THE FILE ON STORMY FOSTER
A Cartoon Movie Serial in Twelve Chapters
CHAPTER TWELVE:
“BLOOD ON THE WATER”
TIME AND PLACE:
HAWAII, 1990 (and in flashback, 1944)
CAST OF CHARACTERS:
TRIXIE BALL, the BLUES SINGER
IRENE BANG, the CLUB OWNER
DIAMOND FAWS, the DEMAGOGUE
STORMY FOSTER, the GREAT DEFENDER
JEFF JUNE, the DOUBLE AGENT
BASIL SINGAPORE, the DECOY
SNOOKS, the PARROT
WILBUR von SCHWEISS, the BUND LEADER
This is Basil again. Today, my wife Irene and I will conclude the story of Stormy Foster. That’s the name by which he was most widely known, but his real name was Nirmahl Ben-Absalom. He was a truly remarkable man: Prizefighter, nightclub entertainer, sex worker, pioneering Gay activist and military hero. As a GI, Absalom fought the Nazis in Europe, but he also fought them here in Hawaii wearing a very different kind of uniform. He hid his face behind the mask of a superhero in order to prevent a breach of our national defenses. This was when the Hawaiian islands were a US territory, not yet an American state.
Deacon Diamond, a celebrity evangelist of the early 1940s, was really a Nazi agent. He targeted Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay citizens with blistering propaganda culled from Adolph Hitler’s Master Race theory. Hitler's intention was to drive us out of the Hawaiian Islands, and then target his rhetoric at our Jewish citizens. While the Allies were distracted by battles in Europe, Africa and the Pacific, the Nazi doctrine of racial purity was going to divide and conquer their home countries!
Disguised as The Great Defender, Absalom (the name he was known by on Pajaro Island) spearheaded a defense strategy that ultimately met with success.
At first, his anti-Nazi crusade was empowered by the gods of Pajaro Island, an ancient refuge for Gay people that was once my home. Mother Penis and Father Vagina endowed him with amazing control over the natural elements. Armed with this gift, as well as his inborn power of personal persuasion, Absalom diffused Deacon Diamond’s evil influence. In the process, he also gave sex and gender diverse Hawaiians their first taste of Pride! Many times he spoke to them, both in person and on the radio, delivering a potent message of empowerment.
There came a time when Absalom displeased the gods. They withdrew their patronage and he was left weakened. At that point, his crusade was taken up by various people whose help he had previously enlisted. My wife was one of them. She and I will now confirm who the others were, and how they triumphed over the Nazi threat.
But there’s a part of this story that only I can tell: The most tragic part!
On July 10, 1944, Hitler’s Axis forces were fighting the Allies to a draw. The German and Japanese armies mounted offensives in England, Finland and New Guinea. History has a record of those battles, but it doesn’t record an offensive that took place here in Hawaii. This time, it wasn’t Pearl Harbor that was attacked. July 10th was the day my adopted home was destroyed. On that day, the Nazis began the massacre of Pajaro Island!
Irene told you how Deacon Diamond had visited the island in secret, on a mission to find and kill Absalom. Without realizing it, he witnessed Absalom’s transformation into the Great Defender and became too frightened to complete his task; but he sent word of what he saw to Berlin. He also stole a sacred scroll from our holy temple and had it translated. What the Deacon learned disturbed him so much, he sought Hitler’s permission to exterminate my people! He wanted to ensure that we could never again produce a hero like The Defender.
At some point, Wilbur von Schweiss, Hitler’s point man in Honolulu also sneaked onto the island and completed a reconnaissance mission. It goes without saying that both the Deacon and von Schweiss were closeted Gay men; by decree of our gods, nobody of heterosexual orientation could navigate the secret route to Pajaro Island! Not even if they smoked the sacred Lavender Tarot root to clear their vision.
Those Nazi bastards knew as much; they had tortured that information out of my faith brother Puma before murdering him! So obviously, they had to recruit a squadron of homosexual Nazis to carry out the attack. No doubt they were drawn from the bund that von Schweiss headed; Stormy's informant Jeff June always believed that most of those bund members were Gay.
Although Deacon Diamond sent his request to invade in the Fall of 1943, it took Hitler almost a year to approve it. We don’t know why, but ultimately that didn’t matter. Unknown to the United States and the people of Hawaii, a platoon of about 75 heavily armed storm troopers gathered on Oahu the night of July 9th. The troop leaders partook of Lavender Tarot root and the platoon set sail around midnight. By morning, it had breached the island. The invasion started immediately!
