To Watch Online or Purchase Film

   Frequently Asked Questions  Production Stills   Synopsis    The Cast and Crew  

 Trailers   The Book  Early Reactions  2 Minute Preview

Listen to 7 minutes of the actual soundtrack.  Video and Bookstore

A special message to visitors from outside the U.S.

Back

Stumble It!

The Last Lovers on Earth

The brave little indie film about two people who escaped the tyranny of "The HIV Matrix."

The hilarious, eye-opening movie the American AIDS establishment forbids you to see.

Production Stills

The film moves in and out of three stories that build to explosive

conclusions that are thematically intertwined.

Below are the three stories the film is based on.

The city glistened in Eddie’s eyes like the gates of heaven. He was seeing it for the first time through tears of relief and joy. What was left in the trail of dark and sickening smoke behind the Greyhound bus was not just the industrial countryside of New Jersey, but two very difficult formative decades that would probably have discouraged hope in Pollyanna herself. But not Eddie. He would never have made it this close to Oz without his own persistent and mysterious inner reserve of optimism. You would never know that behind him lay twenty years of not being wanted or loved.

There was nobody and nothing waiting for Eddie in New York City. His only real possessions were his dreams and his willingness to work hard and earn his way into a gay community that he hoped would heal every hurt, and correct every injustice in his past. He knew that he could find himself and be himself only among his own people. They would be the supportive family he never had.

As the bus emerged from the Hudson Tunnel, he waved to total strangers on the street as though they had been waiting for him to arrive all their lives.

Even though he had little money and only two years of junior college to his name, the high spirits of the late Seventies effervesced inside Eddie. It seemed like the best time in history to be gay. He practically expected the streets to be paved with beefcake. Eddie looked around the Port Authority terminal as though he anticipated some kind of immigration committee to greet him with gay clothes, a gay job, and gay housing. But not a soul seemed to take any interest in the fact that the gay population of Manhattan had just been definitively increased by one. Even though there was no gay Welcome Wagon awaiting him, Eddie never stopped smiling as he found his way to a cheap hotel. He was full of the zest of one who has just liberated himself from dark times.

Eddie was industrious and within a week he got one of the first requisite jobs that gay emigrants obtain on their way to finding their water level in the city. He felt filled with possibility when he took a part-time position as a dogwalker, but soon realized that he would not be able to survive on the meager wages. He then began a series of lateral career moves and dips through jobs like making feather boas and handing out flyers for gay bathhouses. He finally found a job that paid a living wage as a D.J. in a bowling alley. Disco was very big then, and Eddie thought that being able to play records carefully, dance energetically, and wave a tambourine enthusiastically in the air while drawing a paycheck was about as good as it gets. Eddie hoped that someone who owned one of the popular gay dance clubs would happen to stop in at the bowling alley and be impressed by his musical selections. But not too many club owners seemed to be into bowling in those days. People were taking so many drugs that they didn’t have time to bowl.

Eddie found a little rent-controlled apartment on the Lower East Side that he could barely afford. It was a very run-down building. Some apartments had blankets hanging as doors.

He fixed his place up so he wouldn’t be embarrassed to bring home a potential lover.

To say that Eddie was ordinary looking would be considered a major compliment. God had kind of doubled up on Eddie, because not only was he a member of a much maligned minority group, but he was also as ugly as sin. Eddie knew that if he were to attract someone, he would have to win them over with something other than superficial beauty. He was no genius either, so he couldn’t expect to attract the type who love people for their minds. As he inventoried himself, Eddie decided that his most valuable asset was his smile. While it couldn’t be described as winning, his smile was overwhelmingly optimistic. Eddie hoped that there was someone out there who desperately needed encouragement, for emotional support was what Eddie knew he could offer a lover night and day.

Eddie cleaned his apartment very carefully every evening before venturing out into the bars to look for Mr. Anybody. He knew that enough in life was stacked up against him without him bringing home a stranger only to have him discover that Eddie was a major slob. Maybe someone would be attracted to him because he could see that he would be an excellent housekeeper. Before he left for the evening, he also made sure that there were plenty of impressive snacks, wine, and beer in the refrigerator. He could keep the right guy well fed.

It didn’t matter how clean Eddie’s apartment was, or what was in the fridge, because night after night, he trekked home alone. This was the time when people were sleeping with anything that wasn’t tied down, and some things that were. But not Eddie. Some invisible hand in the universe kept sex and love at a constant distance from Eddie. Even New Year’s Eve of 1979—when virtually everybody in Manhattan got drunk and slept with a stranger—found Eddie in bed alone as he greeted the new decade. There was an expression used in the bars and discos that year, "The It Boy," which described the lucky kind of fellow whom everyone wanted to date at that moment. In many ways Eddie seemed destined to be "The Not-It boy," of his era. But he never lost hope that his luck would change. He just kept smiling.

People didn’t avoid Eddie completely. Many gay men actually befriended him because he looked so helpful. And he was the kind of person you could always talk happily to at the bar because he never contradicted you. And his optimism was infectious. He always told everyone how wonderful they looked, and he insisted that they would find a lover that night. Eddie polished everyone’s ego without asking for any reciprocation. If your face was wizened and dripping with bronzer, Eddie would tell you that your complexion was flawless. If your toupee was on backwards, Eddie would coo high praise and demand the name of your hairdresser.

The other great thing about talking to Eddie in the bars was that if you suddenly had to abandon him mid-sentence because you saw somebody cute enter the bar and you had to do some emergency cruising, he never held it against you. He was the most understanding man in New York City. And Eddie would run errands for people in the bars. He would buy them drinks. He would offer people pen and paper so they could exchange phone numbers. He would encourage the most unlikely people to go after the best looking men in the room, and some of the most surprising liaisons occurred. But never for Eddie.

Eddie did make what he thought was a wealthy friend named Dieter who needed help at his elaborate gay parties. Eddie often was assigned the task of guarding the coats at Dieter’s parties, which meant sitting in a bedroom on a bed full of leather jackets, sipping a drink and trying not to spill any on the mountain of leather. Eddie sometimes got to tend bar at an occasional party, usually late in the evening when the original cute bartender had begun to do coke or stopped making drinks early because someone at the party (sometimes Dieter himself) had taken him off to a spare bedroom. Eddie found his tasks at Dieter’s parties a bit tedious, but he never lost his optimistic smile because he thought Dieter’s parties would be great opportunities to meet people, which they were for everyone except Eddie. Eddie was particularly helpful during one of Dieter’s parties at which twenty people OD’d. Eddie didn’t leave Dieter’s until he had helped the host put every single disabled guest into an ambulance. Dieter thanked Eddie for his help and showed his gratitude by giving him some coke and quaaludes.

During his first several years in New York, Eddie tried changing his look several times. He shaved his head. He grew sideburns. He let his hair grow and tied it in a pony tail. He dyed it several different colors and even tried going out at night with sequins in it. But nothing did the trick. He grew a moustache, then a goatee, and then a full beard. He tried selling himself as butch, and then femme. It was all to no avail. Every night he went home from the bars alone. Eddie had the sex life of a gay Job. But Eddie never gave up hope that he would find the right look and that his luck would change.

Eddie even toyed with becoming a drag queen for a while, but his efforts to adopt that lifestyle resulted in a severe talking-to by a delegation of the city’s leading transvestites. He was told that his efforts were giving drag queens in the city a bad name, and he was asked not to buy another false eyelash or piece of lingerie ever again. Eddie hoped that he hadn’t really offended anybody because that wasn’t what he had been put on earth for.

No matter what Eddie did to his looks, he could never get into Studio 54. The bouncers there liked him, but not enough to let him in. They did ask him to go to the deli to get them coffee and sandwiches. In appreciation, the bouncers let Eddie stand in line with the beautiful people, but that was it. They were afraid that they would be fired on the spot if they ever let Eddie inside. One night he gave an attractive young man a camera to take pictures of the inside for him, but the young man left through another exit with the camera, and the interior of Studio 54 was left to Eddie’s imagination.

