being understanding of all this, you condemn your predecessors to
non-existence and
flounder into a future that you seem unable to fashion into anything
you can hold on to
that gives you emotional sustenance. You refuse to be part of any
community. But if you
don't have any community you have no political strength. You are too
busy denying and
disassociating to know that. You do not seem able, it seems to me,
to fashion your future.
To discover what you want. You don't even ask what you want. You
don't even ask
what you need. Your needs are as mighty as needs always have been,
but you don't ask
what they are, which amazes me. How can you not have curiosity about
your future as a
gay person? Don't you want to go anywhere? Do you want to stay where
you are? That
is too bad if you do because we are about to enter a place more
monstrously worse. You
can deny that, as you deny those of us who went before you, but just
know that down
this path of your numerous denials lies your own continued
destruction, the continuing
destruction of gay people as gay people, which this cabal of haters
I shall shortly
describe, and its supporters, which are legion, are intent on
accomplishing with
increasingly ruthless vengeance. If you do not fight back you will
be murdered in ways
just as hideous as the ways in which we got murdered.
Every single president since 1981 has denied our existence and
denied the existence of
AIDS. And we let them get away with it. Oh a few thousand of us
fought for the drugs
that we got but many millions of us did nothing and of course an
enormous number of
them died. They died because they lost their health along their
journey of noninvolvement
and their lack of responsibility to their brothers and sisters.
Instead of
learning from this lesson, you are repeating it. And you are acting
like this with your
health intact, many of you, which strikes me as even more perverse
than what your dead
predecessors did to destroy themselves.
Does it occur to you that we brought this plague of aids upon
ourselves? I know I am
getting into dangerous waters here but it is time. With the cabal
breathing even more
murderously down our backs it is time. And you are still doing it.
You are still murdering
each other. Please stop with all the generalizations and avoidance
excuses gays have used
since the beginning to ditch this responsibility for this fact. From
the very first moment
we were told in 1981 that the suspected cause was a virus, gay men
have refused to
8
accept our responsibility for choosing not to listen, and, starting
in 1984, when we were
told it definitely was a virus, this behavior turned murderous. Make
whatever excuses
you can to carry on living in your state of denial but this is the
fact of the matter. I wish
we could understand and take some responsibility for the fact that
for some 30 years we
have been murdering each other with great facility and that down
deep inside of us, we
knew what we were doing. Don't tell me you have never had sex
without thinking down
deep that there was more involved in what you were doing than just
maintaining a hardon.
I have recently gone through my diaries of the worst of the plague
years. I saw day after
day a notation of another friend's death. I listed all the ones I'd
slept with. There were a
couple hundred. Was it my sperm that killed them, that did the
trick? It is no longer
possible for me to avoid this question of myself. Have you ever
wondered how many
men you killed? I know I murdered some of them. I just know. You
know how you
sometimes know things? I know. Several hundred over a bunch of
years, I have to have
murdered some of them, planting in him the original seed. I have put
this to several
doctors. Mostly they refuse to discuss it, even if they are gay.
Most doctors do not like
to discuss sex or what we do or did. (I still have not heard a
consensus on the true dangers
of oral sex, for instance.) They play blind. God knows what they
must be thinking when
they examine us. Particularly if they aren't gay. One doctor
answered me, it takes two to
tango so you cannot take the responsibility alone. But in some cases
it isn't so easy to
answer so flippantly. The sweet young boy who didn't know anything
and was in awe of
me. I was the first man who fucked him. I think I murdered him. The
old boyfriend who
did not want to go to bed with me and I made him. The man I let fuck
me because I was
trying to make my then boyfriend, now lover, jealous. I know, by the
way, that that other
one is the one who infected me. You know how you sometime know
things? I know he
infected me. I tried to murder myself on that one.
Has it never, ever occurred to you that not using a condom is
tantamount to murder? I
cannot believe you have never considered this. It is such a simple
and intelligent thought
to have. And we all should have had it from day one. Why didn't we?