THE HOLOCAUST PROPHECY
IS FULFILLED
Even though my people, the Kanaka Tanga, were small in number and a peaceful race, they mounted a brave defense. It took the invaders nearly three days of shooting, bayoneting, burning, bludgeoning and hanging to accomplish genocide! Most of our elders were machine-gunned, and in a vile act of sacrilege, their dead bodies were piled on the temple altar. Mamo, our high priestess, was dismembered. The atrocities visited upon my brothers and sisters were so methodical, so extensive and so brutal, hearing them described tore the heart out of me! Very few people survived that massacre. Those who managed to flee mostly took refuge in Honolulu.
One of them, an elder who escaped, told me what had happened. I already knew something was wrong, because I was having horrible dreams that I couldn't understand. When he explained their significance, I was inconsolable! I demanded to know why Absalom’s powers had not been restored; surely he could have stopped this bloodbath? The elder hung his head and replied: “That would have been against the ancient teachings.”
Even if he had been empowered, The Great Defender was forbidden to intervene.
The sacred scroll of antiquity, stolen by Deacon Diamond, foretold the destruction of our refuge. The arrival of the Akua – our name for The Great Defender - meant that our time of holocaust was drawing near. Our queen Pajaro Hina, Mamo and the elders were the only ones who had known this; nobody else had access to the complete scroll. The devotion we Kauwani have to our gods is total and our faith is unquestioning; but the Pajaro Island massacre tested it to the breaking point!
NAZI TARTARE
What made it such a bitter pill for we survivors to swallow was knowing that both murderers and victims were Kauwani! The word “Kauwa” denotes people of homosexual orientation; it has no ethnic connotations.
There is no tribe or nation on Earth that doesn’t include us, and most of our kind have always lived among heterosexual folk - the Maka Inana. It makes no difference that the invaders of Pajaro Island called themselves German, Italian, Japanese or Nazi; they were our kin. That massacre had to be the worst fratricide recorded since the Biblical story of Cain and Abel!
Centuries ago, the Kanaka Tanga fled persecution and took refuge on an island the gods concealed from mortal eyes; but since July of 1944, all Lesbians and Gay men have had to make their way in heterosexual society. Never again would my people have their own sanctuary. The Pajaro Island holocaust was the will of the gods; it had to happen. However, that didn’t mean those Nazi butchers enjoyed divine sanction. The abomination of brother killing brother did not go unpunished!
When Wilbur von Schweiss and his men were ready to leave the scene of their crimes, they prepared to smoke more of the Lavender Tarot root they'd stolen; but just as the island had been reduced to ashes, so had the sacred herb! Every plant in their possession had withered and crumbled into dust. The Nazis searched for more, but none could be found anywhere; so they tried smoking the dust. It had no effect other than to make them sick! They somehow had to do the impossible: Find their way back to Hawaii without divine guidance.
The killers piled into their canoes and set out to sea for their return journey. Before long, they were hopelessly lost, traveling in unfamiliar waters to a destination they could no longer remember! Panic set in and grew uncontrollable when a number of gigantic Great White sharks began trailing them. Slowly, their boats were surrounded and hemmed in; the sharks blocked them until they could move no more than a few feet in any direction. Then those giant fish rammed the boats, overturning them, and a horrible feeding frenzy began.
These were no ordinary sea denizens. They were the reincarnated ancestors of ancient Kanaka Tanga, all those who had fallen victim to genocide eons ago. In the hours following the massacre of Pajaro Island, they took their sweet revenge! The ancestors feasted heartily on the bodies of those who had murdered their descendants. It was a dreadful underwater carnage; history records a red tide washing up on the shores of Oahu, Molokai and Lanai for several days during the summer of 1944. It wasn’t composed of algae, as red tides usually are; it was colored by human blood!
How do I know what happened to those Nazis? Every Pajaro Island exile knows. We all had the same spirit dream which conveyed images of our ancestors’ vengeance in vivid, gruesome detail. So Wilbur von Schweiss was dead, but a handful of his henchmen still lived. They had remained behind to prepare the island for a planned Nazi occupation. When their colleagues failed to return with supplies, they tried to leave and were menaced by the Great Whites. Pajaro Island became their prison!
And so the final Kauwa prophecy came true: The centuries-old refuge was made tabu! No more visitors were allowed to come, and no resident could return or leave.
THE RICO MAMBO TRIO
FEATURING TRIXIE BALL
This is Irene again. Those painful memories have left Basil feeling overwhelmed, so I’m going to finish our story. July of 1944 marked not only the destruction of Pajaro Island but also the end of Deacon Diamond’s demagogic terror campaign. His estranged wife began appearing in public, denouncing the Deacon and his associates. In a serialized Honolulu Examiner interview that riveted all of Hawaii, Pattycake Bancrofft-Faws pulled the covers off every bit of the Deacon’s rotten organization! She exposed him as a Nazi and a sex trafficker, and described how he tried to murder and silence her.