Although Eddie spent a great deal of time looking for companions on the beach at Fire Island, no one ever asked him to stay over, and he certainly didn’t have enough money to rent a house from what he earned spinning records at the bowling alley. Some citizens of Cherry Grove thought that Eddie must be a celebrity’s butler or gardener, because he was out there so often. But never overnight. He was the ultimate day tripper. He went out there so often that the conductors on the Long Island Railroad knew his name and Eddie knew the names of their children and grandchildren. When Eddie had a week off during the summer, he commuted back and forth from Manhattan to Fire Island every day. On the train ride out there, he would sometimes pretend to be reading publications like the New York Review of Books so that he would look more interesting.

One day on the train, Eddie was looking through a sophisticated cooking magazine when he saw a story about a rich bachelor who lived in a huge beach house where he cooked colorful gourmet meals for his friends. There was a photo of the bachelor sitting on the beach in a skimpy bathing suit with another very striking man. The bachelor was handing his friend a luscious looking piece of bruschetta. Eddie just knew in his heart that these two men were more than friends. As the train neared its final destination, Eddie began repeating to himself, "I will eat bruschetta on the beach with a lover, I will eat bruschetta on the beach with a lover." Right then and there it became his permanent mantra, something he said over and over to himself whenever he needed to give himself encouragement.

Eddie was out at Fire Island the day in 1981 that the panic first hit. It was a very hot Saturday in July, and the copy of the New York Times that was being handed around the beach in the Grove was a virtual cure for a hangover. It left many a gay man who had a deep tan suddenly looking ghostly white. A new, strange disease had suddenly broken out in some gay men who lived in New York City. Scientists did not know what was causing it, but the first ones to succumb were people who lived a rather fast-track life and had many sexual partners, two things that Eddie had been trying to do unsuccessfully ever since he arrived in New York.

As the article made the rounds, Eddie saw a couple of very disturbed men pack up their belongings and leave the beach. He never saw them again. In the weeks and months that followed, there were many such suspicious disappearances from the the best looking section of the Fire Island Beach. Several houses were almost immediately put up for sale. One prominent Cherry Grove man suddenly married a woman who had been his maid. Eddie thought it would have been a great time to buy a house if he’d had any money. One of the reasons that Eddie wished he owned a house, besides not having to commute, was that he noticed that everyone who owned a house on the Island seemed to have a lover or two. Eddie often played the lottery in hopes of winning enough money to buy a house with a pool that would earn him a lover.

While the epidemic—which only grew from that moment on—terrified everyone else in the gay world, it only increased Eddie’s hopes. The way he saw it, men who were extremely good looking, the ones who had been very successful in attracting partners, were now seen as major liability. It seemed to Eddie that his salad days might be coming soon. It was a great time to be ugly. Eddie thought he would be feted by men looking for pristine partners all over town. He was a gay vestal virgin, kept pure by destiny in order for love to find him during one of the darkest moments in the twentieth century. Eddie still went out enthusiastically to the bars throughout the epidemic, because he never gave up hope that someone needy would show up. He sipped his drink alone in bars, and whenever he thought his spirit was about to go south, he chanted to himself, "I will eat bruschetta on the beach with a lover." But once again, Eddie’s hopes were not rewarded. The plague had made people needy, but not that needy.

At the very least, the epidemic did result in handsome gay men being kinder to Eddie. As the death toll rose in the gay community, more and more people accepted Eddie’s overtures for friendship. Especially men who were not well. They loved having Eddie around because his optimistic smile helped calm their worst fears. Eddie grocery shopped for them and was a good cook—even though it puzzled them that he seemed to serve bruschetta with every meal, even in the dead of winter. Plus Eddie always said kind and encouraging things. He told men they had never looked better, even when they were covered with lesions from the illness. He told them they were robust, even when they were barely skin and bones. He told guys on their deathbeds that they would live forever. Eddie was convincing because he had a good heart and he truly hoped that they would.

Upon request, Eddie moved in with the sick, cooked for them, and did their laundry. He got on the phone and tracked down old lovers and the families of the dying. The ailing men that he helped always tried to show their gratitude by giving Eddie the recreational drugs they didn’t have the energy or time to take anymore. Eddie often went home at night to his own apartment with bags of marijuana, cocaine, barbiturates, amphetamines, PCP, ethyl chloride, and even poppers. It was the first time in his life that he felt that maybe people truly liked him. Eddie often told the sick men that they were being too generous, but they all insisted that he take the drugs. There were whispers in the gay world that these drugs were dangerous, but Eddie wasn’t worried. The AIDS counselors all over town said to be careful using drugs because one might forget to wear a condom and have unsafe sex under their influence. Since Eddie, to his regret, was never having sex when he was taking drugs, that wasn’t a problem. The sex that Eddie had while taking drugs was the safest and loneliest in the world. Usually, when Eddie was at home alone taking the drugs his sick friends gave him, he was chanting his mantra, "I will eat bruschetta on the beach with a lover."

Eddie probably attended more funerals in the 1980s than the Vice President of the United States. Gay men tended to be nicer and more conversant at funerals than they were at bars, so Eddie thought that the chances of striking up a relationship while mourning might not be so terrible. He always tried to sit near the surviving gay companion of the deceased because that’s where most of the attention was directed at funerals. Sometimes it was hard for Eddie to choose between going to a bar or a service.

As the epidemic and the lugubrious Eighties dragged on, Eddie began taking more and more of the drugs he was rewarded with for all the errands he ran, the funerals he accompanied people to, and all the encouragement he gave. At night, alone in his apartment, he would get high and dream of all the men who had never loved him. His dreams were replete with druggy versions of bruschetta, beaches, and men. One night in the waning weeks of the decade, after he had snorted some especially potent cocaine with a chaser of poppers, he sat down at his kitchen table with a calculator. After some very peculiar computations that only Eddie himself could explain, he figured that since he had arrived in New York, he had been rejected by 1.2 million men.

The next morning, Eddie couldn’t breathe. Eddie called some of the ailing people he had been helping, but all of them were too busy or too ill to come and assist him. Some of them made him promise that he would go over to their places to cook for them when he recovered his ability to breathe. Eddie finally found enough energy to dress and drag himself down to the street where he could barely lift his arm to hail a cab. He asked the driver to take him to the nearest emergency room. When he arrived at the hospital he collapsed at the front door and when he woke up he was in a bed and on a respirator.

Eddie couldn’t believe how many doctors and nurses were standing around his bed. He had never seen so many human beings this interested in him in his entire life.

One of the first people to speak to Eddie was a social worker. After gathering some personal information from Eddie, she told him that she would inform his employer at the bowling alley about his illness. She also said that she had been assigned to Eddie for the purpose of giving him AIDS counseling. When Eddie told her that he didn’t need an AIDS counselor because he knew enough people with AIDS, a doctor standing next to the bed gently took Eddie’s hand and told him that he had AIDS. When Eddie told the doctor that it was impossible that he had AIDS because he had never slept with anyone, everyone in the room began to laugh. They sounded like the studio audience watching a sit-com. Eddie began to realize that there were dozens of people jammed into the room. There were virologists, cardiologists, radiologists, epidemiologists, psychologists, urologists, immunologists, and just about every kind of nurse and orderly. It was a very strange sight. Eddie had never seen so many professional people this concerned about him, ever. In a strange way it made him very happy, even though he felt ill in just about every part of his body. Luckily, he was out of earshot when an insensitive orderly in the back of the room said, "That’s about the ugliest piece of gay ass I’ve ever seen in my entire life."

When Eddie insisted again to the social worker that he couldn’t have AIDS because he had never slept with anyone, the social worker gently told him that was something everyone said at first, but that they would work on his acceptance issues together, that there were all kinds of new therapies for gay men in denial.

"But you don’t understand, I’ve wanted to sleep with somebody, with everybody, ever since I came to New York, but nobody would sleep with me! I can’t have AIDS. I wouldn’t even care if I had gotten it, but nobody would sleep with me. Nobody would love me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it!"