That has been
haunting me for a while, that question. Why didn't we? It is
incredibly selfish not to have
at least thought that question at that moment, all those moments
when we were playing
Russian roulette.
From here on I am going to get even more complicated. I want you to
pay attention. This
is the most important part of this speech.
Bill Moyers recently said this in a speech on October 20, 2004 at
the Palace Hotel:
"For years now, the corporate, political, and religious right—this
is documented from
1971 on—the religious and political right has been joined in an axis
of influence whose
purpose is to take back the gains of the democratic renewal in the
20th century and restore
9
America to a rule of the elites that maintain their privilege and
their power at the expense
of everyone else. For years now, a small fraction of American
households have been
garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large
corporations and
financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of
economic and political power
over daily life."
"Take note," Moyers continues. "The corporate, political, and
religious conservatives are
achieving a vast transformation of America that only they understand
because they are its
advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the
greatest inequality in
America since 1929, they have saddled our nation, our States, and
our cities and counties
with structural defects that will last until our children's children
are ready for retirement,
and they are systematically stripping government of all its
functions, except rewarding
the rich and waging war."
In other words, our country has been taken away from us by a cabal
that includes all the
people who hate us.
These people make the rules. They are rarely elected officials. They
may or may not
know each other. They have several things in common. They are very
rich or have strong
connections to money or power. They are in agreement on what they do
not want. They
believe fervently in their God. And that they are doing all this for
Him. And they stay in
constant touch.
I hope you realize that all these people Bill Moyers is talking
about hate us. Thriller
writers write better histories of our times than actual historians.
Anyway, it is done. What Moyers is talking about. It's already
happened. On a scale of
such magnitude that it is difficult to see how we can ever take it
back. It's all in place
now, this cabal of power. It almost doesn't make any difference who
is president.
You want to know why AIDS was allowed to happen. This is your
answer. You want to
know why gay people have no power and are unlikely to get any. This
is your answer.
The top 1% of wealth holders control 39% of total household wealth.
The richest 5% of households own 2/3 of the value of all stock owned
in the our country.
The the top 1% have as many after-tax dollars to spend as the bottom
100 million.
The richest 20% of households received almost 50% of the national
income, while the
bottom 20% received only 3%.
10
At a time when 265 people in the United States were billionaires, 32
million people were
living beneath the official poverty line.
This inequality gap in the United States is the highest in the
industrialized world.
"That drive," Moyers continues, "is succeeding with drastic
consequences for an
equitable access to public resources, the lifeblood of any
democracy. From land, water,
and natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital
spectrums, to scientific
discovery and medical breakthroughs, and even to politics itself, a
broad range of
American democracy is undergoing a powerful shift in the direction
of private control.
"We are experiencing a fanatical drive to dismantle the political
institutions, the legal and
statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that
have shaped public
responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private
power."
In 1971, Lewis Powell, a Richmond lawyer who called himself a
centrist, was secretly
commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Congress to write a confidential
plan on how to
take back America for the survival of the free enterprise system.
Not democracy. Free
enterprise. Barry Goldwater had lost, Nixon was about to implode,
Vietnam had sucked
the nation's soul dry, the cabal saw their world unraveling. They
saw the women's
movement, black civil rights. student war protests, the cold war.
They saw the world as
they knew it coming to an end. (We are not the first to feel our
world crumbling and
becoming powerless.)
This is what Lewis Powell wrote:
"Survival lies in organization, in careful long range planning, in
consistency of action over
an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing only
available through joint effort
and in the political power available only through united action."
This was the birth of what is now called the vast right wing
conspiracy. It is known as
the Powell Manifesto. You can google Lewis Powell (not the one who
helped to
assassinate Lincoln) and read it in its entirety.
Under the supervision of some of the richest families in America,
that plan has been
followed faithfully since 1971 and it has resulted in these past
years of horror and the
reelection of George Bush. Nine families and their foundations, all
under the insistent
goading of Joseph Coors, have financed much of this. The Bradley
Foundation. The Smith
Richardson Foundation. Four Scaife Family Foundations, The John M.
