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State College was a quiet town filled with middle-class houses, manicured lawns, a church on every corner--and no abortion clinics. Eric Harrah came to open one. What happened next was nothing short of miraculous.
Let's face it, it's hard for Eric to be inconspicuous. First of all, Eric doesn't want to be inconspicuous, can't stand to be inconspicuous, will never allow himself to be inconspicuous. Second of all, how do you ignore a six-foot-four, 295-pound hulk of a man with permanently tattooed eyeliner and a young Simba from The Lion King emblazoned on his arm? How do you ignore a man who wants your attention, who demands your attention, who demands everyone's attention--a man who can control a room with his laugh, with his glare, with his sheer presence? How do you ignore a man whose power to intimidate is like nothing you've seen before, a man who controls but is never controlled, a man who delights in watching his opponents squirm?
.....How do you stop such a man when he invades your town, vows to open an abortion clinic and, by the way, tells you there is nothing--nothing short of murder--you can do to stop him?
Eric Harrah arrived in State College, Pennsylvania, in the spring of 1997. The most outspoken abortion-clinic operator east of the Mississippi--perhaps in the country--arrived quietly, without fanfare, because conservative towns like State College don't exactly roll out the welcome mat for flamboyant homosexuals who help kill babies.
.....Come to think of it, State College had never seen anything quite like Eric and by all accounts was quite unprepared to.
.....Let's just say that the feeling was mutual. Let's just say that Eric didn't want to come. Let's just say that he needed a good reason--are you kidding, he needed a great reason--because Eric Harrah fed on deviance, on sex and sin and corruption, and living in State College would be like going on a crash diet.
.....But Eric loved a good challenge. His friends and associates called him "the Hit Man," because he dropped in on unsuspecting towns and opened clinics where no one else would, where no one else could. He opened clinics where others had tried and failed. Eric didn't perform the procedures himself, but he leased the office space, he purchased the equipment, he hired the doctors, he worked the media, he battled the opposition, he escorted the patients inside, he helped clean up . . . and, when everybody finally went home, he counted the money.
.....There was definitely money to be made in State College. The town is home to Penn State University and thus thousands of women of childbearing age. Oh yeah, the numbers looked good. But Eric wouldn't make a dime in State College. He didn't want to. He didn't need to. He was working for free. You see, Eric's lover took good care of him. Eric was a kept man.
.....Truth is, Eric did it as a favor, a favor for his business partner, his companion, his lover. He struck a deal: Go to State College, get a clinic up and running, then get out--go to a big city, like Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, maybe go back to Manhattan. Back to a life of indulgence.
.....So Eric came, moved into an apartment, and quietly began the work of opening a clinic. But word leaked out, like it always does, and the pro-lifers in town soon discovered who--what--Eric Harrah was. What they learned made their heads spin, and they didn't know the half of it. They called a press conference to expose Eric and his partner. He was suddenly on the front page of the newspaper, on TV, on the Internet. The clinic was now the biggest show in town, and Eric had the starring role. Eric lived to play the starring role.
.....Just offstage, sitting in his living room, away from the protesters and the TV lights, Steve Stupar was reading the morning newspaper. Stupar--a former Penn State football player-turned-local business owner and church elder--looked at Eric's picture and read the evil things he said. At that moment, there came a thought.
.....It wasn't his own thought, that much Stupar knew. But as he sat there, staring at Eric, the message was unmistakable.
.....I want to use you to have an impact on this man.
.....There was no sound, but Stupar knew God was speaking.
.....I want you to become his friend.
.....The thought of becoming friends with this infidel didn't frighten Stupar, it intrigued him. He didn't know how it would happen, but he couldn't wait.
.....Neither did Stupar know that some 200 miles southeast of State College, at Calvary Assembly of God in Dover, there was a card with Eric's name on it. Every Sunday for the last three years, a church member thought of that card, bowed her head and prayed for Eric's soul.