"But darling, you do have AIDS. You have no immune system and you’re gay," said a sweet and comforting voice at the foot of his bed. For a minute he thought it was his grandmother, but it was a doctor.

Eddie kept insisting that nobody would sleep with him. He tried to shout out the utter truth of his loneliness so everyone in the room would hear him, but it was to no avail.

"Darling, we don’t care how you got it. We’re going to take good care of you. We’re going to give you the newest experimental treatments."

"But I don’t have AIDS!"

The laughter in the room was making him confused and lightheaded. He started crying.

"Now, there, there. We’re gonna work on this together," said the social worker. I’m gonna help you understand what’s going on. Doctor, don’t we have something that can help make Eddie sleep?"

One of the nurses plunged a needle in his arm, and as Eddie began to fade into unconsciousness, he could hear that the people in the room were still laughing.

When Eddie awoke the doctor was the only one in the room. she had the kindest smile he had ever seen. He really wished that she was his mother or his grandmother. The doctor told Eddie not to worry, that they were giving him the latest drugs for AIDS, some that had bypassed animal testing and come directly from the laboratory. Best of all, He wouldn’t have to pay for them because the federal government was paying for everything that needed to be done for AIDS patients.

"But I don’t have AIDS."

"Eddie, where did you go to medical school?" the doctor responded, somewhat snippily. Then she tried to lighten things up. "I bet you have a big fancy medical degree and you’re hiding it right there under that pillow, aren’t you?"

"How can you have AIDS without sex or a lover?" asked Eddie.

The doctor smiled like a bemused parent and said, "Eddie, you have sex-negative, lover-negative AIDS!"

"Did you give me a test for the virus?"

"We didn’t need to. We could tell from your immune system and your symptoms that you have AIDS. We don’t want to waste our health insurance premiums on unnecessary tests, now, do we, darling?"

"But I never had sex. I never had love," Eddie moaned.

"The social worker is coming in a little while. She’ll help you through this. Remember Eddie, we love you. You’re very important to us. You’re a very special patient."

Eddie couldn’t believe it. For the first time in his life he was being told by important people that he mattered.

When the social worker appeared, she brought a large thick pencil with a pad of paper and asked Eddie to draw a picture of two men in bed. Eddie was extremely weak and had trouble lifting his hand to draw, but he made an effort. All he drew for her was a single stick man in a stick bed.

"That’s wonderful. We’ll keep working on it. We’ll draw every day, until you can put another man in that bed. And then you’ll tell me the name of that man, and every other man who was ever in bed with you. And then I’ll give them a phone call and pay them a visit and say that a very thoughtful man from their past just wanted me to contact them and tell them that he’s very, very sick."

She came back every day for a week, and every day Eddie just drew the single man in bed alone.

"Try a little harder to draw another man in bed. I know we can make a breakthrough," the social worker said.

It might have continued that way indefinitely except for the fact that Eddie was growing so weak from the treatments they were giving him that one night he began to have hallucinations. The following morning when the social worker gave him the pad, from somewhere inside him he miraculously found the energy to draw for a few hours while the social worker sat in shock.

What Eddie was drawing was no mere sketch of a stick man in a lonely stick bed. Even though it was only done in pencil, it was a fully realized illustration that almost looked like a classic oil painting—the details and gradations of dark and light were so subtle and profound. The drawing looked like it was coming from the hands of Andrew Wyeth or Thomas Eakins, rather than Eddie. He completely ignored the social worker’s request to draw two men in bed, and instead had drawn two exquisite men in the nude on a beach. In the distance over a magnificently rendered dark churning sea, he had drawn a sun with a vaguely human, optimistic, smiling face. It gave the portrait an otherworldly, almost mythological effect. The two princely beings were lying on a blanket, and the miraculous precision of Eddie’s sketch was so good that the social worker said, "My God, he’s feeding his friend bruschetta, right? Eddie, what is the meaning of the bruschetta? And Eddie, what are the names of the two men? Where do they live? Did you sleep with both of them? What kind of sex did you have with them? Were you on the top or the bottom? Did you use a condom? Do you remember their phone numbers?"

The effort had completely wiped Eddie out and he fell back on his pillow and lost consciousness.

The social worker ran three floors down to Eddie’s doctor with the drawing. The doctor was just as astounded as the social worker. "Do you think it is what I think it is?" asked the social worker.

"Absolutely," said the doctor. "It’s a near-death art experience. It won’t be long. I’d better call the administration."

In Eddie’s final hours, he was surrounded by dozens of doctors and nurses who all watched in awe. Virtually everyone who worked in the hospital came by to see Eddie. And it wasn’t just inside the hospital that attention was being paid. Outside on the street a huge throng of reporters was gathering. There were also representatives of every AIDS organization in the world, even some from as far away as Africa. There were balloons and cannons loaded with confetti. Eddie was wheeled over to a window so he could see the crowds of well-wishers. Some had placards that said "Happy One Millionth!" Eddie’s vision was going and he couldn’t quite make them out. He was however, able to speak for the first time in many days. in a faltering but determined voice he asked, "Who are these people? Why are they here? Do they love me?"

The doctor, who had attended many seminars on ethics and terminal illness, had a strict code about talking to the dying; she believed in always telling patients the truth.

She leaned over and said, "Darling, you are the millionth person to be dying of AIDS. You’re going to be on the front page of every newspaper in the world. You are a very special person to all of us. You’re very famous and you’ve never looked more beautiful. We do love you."

Thank God we only hear what we want to hear, because all that Eddie consciously took in at the end was that he was special and was loved. The last human sounds that penetrated his consciousness were the huge rounds of applause that came from the doctors and the cheers from the street. It was very difficult for anyone to hear in the room, but those closest to him could make out the one final word that emanated from Eddie: "Bruschetta."

Daddy’s Little Clown

The father was not doing the greatest job of hiding his disappointment. The mother looked at him in horror as she stood behind their son who had just told them that he'd decided he wanted to be an attorney.

The father mumbled something about supporting his son, no matter what he did in life. The son should be the best of whatever he wanted to be. Money would be no object. The father's voice was so low and tentative that the son wasn't sure whether or not he had really meant that he was proud. The mother nervously jumped in and started hugging the son and telling him that this was one of the greatest days of her life, while the father excused himself in a whisper and went into the bathroom.

The father selected the largest, fluffiest white bath towel and buried his face in it so that he could muffle his sobs. He was disgusted with himself, but he just couldn't control his emotions. As he tried to drown his face in the towel, a second round began. It wasn't crying, it was deep, almost funereal weeping. This was his first born, the one in whom he had invested his keenest hopes. He still had four other sons who could make his dreams come true, but the oldest one is always a prince in his father's eyes. His eldest, a golden law school-bound lad, would have brought feelings of complete masculine fulfillment to just about any father in the land. But this stunning eldest son had not given his father his fondest wish: that his first born become a clown.

The mother urged the son to phone the grandparents with the news and then she headed to the bathroom. She knocked on the door and told the father to meet her in their bedroom. He had barely closed the bedroom door when he collapsed in his wife's arms, and together they fell into a heap on their bed.

She begged him to be strong.

"I won't let you down," she said. "I haven't failed you yet."

"It's not your fault."

"I've given you four other wonderful sons. One of them is bound to be a clown."

"Do you really think so?" he whimpered.

"I know so."

She really didn't know any such thing, but she was desperate. She couldn't stand it when men who have hair growing on their backs started to cry.

"We'll take them to more circuses," she said soothingly.

"But they've already seen them all."

"Well, we'll just do it all again until they get the point."

For years the family had been coordinating its holidays and vacations with circuses all over the country. With their balloons and funny hats, they caused general mirth on every airplane that they spread out in. The slightly disheveled, mischievous little family could often be seen waiting with autograph books at the performers' entrance to circus tents. Each of the boys always wore an elastic bound ball-like nose, sometimes under protest. The little red noses often had a runny little human nose beneath them. At an early age, the boys were thrilled with the family outings to circuses, but eventually most of them sensed that there was something terribly odd about their family.