Olin Foundation.
The Castle Rock (or Coors) Foundation. Three Koch Family
Foundations. The Earhart
Foundation. The JM Foundation. The McKenna Foundation. From 1985 to
2001 alone
they contributed $650 million to this conservative message campaign.
They have helped
to launch and gain financing for networks of newspapers and
magazines. They have seen
to it that hundreds of the most powerful think tanks have appeared,
including the
11
Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise,
Cato, Manhattan,
Hudson Institutes, and many more. There are now in place an ever
growing number of
well-funded student organizations at many colleges. There are legal
advocacy foundations,
such as the Center For Individual Rights and Judicial Watch. There
are Leadership
Institutes and Action Institutes and Institutes on Religion and
Public Policy and Religion
and Democracy. There is a heavily visible media participation: Fox
Television and Pat
Robertson and Oliver North and Radio America and the Washington
Times and Ann
Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, to name but a very few, including the
editorial page of the Wall
Street Journal.
For the preparation of this manifesto, Lewis Powell was rewarded by
Richard Nixon with
a seat on the Supreme Court, where among other things he voted
against gays in Bowers
v. Hardwick, and against Black people in Bakke v. University of
California.
It is vital for us to realize that this plan was written in 1971.
The people it was written
for did not go off then to a disco, or to the Pines or into therapy,
or into drugs. They took
this plan and they have executed it religiously every day and night
for the next thirty-five
years initially with some 400 million dollars and always from then
until now with
unending hours of backbreaking, grinding, unglamorous work, of civic
engagements county
by county across the entire expanse of America. They took the
richest and most liberal
nation in the history of civilization and turned it hard right into
a classist, racist,
homophobic imperial army of pirates. 30% of America now self-
identify as conservative
or extremely conservative. When Lewis Powell wrote his Manifesto
that figure was less
than 10%.
And on the morning of November 3d we wrung our hands and wondered
why.
And we have a community that still cannot decide on what we want or
what to do. We
are completely inept at organizing ourselves and have a monstrously
bad record of
attempting unity.
The continuing existence of HIV is essential for the functioning of
the totalitarianism
under which gay people now live. It works out like this: HIV
allows "them" to sell us as
sick. And that kills off our usefulness, both in our own minds,
their thinking we are sick,
and in the eyes of the world, everyone thinking we are sick. All of
this obliterates the
consciousness of those who should help us and don't. This liquidates
and incinerates our
individuality and our spontaneity, our abilities to fight back, to
hold our oppressors to
task. They want to keep HIV going as long as they can! Why haven't
we seen that? The
signs have always been there! But like everything else we couldn't
believe them. No one
could be as cruel as that. They want to make us superfluous. Their
media, their
newspapers, their networks will see to it that our good qualities
are invisible.
12
It should therefore come as no surprise that when HIV came along
they, this cabal,
facilitated its rapid deployment and continue to do so. Before even
making the feeblest
attempt to commence any miniscule response or inquiry into what
their press was not
reporting, which they most certainly knew about themselves, they
waited until masses of
us had all been exposed to the whatever it was. We on the other hand
chose to not believe
that the whatver it was was a virus until this was incontestably
proved. But they knew
what it was, or were willing to take the chance and hope that it
was, and they just sat
back and waited. Their wildest dreams then started to come true. The
faggots were
disappearing and they were doing it to themselves! I can locate no
work of any urgency,
or indeed much work at all on aids for most of the period between
1981-1984. Oh many
claim it, as many claim seeing cases many years earlier, which I
also doubt, but I cannot
locate whatever these are claiming. In those four years almost every
gay man who had
fucked in America had been exposed to the virus.
And when they did start doing anything it was with such feebleness
that it amounted to
nothing for ten years. You can give me all kinds of reasons why it
took so long but my
research has convinced me that the actual scenario was completely
intentional neglect. Oh
perhaps not the doctors or the scientists. But they had no money.