.....He never stood a chance.
Where do men like Eric come from? You can't create them in a laboratory, at least not yet. No, you begin not with science, but with pain. Eric was born into pain.
.....Eric Craig Harrah entered the world on April 26, 1968, in Wilmington, Delaware. Mom was white and dad was black, but dad never stuck around to deal with the bigotry, only long enough to father Eric and his older sister.
.....Eric's mother did the best she could, and when she got married a couple years later, things were starting to look up. The family moved to a nearby dot on the map named Cheswold, a tiny town consisting of about four streets and a set of railroad tracks. But pain was tracking them. Turned out mom married Dr. Jekyll. Nice guy most of the time, but get some booze in him and he'd start using Eric and his mom as punching bags.
.....Not that anybody knew. After all, the family prayed before meals and at bedtime, and every Sunday morning the kids were packed off to church. Not just any church, but a United Pentecostal, calling-sin-sin kinda church. Eric's mom, however, stayed home most weeks, and his stepfather showed up even less.
.....By the time Eric hit puberty, stepdaddy didn't look so fearsome anymore. Eric decided he wasn't going to stand around and watch his mother get beat up. He fought back, and his stepfather eventually left Eric alone.
.....Eric wanted a father, but let's face it, it's tough to respect a man who batters your mom for kicks. So Eric rejected his stepfather's life; whatever his stepfather did, Eric did something different. He ignored sports, buried his nose in books and developed his mother's sensitivity. His stepfather responded with words like "sissy," "queer" and "fag."
.....It's not that Eric didn't like girls. After all, he got his first kiss in the back of the Sunday school bus. But Eric desired affection and attention from a man, and the one living at his house could offer him neither. He started reading about the emerging gay community, about Stonewall and Greenwich Village. Is that what I am? he wondered. Yet Eric was suffocating in Cheswold; he'd never find his answers there.
.....His search eventually took him four hours north, to the streets of New York City. He worked odd jobs to pay for a bus ticket, planned his escape route at the local library and made up a good story. If all went according to plan, he'd be back in Cheswold before anyone was the wiser.
The man's name was Chet, and he discovered Eric walking in the Village. Chet was around 40, very manly, and very married. Chet didn't know it--Eric probably didn't know it either--but Chet was exactly what Eric was looking for. Chet seemed to be everything that Eric's father should have been. Chet took Eric back to his house, showed him pictures of his wife and children . . . and had sex with him.
.....Eric hadn't planned to sleep with a man; in fact, he had little desire to. What he remembered later was not the act itself, but how good it felt to have a man pay attention to him, to spend time with him--to hold him.
.....But Chet had another life, one that had no role for a teen-age boy from Delaware. No matter. Eric would find other men, men who could fill the role of father, even if only for a few hours. He met Jim, another wealthy New Yorker, another family man, another surrogate father. Jim was 47, Eric was 15, and they stayed together for seven years. You might say that Jim took good care of Eric. Jim wouldn't sleep with him until he turned 18, but it didn't matter, because Eric never promised to be faithful.
.....By the time Eric got a driver's license, New York was like a second home. He was thinner then and still had most of his hair, and his mixed-race heritage gave him an exotic look. He cruised and was cruised. He hung at gay bars like The Monster, Uncle Charlie's and The Vault. Sunday school was but a distant memory.
.....He met a quartet of drag queens who took him under their wing. The group's leader was Louis, though friends and lovers called him Louisa. Eric, however, called him "mother." They were a diverse bunch--Mike was a cop; Alex a doctor; Chris had a rich lover, so he didn't work; and Louisa . . . let's just say that Louisa was very good at what he did and was paid very well for it. For the record, let's also just say that all four are now dead.
.....But let's not turn Eric into a victim. He would hate that. Sure, men used Eric, but Eric used them right back. Louisa taught Eric that it's just as easy to fall for a rich man as a poor one, that you treat a man right and he'll treat you right back. Needless to say, Eric was an excellent student. He gave his partners what they wanted and he took from them what he needed.