I preserved a few of those sensational newspaper headlines for posterity, and they’re part of my donation to the Hawaiian Gay Archive.
The woman I would later know as Trixie Ball revealed that the Children’s Protection Committee was nothing but a shell organization hiding a Nazi fifth column. It was so stealthy an operation, most of the membership had been unaware. Then she told the shocking truth about brothels as funding sources for the Committee. Behind the scenes, she was giving evidence to the War Department.
Some of the documentation she turned over to them was provided by Jeff June; despite his complicity in Nazi schemes, he ultimately proved that he was no traitor. So, just as history indicates, he and Trixie deserve credit for dismantling Hitler’s plot to conquer America from within. In my small way, I guess I did my part, too, as did Basil and my brother Freddy; but we couldn’t have done anything without Stormy Foster!
It was The Great Defender who protected us from roving anti-Gay vigilantes; who inspired us with Gay Pride speeches drawn from Pajaro Island religious doctrine. It was the Defender whose pirate radio broadcasts sparked debate among Hawaiians about how Gay people should be treated; and whose timely intervention rescued Trixie Ball from drowning. His spirit guide Snooks the Parrot returned to him that same day, and his elemental powers were restored. Snooks led him far out to sea where the Deacon had thrown his wife overboard. Combining his powers over wind, water and fire, Stormy freed her from Wilbur von Scheiss’s death trap and carried her back to shore.
She was almost dead, but he managed to resuscitate her. As she lay on the beach gasping for breath, he removed his mask. She saw that what Deacon Diamond had suspected was true: Stormy Foster really was The Great Defender! And her own suspicions were also correct: The Defender was Kid Bombay, the prizefighter she had lured into the Deacon's brothel. Stormy held no malice against Trixie, but he reminded her that she should have listened when he warned her not to marry Diamond Faws. Tearfully, she revealed to him the whole sordid mess that the Deacon had made of her life. Right then and there, she vowed to take his evil ass down, and his Nazi-backed Committee with him!
Of course, Trixie had to serve time for the part she played in the Deacon’s schemes, but the court showed leniency. I was one of several donors to her legal defense. Her friend Prissy Stockdale also contributed. We got Trixie the best representation money could buy, and the damning evidence she’d given worked in her favor; but more serious than the collaboration and procurement charges against her was the public reveal of her sexual orientation. There was no way for her to tell the full story and avoid talking about that!
More than anything else she confessed to, admitting that she was a Lesbian destroyed Trixie’s reputation. That's how strong anti-Gay bigotry was back then! The revelation could have utterly ruined her life; but once again, friends came to her rescue. When Trixie finished her prison sentence on the mainland, Prissy Stockdale and I were there to meet her at the front gate. We paid for her flight back to Honolulu and found a place for her to live. Then I hired her to work at my club.
As the singing Widow Bancrofft, Trixie had been a compelling fundraiser at Children's Protection Committee events; but with grooming from me, Fannie Foster, Theresita Carmen and Todd Yamaha, she became a phenomenal performer! That said, we didn't deserve all the credit for her subsequent success. I wouldn't even say we deserved most of it: Trixie took the lead in reinventing her stage persona, and she was always her own music director. She had a strong musical vision for herself and we respected that.
At my suggestion, she adopted Trixie Ball as a stage name and began the process of leaving her sad past behind. Her first shows took place in late 1947, at my nightclub. I made her the focal point of a new act called The Rico Mambo Trio; Basil was briefly part of that group. By popular demand, Trixie went solo a year later and launched her stellar career as a Blues singer. In 1954, she emigrated to Hong Kong and conquered the South Asian cabaret scene. For two decades, Trixie was known as the Red Hot Blues Queen; Far East audiences adored her, and she had fans in Europe and Australia, too.
After retiring from the stage, Trixie reclaimed her American citizenship. By the early ‘70s, she'd become a Lesbian feminist and a force in East Coast Gay activism. We lost Trixie Ball just five years ago; what a remarkable life that woman had! She was one of the most courageous people I’ve ever known as well as a dear friend.
DÉNOUEMENT AT MOLOKAI
After Trixie and I got to know each other, I asked why she hadn't outed Deacon Diamond as a closeted Gay man. She explained that, despite what she witnessed at Kewalo Basin Harbor, she didn’t have evidence to support such an explosive claim. I understood; we hadn’t exposed him as a Nazi for much the same reason.
Jeff June might have provided evidence of the Deacon's hypocrisy, but he wasn’t available to do it; he spoke just once to War Department investigators and then disappeared! He told Trixie that he wanted to find Diamond Faws before they did; still hopelessly in love with the Deacon, Jeff thought he could convince Diamond Faws to turn against Hitler and seek asylum in the United States.