And they were not
going to get any money. Or enough money. People upstairs were going
to see to it that
there would be no money. Let even more people get infected first.
Blacks, junkies,
prostitutes. Every color of skin but straight white. Every religion
but Christian. Excuse
me, white Christian. Then we'll throw them a few pennies to make it
look like we're
concerned.
The cabals Bill Moyers talked about have called all the shots in
facilitating and
accelerating the plague of aids. If scientists discovered something
useful, it has rarely been
available. I spoke earlier about the refusal of this president to
allow already approved
generic drugs out to a desperate Africa and elsewhere. Of that huge
Congressional
approval of many billions for HIV around the world that Bush brags
about, something
less that 2% has left Washington almost four years after its
approval. Does this sound
like a President and a government and a country that wants to help?
I guess I have suspected behavior like this all along. But I never
knew it in quite the way
that I have now come to see it thanks to Bill Moyers: intentionality
is the only word to
describe the genocidal treatment the world is drowning in. Much of
the world, most
assuredly including us, has been intentionally hung out to die. So
far some 70 million of
us. That is some manifesto Lewis Powell birthed. And all we have to
do is keep fucking
each other without condoms and the rest of their "moral issues" will
be dead.
Do you seriously think they care about the continuing rise again of
HIV infections? They
are grateful for them. Do you think they care about a sudden plague
of crystal? They
thank us for our cooperation. And we thought for one brief second of
time that we might
even be allowed to marry the ones we love.
13
And while all this happened, even if we had enough suspicions to
act, what did we do?
We completely shrank from our duty of opposition. Those are
Christopher Isherwood's
words: "the duty of opposition." But he was flagellating himself
with these words. He
fears that should he have to live face to face with a war in his
backyard that he "would
shrink from the duty of opposition."
Marriage? Forget it. Non-discrimination laws? Forget them. Those
that have been enacted
will be rescinded or amended into toothlessness. Adoption? Equal
rights? Forget
everything. We are going to be erased into nothingness. They hate us
so much and now
they are in complete and utter power, the most dangerous situation
in the world for the
unwanteds to live under. And I no longer think it matters who is
President. Clinton turned
out to be as rotten for us as George Bush, either one.
Ok, keep putting your life in jeopardy. 110 of their drug companies
certainly want you to
do so. Keep dancing your asses off at circuit parties all over the
world as you go down to
the sea in ships that are made to intentionally capsize and take you
down with them. Ok,
keep being bored and crying for your poor selves. You ain't seen
nothin' yet. With our
complete cooperation they have already murdered several generations
of us so far. They
won't have to murder so many more of us to get their wish. Like
Russia, we will
disappear. That is what they want to do. Disappear us. And now they
are able to
officially do it. George Bush has his mandate. Can't you see all
this! People high up there
in their secret powwows don't want us here. Word has come down from
on high: get rid
of the faggots once and for all. You think the law will protect us?
Think again. Wait until
you see the new Supreme Court.
You are here as a gay person because of certain events and certain
people who lived and
suffered and died before you. You must learn about them and not
continually deny their
existence and importance in our history, the history of gay people
in America. You must
learn about them! They have made your life possible! What kind of
person doesn't want
to learn about themselves? I don't know why but you don't want to.
Most of our fellow
gays don't read books about us. Or come to plays about us. What do
you want to do? I
don't know. And for all I can tell in talking to many of you, you
don't know either. And
this is very frightening. A large uncongealed mass of potentially
superior beings doesn't
know what to do with themselves or bother to learn their history. So
they dance. So they
drug. So they go on to the internet to find more sex. These are
useful lives being wasted.
Why is that? Why is there no useful creativity going on? Why is
there no mental agility
visible, no audible questioning discussions of… almost anything of
importance? Don't
you long for some involvement in the humanity that you belong to,
for your place in the
scheme of things? You don't know how to make entrance on these
playing fields, is that
it? I don't know what is wrong with us. I wish you could tell me.