.....He lived a dual life out of necessity. In the Village, he was a "fem queen," but back home in Delaware he was a bright but disinterested high school student. In the end, there was no cap and gown for Eric, only a GED and a mutual understanding with a school that wasn't sorry to see him go.
.....His only academic interest was politics, which he satisfied with a part-time job in the state legislature. There, 17-year-old Eric watched self-serving legislators make backroom deals, cozy up to lobbyists and sleepwalk through floor votes. Yet instead of turning Eric off to politics, his two sessions in Dover taught him how to tell people what they wanted to hear, how to stroke their egos, how to lie.
.....He decided to enroll at Wesley College in Dover, not because he wanted to, but because that's what people were supposed to do. His political science professors taught how government was meant to operate, but Eric knew better. He dropped out a year later.
.....By now he had discovered that the homosexual community wasn't sequestered in New York. He joined Louisa and the others on road trips to Baltimore, Philly, D.C., and in summer to the Eastern Shore. He even looked for love in his hometown, with married businessmen during their lunch hour in a public park. But there was little joy in it, because it never gave Eric what he really wanted.
It was the summer of 1989, and Eric, Louisa, Mike, Chris and Alex were headed for Rehoboth Beach, Del., a gay summer hot spot. They were driving through Dover when they came upon a protest in progress outside the Delta Women's Clinic. The five of them only wanted to get to the beach--it was hot enough to melt a drag queen's makeup and Louisa was already sweating--but the protesters, with their signs and their pamphlets, were slowing down traffic.
.....Exactly why Eric decided to pull into the parking lot is a mystery. Now you have to understand that until that moment--even though he grew up just a few miles away--Eric didn't even know the abortion clinic existed. His knowledge of abortion was limited; indeed, the subject was never discussed in his house. These protesters, however, were an inconvenience.
.....A shouting match ensued. Eric spotted a woman nearby, in tears, and offered to escort her inside. He asked the clinic staff how he could help their cause, and they suggested that he join NOW. What's that? Eric asked, for he had never heard of the National Organization for Women.
.....They gave him a phone number, and Eric did a little research. He didn't need much convincing--after all, he was a life-long Democrat, and he figured Democrats were supposed to support abortion. A couple days later, he called.
.....Eric would never be the same.
.....Within six months he was secretary of the county chapter; six months later he was vice president; and then, one year later, Eric Harrah was president of the Delaware state chapter of the National Organization for Women. He became an abortion stormtrooper, often spending his Saturday mornings escorting women into the clinic. He descended on pro-choice rallies, leading chants like "Not the church, not the state, women will decide their fate," and "Keep your rosaries off our ovaries." He rallied opposition against the nomination of conservative Supreme Court justices--against anyone who opposed his new cause.
.....It wasn't long before he had a full-time job at the clinic. He started out as director of public relations; working with women's groups, talking to the media. Then another turning point: Eric's long-time companion, Jim, asked him to move in with him in New York. When Eric told the clinic's owners that he was quitting, they countered by offering him a bigger role. Good-bye Jim. Eric was having too much fun to stand by his man.
Indeed, Eric Harrah didn't just arrive in the abortion industry, he detonated. It was as if he'd taken an aptitude test, and the result came back: "You should be running an abortion clinic!"
But Eric knew nothing about running a clinic, and that alone made him all the more dangerous. He was the first to promote free abortions to victims of rape, incest and HIV infection. Next came discounts for minors, out-of-staters and Medicaid recipients. They were all publicity stunts, and they worked to perfection. In four years, he probably gave out less than 25 free abortions, but in return, he got loads of free publicity. He was even siphoning business from neighboring Pennsylvania.