After his depth of corruption was exposed, Deacon Diamond had dropped out of sight. When the authorities went to arrest him at Children’s Protection Committee headquarters, they found nothing but a shambles! The Deacon's outraged congregants had arrived ahead of them and ransacked the building! They'd wanted to lay hands on Diamond Faws, too, but he was long gone. So the FBI had a dragnet out for him, Jeff June was searching for him, and of course, The Great Defender was also on his trail.
By then, a spirit dream had made Stormy aware of the Pajaro Island massacre. I was laying beside him in bed when he awakened from it, screaming and sobbing! That was an awful night; I called Freddy and he rushed over to my house. We were so alarmed by Stormy's anguished reaction, we actually sat suicide watch over him. It took several hours for the two of us to nurse him out a deep, dark depression. When his mood finally lifted, he became apoplectic with rage!
He knew that most of the killers had already been punished, but not the Deacon. That's who he blamed most for butchering the Kauwa people, and he was hell-bent on revenge! Later on he told me that Snooks the Parrot refused to lead him to the Deacon's hiding place; she must have foreseen the inevitable outcome of their confrontation! Stormy had to use other means to locate him.
It was Jeff who found him first. He’d been the Deacon’s personal assistant for years, and believed he knew where to look. Earlier in 1944, Jeff had learned about Diamond Faws' secret affair with Wilbur von Schweiss, and where they would go to escape prying eyes. They’d often tryst on the island of Molokai, which was the Deacon's birthplace. One of their meeting places was hidden atop the high cliffs. Sure enough, that’s where he found Faws: Waiting in vain to rendez-vous with his Nazi lover and plan their escape!
But by the time The Great Defender arrived on the scene, poor Jeff was dead. A self-inflicted gunshot had blown half his head off! Stormy said the Deacon was standing over his bloody remains, laughing like a maniac. The monster bragged about luring Jeff into a suicide pact that he himself had no intention of honoring.
He told Stormy: “That Jap faggot wanted me to throw myself on the mercy of the Allies. I said I'd sooner die than do that! Then he claimed that he wanted to die with me. He told me loved me, just like a sniveling little bitch! I dared him to prove it, and as you can see . . . he did!” Seething with rage and grief, Stormy responded by describing Wilbur von Schweiss' grisly demise at sea in cold, agonizing detail.
He said the Deacon went wild and tried to kill him with his bare hands! It was a desperate and futile effort: Diamond Faws, the fire-and-brimstone preacher, ended up reduced to a pile of smoking ashes! Predictably, Stormy lost control of his temper and incinerated Deacon Diamond with fireballs. But before he died, he gave the Great Defender the fight of his life: Snarling, clawing and biting like a savage animal! Stormy was an ex-prizefighter with a fearsome temper to boot, but he needed medical attention after tangling with that madman. He admitted to me that, if it hadn’t been for his restored Akua powers, Diamond Faws might well have succeeded in killing him!
STORMY IS STRIPPED OF HIS POWERS
What Faws did succeed at was forcing Stormy to once again violate the gods' prohibition against taking life. He recalled to me how, as he stood looking at the Deacon’s smoldering corpse, Snooks the Parrot flew down from the sky and let out a long cry of alarm. The sound of it echoed out over the cliffs. Then he said the bird came very close to his face and hovered. At first, he thought she was angry but when he looked into her blue eyes, he saw profound sadness.
The bird’s brilliant plumage changed back to its normal golden hue, and Stormy’s battle-torn costume disappeared. He stood there naked, an Akua no longer; and suddenly, it started to rain. A trickle quickly progressed to a downpour and in less than a minute, he was soaked to the skin! As if engaged in silent conversation with him, Snooks continued to hover for several minutes; miraculously, her feathers remained dry. Then the erstwhile Queen of Pajaro Island reclaimed her rainbow colors, brushed his cheek lightly with one wing and flew away. She rose higher and higher into the rainclouds until he couldn’t see her anymore.
Stormy said he cried like a baby, because this time he knew that she was gone for good.
His super powers would never return, but they'd served their purpose. The Akua's holy mission was complete: Adolph Hitler's plot against Gay Hawaiians had been exposed and disgraced. Just as important, the seeds of Gay Liberation had been sown in fertile soil and were already taking root! So perhaps it was fitting that both Deacon Diamond and The Great Defender should die at Molokai.
The Great Defender's saga is complete, but the
file on Stormy Foster is not yet closed.
Click below to read
Epilogue to the Stormy Foster saga
You've just read Chapter Twelve! Click below to read
Eleventh chapter in the Stormy Foster saga
Concept by HAMPTON JACOBS and PATTY BALL
Art by STUFFED ANIMAL
Costumes by HENRIETTA la del BARRIO
Project Assistance by RODERICK MACK and DAVE PEARSON
Text by HAMPTON JACOBS