It all started in the early Cold War, when the father, then a young recruit, had been assigned to bodyguard a four-star general in Paris. The general was supposed to figure out how to protect the Eiffel Tower in case of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. During his free time, the young soldier explored the cultural treasures of the City of Lights. One spectacular spring day, he stumbled upon a little French circus on the outskirts of Paris, and after the confusion of finding the right currency for the ticket, he went and sat down inside the musty tent. Before he knew it, his entire future had been transformed.

As the father sat in the audience with a croissant and a glass of red wine, the planets conspired to bring him together with Annie Fratellini, inarguably France's leading clown, and from the perspective of connoisseurs, the greatest clown in history. Annie Fratellini was the archetype of a clown.

The father had come from a poor family that didn't even have enough money to introduce its children to the joys of the circus. He had never even seen one on television because his family didn't own one. The father was a Big Top neophyte, and Annie Fratellini was his first live clown.

When Annie Fratellini waddled out to the main ring of the circus in her big shoes and floppy hat, it might as well have been Venus herself. Every light inside the father went on. Her big sensuous painted smile and her eyes darkened like black moons from another world simultaneously brought laughter and tears to the audience. For a man who had never slept with a woman, her wildly feminine, hilarious performance was equal parts spirituality and sexuality. She was cosmic. He was having what only can be called a spontaneous mythopoetic awakening complete with all the psychosexual trimmings.

Each one of her routines, drawn from the long history of clowning, was a sublime revelation to the father. When she juggled, it was as though she was tossing stars in the air. When she sang, it was like hearing all the rivers of the world sing to him. And he didn't even understand what she was singing, though in his soul he imagined that she was singing about the unfolding of his own life. Her act defied logic and chronology. One moment she seemed to be a young, rambunctious clown, and the next she was a loopy, arthritic, ancient clown. Her sleight of hand took his breath away as she made the largest bouquets of beautiful flowers disappear into her body.

He didn't know how she did it, but she was able to play several instruments at once, a virtual one-woman band. She seemed to play the saxophone by bending all the way back and coming out from under her own legs. Annie Fratellini was showing him all the amazing things that a creative woman can do with her body. He was totally aroused. Every time she did a pratfall, he longed to be on the ground beneath her to prevent injury. But she was invulnerable and indestructible. For the father, the image of Annie Fratellini altered for the rest of his life his deepest desire to merge with a woman: love and sex would henceforth be intimately intertwined with the vision of the great clown, Annie Fratellini.

Back in his room at NATO headquarters that night, Annie Fratellini continued performing in his imagination. While other men in his unit might fantasize about their scantily-clad pin-ups, the father conjured up all the incredible things he could do in bed with a clown.

The father went back to the circus as many times as he could before he was transferred back to the states, and when he left Paris he didn't care that he was leaving the Louvre and the Seine behind. The only treasure he would miss was Annie Fratellini. The stewardesses on the plane commented to each other about the lovesick soldier who stared at a photo of a clown throughout the flight.

Shortly after he returned to the states, to Dubuque, he left the service and tried to decide what to do with the rest of his life. He thought about finding a fully-accredited clown school, but he was honest with himself and had to admit that he did not waddle or wiggle like a clown. He just didn't have it. His body movements were more like those of an accountant, which is what he became. Instead of becoming a clown himself, he would sire one. He would marry and have a daughter. And he and his wife would give the child the kind of zany upbringing that was necessary to nurture a great clown like Annie Fratellini. But before he had a daughter who could become a clown, he needed to find a good woman to marry.

Fortunately, Dubuque had caught on to the Mexican food craze early, and one evening the father was chowing down on a burrito when he noticed the woman who would become his beloved. She was sitting with her secretarial pool sisters in a margarita-and-nacho celebration of one of the women's five-pound weight loss.

It was the Fifties, and in those days people were not aware that margaritas are more of a drug than a drink. The restaurant had what is called a bathtub margarita, a nearly bottomless bathtub of the aforementioned drink with twenty- and thirty-foot straws extending from tables all over the restaurant. Nearly every diner was having the bathtub margarita, including the father and his soon-to-be wife. When the future wife went into the bathroom, she was so tanked she could barely locate her face in the mirror as she freshened her make-up. She was so out of it that she even got lipstick on the wall of the ladies room. Well, of course this cosmetic disaster made her look like you-know-who.

When she emerged and the father saw the wild colors and unprecedented designs on her face, he was so overcome by flashbacks to Annie Fratellini that he was a goner. Years later neither could recall what was said, only that they met and somehow managed to give each other correct phone numbers, despite the fact that the margaritas had begun to make everyone in the restaurant sound like they were speaking a foreign language.

When they dated sober, she looked more like Mamie Eisenhower than Annie Fratellini, but in those days, in many Midwestern towns, Mamie was what passed for hot. After numerous dates, they decided that their feelings for each other were just as strong when they weren't drunk as when they were, so they decided to marry. And this happened despite warnings from her family about men who took a woman on too many dates at the circus.

The mother tried to be supportive of her husband-to-be's obsession with clowns and the Big Top. She thought that it was better to have a man who has jolliness in him than not. They were married inside a huge tent and the bridesmaids were a little chagrined to have to wear bowlers and taffeta with polka dots. The event struck many of the guests as being more like a big children's birthday party than a wedding.

Their married life revolved around the father's successful accounting career. And his dream. He wanted a large family to increase his chances that one of his daughters would grow up to take the circus by storm. This is where the first hitch occurred, because, try as she did, the mother could not give birth to a girl. In rapid biological succession, they had five healthy sons and then the couple stopped trying because they were worried about how they would be able to send the ones they already had to clown school. The paucity of daughters came as an existential shock to the father, but the mother kept insisting that men make fine clowns too.

Privately, she thought that she was unable to give birth to a girl because she had been painfully jealous ever since he told her about Annie Fratellini. What women's magazine tells us how to compete physically or emotionally with a clown in a husband's past? When they made love, she could never be sure whether he was really making love to her or to his French icon. There were nights when she felt like there was a goosey Parisian clown lying there in bed between the two of them. But to get through this life, every woman makes her choices and her trade-offs.

The father struggled to give his sons the kind of childhood that any professional circus performer would envy. The house was painted all the bright primary colors used by Ringling Brothers, and they filled their children's playrooms with oversized balls and whoopie cushions. They even bought an expensive battery-operated car into which, on cue, all five sons would cram themselves dressed in their little clown costumes. Whenever their neighbors were having a backyard barbecue, the family was always invited. All seven of them arrived at the parties in full formal clown costumes, which amused everyone to no end. Their reputation as the weirdest family on their block was unchallenged.

The parents thought they had given their progeny an entertainment-packed childhood complete with the solid building blocks of audience participation, charm, and aggressive buffoonery that would lead to a successful adult life of a clown. They were not at all prepared for their oldest son's announcement in his senior year of high school that he was hanging up his carnation with the hidden water jet in order to enter college and law school.

And the bad news did not stop there. The second son wanted to become a politician. And the darkness continued to fall upon the family when the third son told them he planned to enter medical school. The father was beginning to understand that life has a propensity to break your heart. He looked a tad crazed when his fourth son took his parents aside and told them that his career path would not take him into the realm of the greatest performers, but rather into the three rings of the great thinkers; he would become a philosopher.

The fourth son's announcement was qualitatively different from the others. There was an edge to it, a very negative one. The father sensed an anger beneath his son's career decision, as though it was meant as a complex punishment for his parents. But as with the other sons, they put up a good front, and the mother rushed out to Carvel's to purchase a big ice cream clown cake to celebrate the announcement. It turned out to be one of the most ambivalent evenings the family ever spent together.

The father was on the money about the fourth son, for he truly dove into philosophy with a vengeance against his family. And as is the case with any angry academic, someone gets hurt in the process. This time it was Hannah Arendt. The fourth son put the banality of evil in his crosshairs and decided to spend the rest of his life proving the clownishness of evil. Evil was hardly banal, not in the least. It was as clownish as the day was long. And clownishness was the root of evil, its very essence.