What do you do with
yourselves all week long, seven days and nights a week, that amounts
to anything really
important? I can't see many of you as doing anything important, to
give your lives
14
meaning. Oh I can see lots of frocks on the runway but I can't see
bodies inside of them,
bodies with brains and concerned with anything but pretty and
orgasms. What do you do
to make your world, our world, a better place? A world that needs
every bit of help it can
get, our world, not their world. You don't seem able to connect with
anyone beyond the
basest ways.
"Why can't we look at our bodies and see not just a sexual
definition? Why can't we see
in the body all that the body represents? Sexuality, yes. But also
mortality, humanness,
humaneness, innocence, purity, health, sickness, strength,
consideration, responsibility,
divinity. When did we rob our bodies of all the complexity they
possess? Why do we
refuse to see all that we are capable of? All the other things that
make us full beings."
That very beautiful paragraph was written by my friend, Jordan Roth,
who is one day
going to be a very fine writer if he just keeps at it.
Do you know you are taking the same crystal meth as Hitler? The
stuff that was being
used well into 1997, the government outlawed one of the ingredients
and so the orignal
process was resurrected, the one as used by the Nazis. It was first
synthesized by the
Germans in the early part of the 20th century. Hitler was a crystal
addict. The new
version is much more potent than the stuff you were taking before
1997, which is the
main reason why it is so hard to break an addiction. Dr. Howard
Grossman told me this
bit of history. Maybe I shouldn't have told you about the Hitler
part. To the more
twisted among you it may be a turn-on.
I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we're better than other
people. I really do. I
think we're smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do,
I totally do. I really
do think all of these things. And I try very hard to remember all
this.
But I am finding that I am not so proud of being gay anymore. It's
come over me slowly.
As much as I love being gay and I love gay people I'm not proud of
us right now. It's
disappeared. I almost could say we've disappeared. But since you are
here I can't quite
say that. But that's how I feel.
I do not see us, don't you see? I do not see us! They are killing
us. They are eradicating
us from this earth. Little by little by little we are disappearing.
I do not see us and I am
beginning to see us less and less.
I have recently come to believe that gay men and women are tragic
people. We are so
wonderful but we are also so fucked up. So blind. So ignorant in
ways to look after
ourselves. So uninterested in the Outside World that is subsuming us
when we thought
we were making them pretty and giving them songs to sing. So without
agendas to utilize
our wonderful-ness. We know who the enemy is and we just stand here
letting them
shoot us over and over again. WE STAND HERE AND LET THEM DO IT! All
of the
brains and abilities we have among us are useless. The smartest
among us, our famous
15
ones, our rich ones, seem to allow this most of all. The ones who
should help us and
speak up for us refuse that responsibility. We have enough rich gay
men and lesbians to
finance a takeover of the world but their brains and their money and
their skills are not
available to to help us. To lead us. To inspire us. To finance us.
To be like Lewis
Powell's Nine Families. That, too is tragic. To have so much money
and to not to use it
for brothers and sisters, for family, for our continuation here on
earth. Why is that?
Rockefeller tithed himself from his very first dollar, to go to his
church for his salvation.
Please, can we get word to every rich gay person to show up to help
save us. We need
our Nine Families desperately.
Public service: how many religions demand this of their members? How
much public
service in behalf of your brothers and sisters, your family, have
you performed recently?
Don't tell me you don't know what to do. If you can find another ass
to fuck, and you
seem endlessly inventive at accomplishing this, then you should be
able to locate a more
useful and responsible outlet.
For a few brief years we had some noble moments, of togetherness and
anger and
progress. Not many of us, mind you. If you are still alive, you know
who you were and
where you were during those worst years of our mass murder. You know
what you did
and what you didn't. And I know too. I know that most of you, should
you still be alive,
didn't do a goddamned thing. In fact, you were ashamed of us, many
of you were. I
remember that as well as I remember those who died. "Friends"
crossing the street to
avoid me because I was advising cooling it. I was actually told to
not come back to Fire
Island Pines. Lots of people come up to me now on the street and
say, thank you for
what you did for us. I do not consider that a compliment. My
response quite often's been
a curt Fuck You, why aren't you doing it too! I don't do anything
that anyone else
couldn't do. I just do it, and some 10 or 15,000 other people did it
too then. And the rest
of you sat on your asses. And, those of you who are still alive,
know who you were and
how little you did.