He quickly made a name for himself in the narrow and controversial field of philosophy called Evil Theory. Only the biggest universities have endowed chairs devoted to the exploration of the nature of evil, and at a very young age he was given one at an Ivy League school. He published dozens of groundbreaking papers on the clownishness of the Inquisition, the clownishness of witch-burning, the clownishness of slavery, the clownishness of the Holocaust, and even the clownishness of capital punishment. Perhaps his most talked-about work was a paper trying to show the connection between clowns and the crucifixion of Christ. More than one fellow philosopher quipped that he probably had Hannah Arendt perpetually spinning in her grave.

The fourth son always made a point of sending his articles, which were invariably published in prestigious philosophy journals, home to his parents, who sadly read each word out loud, even the hard to understand ones on "the reification of the clownishness of evil." They didn't fully understand the papers, but the father usually caught the drift and he would sigh deeply and say to the mother, "He hates us, he really hates us."

Predictably, the fifth son provided the coupe de grace with a twist. After making sure that his parents were sitting down, he informed them that his plan for the future was to become "a gay."

"A gay?" his father shouted.

The mother immediately dreaded the years ahead. But in all fairness, the parents made every attempt to be cool about the orientation announcement. And there was at least one fringe benefit: Becoming "a gay" did not entail the expense of going to college. All that was required was moving to New York City.

The father was crestfallen, and given his advancing years, the mother desperately tried to convince him that there was not that much difference between being gay and being a clown.

"Stop humoring me," the father said. "They're worlds apart. They're apples and oranges. There's not even a remote connection. Gays are boring. You're libeling clowns."

"Listen to me. I raised that boy. There are things he just can't hide from his mother. I've watched him like a hawk. One day he is going to make you proud. Deep down inside, that boy is a clown."

Their fifth son moved out of the house and made his way to Manhattan where he became a bartender, a waiter, and then wrote a novel about coming out in the Midwest. Meanwhile, from the moment he left home, his parents kept reviewing the details of his youth trying to figure out what they could have done better.

Early in childhood, when he wasn't wearing his clown costume, their fifth son often donned women's clothes, and it hadn't escaped their attention that he looked good in them. Remembering how Annie Fratellini had rapidly crossed back and forth over the gender lines in the blink of an eye, the father had high hopes that his son was developing a repertoire that would come in handy years later in some prominent North American circus. It was not easy explaining to their neighbors that the tiny drag queen was preparing for a major career in show business. They even let the son bowl publicly at the local alley in the mother's high heels. He also had free reign at his mother's make-up table. Unfortunately, with his keen eye and sure hand, when he was done he often looked more like a ten-year-old Joan Crawford than a budding Annie Fratellini. It galled the father that after being so supportive of the son's adventures in flamboyance, it had only resulted in him becoming a gay.

A number of years went by during which the parents received letters from the fifth son about boyfriends, bars, and brunches, but little that would pass for confirmation of the mother's so-called intuition. The father started to think that she made the whole thing up so that he would not lose interest in life. When they received the son's coming out novel, he was certain that there was no hope, for the book was so tedious that neither of them could read more than half of it.

But then a miracle happened.

It was after the ten o'clock news one evening several years later when they were flipping around on the television set and they saw a familiar face bobbing up and down like a marionette on one of the talk shows. By God, it was their fifth son, the gay.

He was shouting at the talk show host, "IT'S A PLAGUE! YOU'RE ALL MURDERERS! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!"

Just when the talk show host got him quieted down, he started screaming again, "THE GOVERNMENT'S NEGLIGENCE IS KILLING US! THE GOVERNMENT'S NEGLIGENCE IS KILLING US!"

The performance astounded his parents as much as the people on the talk show. Their son's face turned every angry shade of red and his eyes were popping in and out of their sockets, as if they were fake eyes. And his hair, which was now receding, had become a vigorous orange fringe that gave him a very contemporary Clarabelle look.

The effect of the son's uncontrollable shouting and wild over-the-top body movements struck his parents as utterly hilarious. They both fell on the floor, howling.

"I can't believe it. Maybe he hasn't let us down. I hope the camera shows us his feet. I bet he's wearing big floppies."

Then the son began to attack his own people, the gays. "YOU'RE ALL RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS EPIDEMIC! YOU'RE ALL GONNA DIE!"

To further dramatize his point, he stood up for a second and then sat down with such force that his chair collapsed backwards.

Well, it's a good thing that the mother was wearing Depends, because both parents lost it.

"He's doing the Crazed Napoleon routine!" the mother shrieked.

"I know, I know, and bless him, he's doing it perfectly!" gasped the father.

As the talk show ended, the son screamed into the camera, "IT'S AN EMERGENCY! IT'S A CRISIS! NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL! THE PRESIDENT MUST DECLARE A NATIONAL EMERGENCY!"

The father traveled back in time and saw his little Emmett Kelly sitting on his lap begging him to tell him again about Annie Fratellini's Crazed Napoleon routine. It was his father's favorite. When all three rings of the French circus were filled with the action of nearly every performer in the circus, Annie Fratellini would suddenly appear in the midst of them all dressed as Napoleon, complete with her hand tucked inside her little jacket, which was covered with all kinds of impressive looking clown insignias and epaulets.

In her oversized Napoleon hat, she began screaming out orders at every one in the circus. They weren't even really words. They were just screeching, vaguely hysterical sounds. Even though the noise made no sense it seemed to overpower every single performer in the circus, including all of the animals. A dark, sinister, almost erotic trance of human execration and abjection seemed to seize every soul in the audience, including the father. The audience roared with the loudest, most other worldly laughter that the father had ever heard. One by one, everyone in the circus tent seemed to fall into servile obeisance. Everything had gone completely out of their control. At Annie Fratellini's feet were the trapeze artists, the dog trainers, the dogs, the dancing bear trainers, the dancing bears, the lions, the lion tamers, the zebras, the French poodles, the human cannonball, the other clowns, and even the ringmaster himself. Then for a second, the entire audience paused in absolute silence so all that could be heard was the piercing sound of Napoleon Fratellini's comic will to power. The audience seemed to levitate in total delirium. Before them stood not a clown but a superhuman genius. The fifth son loved the story, and sometimes his father would catch him trying to act it out. When he was alone in his room he would often shout all kinds of orders at his toys and then have a frustrated tantrum when they did not obey his orders.

Life had taken a strange turn for his son. The plague had given him a stage on which to fully realize his talents.

Unfortunately, the son's appearance on the talk show was also taking the mother back in time and the faultline beneath herself and the father was turning into a virtual earthquake.

"See," she said, "why did you doubt me? Can you forget her now? Who cares about her? I feel cursed by her. Look at our son. He makes her look like Soupy Sales. Don't you see? I haven't failed you. I've given birth to the biggest clown of the twentieth century. Damn Annie Fratellini. Damn her! Damn her! Damn her!"

The father was so excited about the son finding himself that he didn't pay much attention to the mother's outburst.

In the weeks, months, and years ahead the fifth son was a constant presence on network news hours and talk shows. Whenever their son was on television, they made a real occasion of it. They blew up balloons and threw confetti at each other. They ate Jujubes and popped corn. They would even have calliope music playing in the background while, on one prime time show after another, their son was screaming, "END THE PLAGUE OR REVOLUTION! END THE PLAGUE OR REVOLUTION!"

Although the father was elated at the son's fame, he began to withdraw into himself and wonder exactly what the legacy of Annie Fratellini had done to his son. As he watched his fifth son become the leading clown of the plague by constantly doing the Crazed Napoleon routine, the father remembered him dressing up in drag as a child, and he grimly suspected that his son was literally trying to become Annie Fratellini to please his parents. His son was trying to transcend time and gender to become her. He had never told his son that he wanted him to become her, but the father was convinced that his son had tried to become the fulfillment of his father's obsession. It gave the father chills.

The son's performances became more and more elaborate. He turned screaming at talk show hosts into an art form. Like Annie, their son seemed to be attempting to control every element of the plague with sheer loud will. Activists, doctors, nurses, even elected officials were like his elephants and French poodles. They all bowed to his ear-shattering, overpowering looniness. If he told them to go left, they went left. If he told them to go right, they went right. There was no rhyme nor reason to what he told them to do. It was pure unpredictable, irrational entertainment. And no one was immune. Even the President of the United States seemed to be listening to their gay son screaming out all kinds of final solutions for AIDS and doing whatever he said to do about the plague.

One night on a Nightline telecast while he was urging Americans (in an explosive menacing voice) to bring the government to its knees in order to end the plague, the parents watched as their son crossed and uncrossed his eyes while touching his nose with his tongue. They had never seen anything like it. They hadn't laughed so hard in years. It added extra years to their lives.

The country was so taken by their son's performances that at times the government's policies concerning the plague began to resemble the Crazed Napoleon act. Their youngest son, the gay, had the entire United States in the palm of his hand and totally at his command. Government officials who were handling the plague got so rattled by his veiled and not-so-veiled threats that they felt they had no choice but to supply all the sick people in the land with any and all of the medicine that the son demanded in his routines on television. An endless round of experimental drugs was given to the sick at the shrill behest of their son.

The son was clearly impressed by his own angry performances, because he himself eventually took every single one of the medications that he had demanded the government offer, and inevitably they took their toll on him and destroyed his immune system. Soon the ghost of Annie Fratellini could no longer be seen doing the Crazed Napoleon routine on television and one day the inevitable phone call came to the father and mother.

"Father, I am dying. May I come home?"

"Of course, son. You've made us proud. We love you. Come home."

When the fifth son arrived home, he was a pale shadow of the ballistic man they used to see on talk shows. When he walked into his childhood home, the reunion was overwhelmingly emotional. The parents put him in his old bedroom which now had walls covered with pictures of the family visiting circuses all over the world in happier days.

The other four sons were called and told that the youngest did not have much time. They dutifully journeyed home from all over the United States. They all spent the last day of the fifth son's life surrounding his bed, trying to express their love and unity with him by all wearing their red clown noses. Across America, the plague was bringing families together exactly like this. Some people argued that reunions like this one were what made the plague a good thing, that it was a kind of morning in America. For a brief moment, the parents were happy to be with all of their sons again in one place, even if the occasion was a sad goodbye. They were now all grown men, but for a second the father felt as though all his sons were cramming once again into that little car for one big comic effect just to make their old man happy. It was heartbreaking to see the mother, the father, the lawyer, the doctor, the politician, and the philosopher, all in clown noses, gathered around the bed watching the gay brother die.

There was one very unpleasant moment near the end when the philosopher son and the father seemed to be exchanging hostile glances over their red noses. (The philosopher son hadn't wanted to wear the nose, but given the gravity of the situation, he acceded.) The philosopher son seemed to be saying to the father that the plague itself had been caused by clownishness, and in response the father's eyes seemed to say the opposite, that the plague would be ended by clowns.

The youngest son was buried, after a surprisingly somber and quiet funeral, in a clown costume. When the four sons returned to their homes and families, they felt a relief that lasted the rest of their days.

The Last Lovers on Earth

The phone began ringing on Monday morning and Kyle couldn't get a thing done. He was sure that it was their friend Enola who had spilled the beans to one of their neighbors who worked in the media. They had both begged her to keep it a secret. She hadn't realized the significance of their status until Seth, after one too many glasses of chardonnay, had underlined it all too well for her. She suddenly got the point that it was really big news that they were both still alive.

The first call came from the local ABC affiliate. It was a blond woman whose name Kyle recognized from the evening news. She said that she was sorry to be asking such a prying question, but was it true that Kyle and Seth were lovers, and was it also true that they were the only gay people on earth who were still alive?

"Last time I checked," he responded.

"Do you realize how amazing that is?" she asked.

"Well, I guess it is slightly unexpected."

"We'd like to lead with you tonight on the five o'clock news."

As soon as Kyle hung up the phone it rang again. It was NBC. Then CBS, CNN and several internet news services called. Then an aggressive reporter from the New York Times, and after that just about every major paper in the country.

And all this was happening simply because Kyle and Seth were gay and alive.

Throughout the day on ABC they promo'd the evening spot: "Tonight at eleven, we'll have an interview with the last two gay men alive on earth."

All day long hyperventillating reporters called AIDS researchers around the world and asked them to explain why these two men could possibly be alive. The phone lines at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta were constantly tied up. What was going on? For several years now hadn't the top AIDS researchers insisted that, as a result of the government's unprecedented multi-trillion- dollar federal effort against AIDS, all gay men were dead?

Now word of the confirmed spotting of two gay men who were still alive was spreading all over the globe.

Was there a cover-up going on? What did the government know and when did it know it?

The media was not ready for another major government scandal, especially one that involved a minority group that was supposedly history.

For the press it looked like it could become a story about criminal negligence in science. If the top scientists could not be trusted to tell the truth about AIDS, what could they be trusted to do?

But for scientists who were informed of the bizarre fact that two gay men were still alive, the question was purely scientific. Calmer heads had to prevail. The right questions needed to be asked. The correct scientific procedures needed to be agreed upon in order to get to the bottom of this new gay men's health crisis. In science, method and careful data collection are everything. What was different about the two gay men who were the only ones still alive? Did they have unique immune systems? Were they genetically different from all the other gay men? Had they forgotten to take their medications? Had they failed to understand the complexities of treatment compliance? Had someone forgotten to give the two men one of the experimental vaccines? Was this an exception that was going to prove some disturbing rule? The matter called out for well-designed experiments with proper controls to determine why all the other gay men on the planet were dead and these two were still alive.

In every editorial conference at every newspaper across the country, the same question was being asked: How was it possible that so many amazing medical approaches to AIDS had been tried without having any effect on these two gay gentlemen? A real opportunity was at hand; there was a great deal scientists could learn by studying this unusual gay couple. They were as valuable as the last two pandas on earth. Perhaps these two men should be urged to be volunteers for one final AIDS study that might help the government understand the true nature of gay men once and for all. After all, every other member of their community had been enthusiastic team players in signing up for nearly every government protocol that had been offered to them.

When the Director of the National Institutes of Health was informed that two gay men were alive despite all of the billions of dollars that the N.I.H. itself had devoted to AIDS, he asked the President to make an exception and have the Secret Service assigned to protect these two medical anomalies. He was a worldly man and he knew that there were millions of homophobes all over the world who, as a result of the success of the AIDS research effort, had given up hope of ever having a homosexual to attack. These two gay men would be in demand everywhere there were homophobes. They had to be kept safe and alive if scientists were to achieve a final understanding of the AIDS epidemic. What had the best minds in science done wrong? The fact that these two gay men were still kicking gnawed at the conscience of every scientist at the Bethesda campus of the N.I.H.

Since all the gay men in every other country were dead, it didn't make America's AIDS researchers look too good; they always put on airs that they were the best in the business. The heads of health departments all over the globe were calling Washington and demanding an explanation. Had the arrogant, dishonest American scientists fucked up again? Everyone in the AIDS Division of the Pasteur Institute in Paris could barely keep from gloating. It was yet another reason that the entire international AIDS research effort should have been kept in French hands. There were no gay Pierres or Michels living in Paris anymore. The French AIDS research effort had been completely successful, thank you very much. The Americans could just kiss their dreams of a Nobel Prize for the eradication of AIDS goodbye.

When Seth got home, Kyle was ashen with terror.

"Why did you have to tell Enola that we were the last two gay men alive on earth?"

"I told her to keep it to herself. What a bitch!"

"Well, I hope you're ready to go on the Larry King Show."

"What?"

"They just called. They played hardball. They said that if we did any other media before them, they would never have us on. And they warned us that they were the only show that wouldn't give us a hard time."

"I can't go on Larry King. I just got a zit on my nose."

"They're sending a limo in an hour. I don't think we have any choice. I don't want to be grilled mercilessly by Barbara Walters."

"What do they expect us to say?"