Yes for one brief moment in time we got angry. Correction, a few of
us got angry. Of all
our many many millions of gay people in this country, about 10,000
of us or so got angry
enough to accomplish something. We got drugs. We got aids care. We
got enough so we
could continue fucking again. That in the end is what it amounted
to. As soon as we got
the drugs, you went right back to what got us into such trouble in
the first place. WHAT
IS WRONG WITH US? The cabal can't believe their good fortune.
How many gay people in America in those years of Aids? Ten million?
Twenty million?
Thirty million? How many of us are there now? We don't even know how
many of us
there are! Or how many we lost! And every time some statistical
number is released by
some faceless organization or government office, I always wonder:
how the fuck do they
know how many of us there are when we don't even know how many of us
there are?
16
And none of our so-called gay organizations ever bothers to find
out. It would be nice to
know, helpful to know. Don't you think?
You know, it isn't meant to be easy, life. I don't know why it isn't
meant to be easy, but
it just isn't, so we might as well get used to it and try to find
things that give us a certain
sense of pride. We must create ourselves as something we can live
with. It takes energy,
yes. Why are we so crippled intellectually? Oh, we study sexuality
and gender stuff until
it comes out of every university's asshole but we don't study
history, who we were and
where we came from and our roots, the wellsprings of our historical
existence. We do not
honor our dead as we do not honor ourselves. We continue without
surcease to be and
remain, endlessly, day after day, helpless victims. "In my country
when they raise the
bus fares, we burn the buses," a Brazilian journalist said to me as
she watched a sparsely
attended Act Up demonstration.
There is never one single hour that a disenfranchised minority does
not have to fight to
breathe and stay alive. The hate out there will never lessen. It
only grows and grows, this
hate. Most of you refuse to face this. I hate you for your doing
that. I really do. I have no
more patience for this kind of weakness. I know this is uncharitable
of me. I don't care. I
am too tired of fighting with so few troops. You are now dancing
your own dance of
death, you know. And I hate you for this, too. Grow up, I beg you.
Oh, grow up.
Time goes by so fast. We are allotted so precious little of it on
this earth. How sad that
you use it so stupidly. Every minute that goes by is gone forever.
You who have been
given a new lease on life, the very gift of life itself, piss it
away. It is so incomprehensible
to me who has come so close to death a couple times. I find your
inactivity and
ingratitude and lack of imagination on how to act in emergencies
incongruous,
incomprehensible, insulting. And unacceptable. I could never
understand during all those
years of Aids why every single person facing death would not fight
to save his own life.
And I cannot understand now how, life having been given back to us
again, again you treat
your life with such contempt.
Yes, all that I have spoken of tonight is the stuff of tragedy.
I wish we could truly look upon each other as brothers and sisters.
It sounds corny I am
told when I keep using terms like this. How can we be related I am
asked dismissively.
You do not know or want to know that we have been on this earth as
long as anyone else
and that we have as many available heroes and heroines as anyone
else. Your family has
been here a very long time and has an ancient and distinguished
lineage. You must learn
that Abraham Lincoln was gay and George Washington and Meriwether
Lewis and so
many others we are only just beginning to uncover. But they will not
let gay history be
taught in schools and universities. And we seem unable to teach
ourselves. My own
college, Yale, with $1 million of my own brother's money to do just
this, will not teach
17
what I call gay history, unencumbered with the prissy
incomprehensible gobbledygook of
gender studies and queer theory. Abraham Lincoln did not talk that
language.
We richly deserve the government we have received. We do not even
know who we are.