"They want to know why we're gay and not dead."

"I'm just gonna sit there and smile. You'd better do all of the talking. You're the reason we're still here."

No one was more shocked than the editor of the New York Times. The whole building on West 43rd Street was in disarray. It was as if a car bomb had hit the place. Just the week before, the Times had done a five-part wrap-up series on the epidemic with the headline "All Homosexuals Dead, But AIDS Researchers Still Cautiously Optimistic." It had been an expensive and historic series to pull off; no one at the Old Gray Lady looked forward to retracting this one. They couldn't just run a little correction. How had they gotten the story so wrong when they had enlisted practically every reporter in the building to scout the entire globe to make sure that every gay man was indeed dead after such a prodigious government research effort? Had the Times once again failed to uncover a major government scandal? How had they not known that there were still two gay men carrying on, practically under the Times's nose, in Cape May, New Jersey? Why hadn't anyone on the team of investigative reporters thought to call the Cape May Health Department to see if there were any gay men still alive in that town?This was no minor oversight. Heads of reporters were going to roll down Broadway. This would be the biggest media brou-ha-ha since CNN's Vietnam sarin mess.

Religious groups that had breathed a sigh of relief when they thought that the AIDS epidemic was over immediately began to plan mailings warning that Seth and Kyle could be responsible for recruiting a new gay population if something was not done to counter the threat.

The staff of the Larry King Show was ecstatic about their coup, but Larry wanted balance and it looked like they wouldn't be able to get it. They desperately tried to contact the leading AIDS researchers to come on with the gay couple, but the scientists were so mortified that they didn't even answer their phones.

The Centers for Disease Control convened an emergency meeting of its elite Rapid Response Epidemiologic Service, which had successfully concocted the whole paradigm which the nation had come to know as AIDS. The Epidemiologic Service of course wanted to pass the buck. They insisted that it was the fault of the CDC's AIDS Prevention Department. If that department had done what it was supposed to do--namely, convince every gay man to take all kinds of AIDS drugs prophylactically, just in case they got AIDS--this crisis would never have materialized. How could anybody in Prevention call himself a professional? Nobody looked good in Atlanta. There was AIDS egg on the face of everyone at the CDC. Some doctors around the country talked openly of charging the entire organization with medical malpractice.

The Prevention Department was dumbfounded. Every time that there had been an announcement of a major breakthrough in AIDS therapy, several hundred thousand gay people had taken advantage of the new opportunities. And there had been so many of these remarkable medical breakthroughs that it was inconceivable to the Prevention Dept. that any gay men could still be standing. How could it be that Kyle and Seth were walking around without the famous buffalo humps, which had been the fringe benefit of protease inhibitors? Why hadn't they developed the chicken feet, ostrich plumes, and lion manes that were the side effects of the subsequent generations of breakthrough AIDS pharmaceuticals? Clearly the marketing departments of the leading AIDS pharmaceutical companies had fallen down on the job. Someone had seriously failed in the area of AIDS communications.

"It's the Vaccine Education Department!" said one nervous high-level CDC official to the angry director.

"You mean these two gays never took the vaccine?" responded the director.

"No, sir."

"What's the matter with them. Don't they own a television set?"

That two gay men had actually survived the massive Manhattan AIDS Project, the most ambitious biomedical enterprise in history, led the news hours all over the world that night. Some stations interrupted their regular program to break the story about Kyle and Seth. People in many countries had forgotten what a gay man looked like, so ambitious photographers from dozens of countries were booking flights to the small airport in Cape May. Many media outlets had to scurry to find experts on homosexuality to go on the air to give the public adequate background for the unfolding story.

It was only a few hours after the call from the local station when, Kyle and Seth's street suddenly started to fill up with camera crews and curious neighbors.

When Kyle looked out the window, he yelled at Seth, "See what you've done for us? There goes our peaceful little life in Cape May!"

"Well, it's your fault. You told me not to believe a word that the government said about AIDS."

"For God's sake, you'd be dead if you had, silly."

"Kyle, I don't want to be an international celebrity. I just want to go to the A&P. We're out of coffee."

They embraced anxiously and tried to collect themselves. When the limousine from Larry King arrived and they emerged out their front door, some neighbors actually applauded, but there were some who took the opportunity to dust off some vintage homophobic epithets.

"Go back to Israel, you gay Jews!" one rather confused and angry person in the crowd shouted at them.

"We're not even Jewish!" screamed Kyle as they darted into the waiting limousine.

Helicopters with cameramen leaning out of them could soon be seen and heard buzzing loudly overhead. The limo's progress was followed all the way to D.C. It was turning into a media event not seen since the O.J. Bronco chase or the Cunanan hunt back in the 90s. All three network anchors of the news were called in early to cover the story. Swat teams of reporters had located Seth and Kyle's parents and were now beginning vigils outside of their parents' homes. Never had two gay men caused so much commotion merely by not being dead.

The President of the United States was interrupted in the middle of a National Security Council meeting and informed that the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and The Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms had all confirmed that the news reports were accurate. It defied logic, but yes, two gay men were still alive. And even more surprisingly, one of the wire services was reporting that they were as healthy as football players.

The President turned red and started pounding the table. "Get me the CDC on the phone in the Oval Office," he shouted at his secretary. He promptly ended the meeting and rushed out of the room.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control was nervously waiting on the other end of the phone when the President took his place behind his desk. The President took a deep breath.

The director immediately started to pass the buck. He tried to blame the Secretary of Education. The two undead gay men had not received sufficient AIDS awareness education. And it was Hollywood's fault for not doing enough AIDS-awareness movies. In addition, it was decadent Broadway's fault for never having enough red ribbons on the Tony Award shows.

The President was not having any, and he proceeded to lose it on the phone. He ordered the CDC to determine immediately what was wrong with their AIDS program. He demanded a report on his desk in two weeks. How did they know there weren't other gays all over the country who hadn't been beneficiaries of the government's generous AIDS treatment and vaccine program? Privately, the President was thinking that this was the kind of thing that always happened when you let the government bureaucracy run things. He had always told his staff that they would have been better off privatizing the whole damn AIDS crisis.

As the limo sped with its precious cargo to Washington, the major networks recorded the entire journey from the air. They did a split screen showing Republican leaders rushing to the floor of Congress to denounce the resurgence of a powerful homosexual lobby in the Nation's Capital, even though Kyle and Seth had never been there before. They blamed the democrats for an incompetent AIDS program. Fundraisers in Christian right-wing offices watched the limo with the gay couple on television and began composing letters in their heads that warned of the threat of a new homosexual agenda in Washington.

There was a television set in the speeding limousine and Kyle and Seth watched their own journey in horror. Kyle took advantage of the car's wet bar to make the two of them a stiff drink.

"This is so surreal," he said to Seth.

"It's like the first days of the epidemic."

As Seth sipped his drink and stared out at the passing scenery, his eyes teared up and he got lost in memories of the preceding twenty-five years. He remembered the two of them being paralyzed by the news every night as the death toll kept climbing and climbing while the government declared one major victory after another against AIDS. Every time there was some new development in AIDS therapy, it seemed to Kyle and Seth that another herd of gay people disappeared. All of their friends had become alienated from them. No one understood why they didn't show up at AIDS benefits. At gay parties in Cape May, whenever Kyle said that they didn't believe what the government or Gay Men's Health Crisis were saying about the epidemic, they were told that they were paranoid or in deep denial. They were not criticized in this manner any more because, as a result of the program that all their gay friends supported, all of their gay friends were now dead. They had all wanted the government to take extraordinary measures to end the epidemic. And it had.

When they arrived at the CNN building, the limo pulled into an underground garage to avoid the crowds of cameras outside. Seth wanted Kyle to beg the driver to take them back to Cape May immediately.

They were greeted as soon as they got out of their car by one of the Larry King Show's producers. She told them that the whole world was waiting to see them, that virtually every news show in the world had called in and asked for a live feed from the broadcast. Larry King himself was so excited that his cardiologist was called in to sit on the set during the interview. The producer told them not to worry, that Larry never hurt anybody's feelings during interviews. He would treat them just like they were family. He would ask a couple of phony hardball questions and that would be it. She also said that they wouldn't let any nasty calls get through. She said she realized how rough it was for them.

"We want to protect you," she said. "You two are like an endangered species."

"Like?" said Seth. "We are an endangered species."

After spending two hours in a plush refreshment suite at the studio, they were taken into the Green Room on the King set. They were told that they would not meet Larry until they were on the show because he liked things to seem spontaneous and unrehearsed.

Larry King started the show by apologizing for bumping the Publishers Clearing House winner who was supposed to be on that night.

"I know the whole world is talking about this story," he said. "Tonight we have the exclusive. Even though the United States spent a quarter of a century and an unprecedented amount of money on AIDS research, treatment, and prevention, there are still two gay men alive. It's almost unbelievable, but we have them here on the show for you tonight.

Larry handled the frightened last gay couple on earth with kid gloves. They both warmed up to him right away. He acted fatherly in his concern about their sudden international notoriety.

"You both know that you've caused quite a stir all over the world, don't you?"

"Yes, Mr. King," responded Kyle.

"Call me Larry, please."

"Yes, Larry. All hell has broken loose."

"What's it like being the last gay couple on earth? It must feel like quite a responsibility."

"Nobody knew it till one of our friends was indiscreet. But now the whole world knows. I guess we have to try and do a good job representing the gay community," responded Kyle.

"Especially since I guess we are the gay community," added Seth.

"We understand the White House has issued a statement assuring the American public that it is re-examining its whole AIDS program in light of this development," said King. "They're baffled over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They just can't understand how after spending over two trillion dollars on the AIDS problem, the two of you could possibly be sitting here chatting with me tonight."

"Well, here we are, Larry," said Seth nervously.

"So the two of you just never got with the AIDS program. You know I was kind of surprised not to see you both wearing red ribbons. I remember in the old days of the AIDS epidemic, you just never saw a gay without a red ribbon."

"We never wore red ribbons, Larry," said Kyle.

"That's interesting. How many AIDS candlelight vigils did you two attend?"

"None, Larry."

"And how many dead bodies of people who died of AIDS did you throw over the fence onto the White House lawn in demands for more money to be spent on the AIDS Manhattan Project?"

"None, Larry, none."

"You know, I'll be criticized by everyone in the media if I don't ask this, and I hope you take it the right way. Are you two sure you are gay?"

"Of course, Larry," asserted Kyle.

"I mean you have to admit that in half a day you not only have attracted the attention of the whole world, but you've shaken our faith in the American scientific establishment. You understand why I have to ask these tough questions."

During the call-in segment of the show there were all kinds of curious questions. Some people wanted to know whether a single gay couple actually constitutes a legitimate minority group. Another wanted to know whether Seth and Kyle qualified for the benefits of the Americans with Disabilities Act. One woman who described herself as a lonely fag hag asked if she could adopt the couple. Kyle told the woman that they had enough women friends, including one with a big mouth.

The most dramatic call was from the head of the Secret Service who called Larry to say that the President had authorized around-the-clock protection for Seth and Kyle, because they were now extremely important to the public health of America and until all the leading AIDS researchers understood fully why Kyle and Seth were still alive, the AIDS Manhattan Project could not be considered a complete success.

Larry sat up in his chair and said, "What do you think of that, Kyle? Complete protection from the Secret Service, just like the President."

"Well, that's good, I guess," he said with a gulp.

Larry closed the evening by thanking the couple for sharing their amazing story with the American people. He said that he would love to have them back on the show periodically for as long as they were still alive.

Because Kyle and Seth were so important to the security of the country, the Secret Service never let them return to their home in Cape May. Instead, they were flown to a retired C.I.A. safe house enclave in Palm Beach, Florida. Needless to say, the Service knows that we are a country of crazies, and as soon as anyone hears that there are only two of anything left in existence, there are always a few Americans who feel a deep need to shoot them.

Kyle and Seth actually found living in Palm Beach wearing fright wigs and dark glasses to be quite pleasant. They were housed in plush places reserved for ex-spies and mafia rat finks. The government provided for their every need, with the understanding that they would cooperate in helping the top AIDS researchers understand why the AIDS Manhattan Project had failed. They didn't get to see their families, but that wasn't bad because their families now felt embarrassed and guilty that they were related to the only two gay men still living on earth, two men who had also brought shame upon the world's greatest scientists.

They were interviewed daily by brigades of psychologists, sociologists, theologists, and AIDS educators. Not since the O-ring brought down the Challenger had there been such an intense American effort to get to the bottom of what had gone wrong with a government endeavor. Why had every other gay person taken the treatments or the vaccine except for Kyle and Seth? What was different about them? The government had spent a fortune on public service spots to get the cooperation of all gay people. Why had Seth and Kyle not been motivated to follow the public service urgings of celebrities like Madonna, Whoopi Goldberg, or the incredibly influential Rosie Perez? The government needed to have a firmer understanding of its communication failure for future public health emergencies.

The experts just wouldn't accept the rather simple answer that Kyle gave them. He said that starting when he was a teenager, and continuing into his adult years, he had come to the conclusion that the American government didn't like gay people all that much. In addition, it seemed to him that we primarily expect our government to lie to us and screw everything up. He pointed out that if you accept these basic premises, you would pretty much do what he and Seth had done, which is steer clear of anything that the government was doing on AIDS. They had better things to spend their time on. And incidentally, they wanted to live.

Not a single AIDS expert who examined the lovers could believe that it was that simple. They were attractive, intelligent men. While they did lack some of the perky desire to please that the scientists had noted in many of the dead gays, they seemed reasonable. Why had they not responded to the carefully crafted, powerful, and sexy ads that the government had used to motivate gay men to get tested and to take the vaccines and pharmaceuticals that had been especially prepared for them? There had been AIDS ads of hunky guys with great abs climbing mountains, AIDS ads showing hot guys rolling in the grass with their dogs, ads with rapturous transvestites donning condoms, even multi-cultural ads with pictures of gorgeous black guys on bicycles next to copy that said they were using their freedom of choice to select which AIDS medication they wanted to take. These ads had worked for every other gay person on earth except Kyle and Seth. One exasperated AIDS educator suggested that the reason that Kyle and Seth hadn't cooperated with the AIDS program was that they were sexually dysfunctional. They were not responsive to the erotic subliminal messages that Madison Avenue had perfected for the government to utilize throughout the war on AIDS.

"Actually, we like sex," Kyle told the psychologists.

"You've seen one AIDS ad, you've seen them all," said Seth.

After a year of vigorous research on the matter, the government didn't know any more than it knew when the two were first discovered living in Cape May.

Every week that passed after the discovery of the lovers was filled with a great deal of anxiety for the White House. The President was running behind in the polls for re-election, and his opposition was constantly running pictures of Seth and Kyle, accusing the administration of total failure on AIDS. The President himself made a direct appeal to Kyle and Seth to take the AIDS vaccine. He even offered to have it administered to them at the White House during a special ceremony with Sharon Stone attending, but they respectfully declined.

On the night before the election, the President called the directors of both the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health to tell them that they had probably cost him his re-election. "You both told me you would end the AIDS epidemic. You've really let me and the country down."

When the results came in, all the pundits said the President had lost because of Seth and Kyle.

In his concession speech at a Washington hotel, the President tearfully admitted that his failure to end the AIDS epidemic completely was the reason for his poor showing at the polls. He said that he had done everything that the AIDS activists had demanded that he do, but apparently that was not enough to end the scourge once and for all. When he said that he hoped that the new President would put politics aside and commit himself to whatever public health policies were required to put the epidemic finally behind them, the crowd of his supporters roared their approval.

Among the millions of TV viewers watching the President concede the election were Seth and Kyle, who were sitting side by side on a big sofa at their secret location. They didn't know exactly what the defeated President meant by his remarks about public health, but once again in the course of the epidemic, they found themselves putting their arms around each other and holding on for dear life.