And our enemies participate in their convictions every day of their
lives. We only show
up when we want to, which is not very often. But then perhaps you do
not love being
gay. Or think we are better than other people, and smarter and more
talented and more
tuned into what is happening, and are better friends.
I leave the hardest topic we must face till last.
How do we fight as a united front when they don't approve of
our "behavior" and when
our behavior is inseparable from our beings? How do we fight as a
united front when
some of us won't or are unable to change certain behaviors that many
of us have difficulty
in supporting and defending ourselves? We've been so concerned about
showing the
world a united front. We feel the need to say that everything gay
people do is good and it
simply isn't so. We must have an honest discussion amongst ourselves
about what's good
and what isn't. This is of course the problem that has finally
brought us down because we
have refused to deal with it, and perhaps is one reason today's
youngsters have difficulty
in acknowledging our past. It is the unfaced devil in our closet, if
you will, that we have
refused to deal with and which, now, now that they have achieved
their position of
imperial power, will be used to hang us once and for all. To be
crude about it, how do we
market and sell our wishes and our needs as they have been able to
package and sell their
wants and needs so successfully for thirty-five years? How do we
frame this issue? How
do we claim the God that they have subsumed into their own
ownership? It is inhuman to
think that the only way we can get through to some safe other side
is by policing each
other and in so doing destroy whatever hope we have of getting
along? If they have been
able to convince this country that the Republicans are the party of
the people, surely so
many sons and daughters can be smart enough to find a way to sell
our parents
permission to co-exist.
I do not know how to answer any of this. And I don't think anyone
among us does either.
To talk out loud about what our bodies have done and continue to do
is asking for trouble
from others of us. How do we admit our past, own it, and evolve from
it and move on?
For we must do this.
I know some of you will immediately jump up to act. I caution
rushing off to form
anything quite so fast until we decide how we want to deal with what
I have raised
tonight. I know many of you are prepared to tough it out and say to
them, "fuck you, I
am what I am." And point out quite rightly that they have simply
pushed us too far and,
no matter what we have done and continue to do we simply cannot
allow them to treat us
this way any longer. We are human beings as much as they are, and
their God is the same
18
as our God and He simply cannot be allowed to be as punishing as
they are requiring Him
to be."
But this is perhaps too honest and reasonable to say to those who
are not either.
Reasoning like this has not worked for us in the past. But I sense
that ignoring this
question of responsibility for much that has murdered us will only
please them more.
These are the problems we must confront as we go forward. If you are
going to fight in a
united way, which I am convinced is now the only way that can save
us, we must find a
platform that all of us can support without divisiveness and shame
and guilt and all the
other hateful weapons they will club us with.
And if we do want to go out and fight again in a united way we must
ask ourselves: are
we able to replicate the kind of devotion and commitment and
backbreaking thankless
work and tactics that continues to bring them year after year into
such positions of
unlimited power. Thirty-five years of that? For thirty-five years
the cabal I have spoken
of has worked every single day and night to bring them their
success. Quite frankly they
deserve their victory and we deserve our loss.
I would like to quote this from a Baptist minister, Tom Ehrich, in
Durham. By chance, I
found it on a Christian website at 3:00 this afternoon. "It would be
helpful if we started
in silence and just listened to each other's voices. Whether we can
muster such maturity
amid toxic political attitudes remains to be seen. If we are to have
a meaningful national
discussion of moral issues, we will need to start with the sexual
issues, not because they
are the most important but because they are the fire engulfing the
tower. Let's get it all on
the table…
"And let's do so openly and boldly, without the code language that
we often use in moral
debates, without our usual cherry-picking of Scriptures, without our
usual blistering
indignation, without the bullying that elevates one's viewpoint into
divine certainty."
So we are being invited to this table whether we want to or not. We
must be prepared.
I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we're better than other
people. I really do. I
think we're smarter and more talented and better friends. I do, I
do, I totally do. I really
do think all of these things.
And I passionately and desperately want all my brothers and sisters
to stay alive and
well and on this earth as long as they want theirs to.
Can we all help each other to reach this goal?
How are things going now with you?
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