.....His competitors were outraged. Planned Parenthood labeled him "unethical." The Delaware Women's Health Center accused him of "bravado" and "pseudo-machismo." Eric didn't care. "I'm not ashamed of what I do," he told the press. Besides, he had no time for shame--he was too busy posing for the front page. He knew his pricing plan made him look like the compassionate one. Did Planned Parenthood ever lower their rates?
.....Forget the price-fixing, forget the cartel mentality, Eric charged less simply because he felt like it--because he could--and if the competition didn't like it, well, that's too bad. They couldn't match him, because they've been in business too long, they've got too much staff, they've got a doctor they're paying way too much.
.....And when the competition goes under, you better believe there's gonna be a price increase at Eric's clinic. He's the man now, the only game in town, and again, if you don't like it, he doesn't want your business. But you better not wait too long, because an eight-week abortion costs a few hundred bucks, but get up around 20 weeks and we're talking a few thousand. The HMOs, they're only too happy to play along; they'll gladly pay up to a thousand dollars for a first-trimester abortion rather than five or 10 times that for labor and delivery.
.....None of this was lost on clinic owner Melvin Soll. Eric was the perfect henchman, and Soll could stay in the background while Eric took the heat. The pair started working together. Soll was the money man, and Eric did the gruntwork.
.....Eric and NOW soon parted ways. NOW members said he was too domineering, that he promoted his own views ahead of the organization's. Eric, meanwhile, was too busy starting up a Louisiana clinic to pay much attention to NOW business.
.....Eric was the ultimate profiteer--no guilt, no tears, no regrets, none of that I-just-want-to-help-women. Oh, sure, just like the others he started doing it for the movement, for the cause, but, just like the others, reality eventually set in: the pickets, the scorn, the media attention, the landlords who don't want to rent to you and the doctors who don't want to work for you--plus the simple fact that you're not an architect, you're not an attorney . . . no, you're the honest-to-goodness town abortionist. Yeah, you can call them "products of conception" all you want, but come on, everyone knows what you really do for a living. There's no invitation to Career Day waiting on your answering machine.
.....Of course his clinics offered other services: pregnancy tests, birth-control devices, treatment and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. These services never generated much money, but they were great p.r. Without them, Eric was nothing but an abortion-clinic operator. With them, he was transformed into manager of a chain of "women's health care facilities"--facilities with caring names like Delta Women's Clinic and Brandywine Valley Women's Center.
.....The clinics themselves were a lesson in marketing. Pictures lined the walls, but only pictures of women, never of families or children. The wood was polished, the floors were waxed--not so much for appearance, but to make it easier to clean up the blood. Flowers and incense helped mask the disinfectant smell. Anything to disguise the hospital aroma. Anything to disguise what really went on inside.
.....But the one reminder Eric could not disguise, that he could never ignore, was the sound of the vacuum aspirator, the machine that sucked out the product of conception, the fetus . . . the baby. For years, hearing that sound made Eric cringe. Eventually, when his heart turned to stone, that sound became like the ring of a cash register. No matter where he was in the building, once he heard that sound, he knew there would be no refund.
.....As for the pro-lifers, Eric knew how to handle them. He used his size and his sexuality to intimidate, and he was very good at it. He was a self-declared, self-anointed, one-man clinic defense team. Pro-lifers feared him--no, they were terrified. Profanity? Eric knew more words than a dozen longshoremen. Shout at him, and he shouted right back. Get in his face, and he got in yours. Push him around, and . . . well, you get the idea. After a while, Eric didn't need any provocation. If you disagreed with him or his line of work, his mission was to make your life miserable.
.....Yet in the midst of it all, there were glimpses of a troubled soul fueled not by anger, but by a lifetime of misadventure. He kept a Bible in his office--right next to a copy of Madonna's Sex. He once told a reporter, "The only regret I have in being in the [abortion] business is I'm not welcome at any church."
.....This man without a heart actually talked to his mother almost every day. This man who said he couldn't be stopped tried instead to escape via drug overdose. This man who made his living off abortion would occasionally give one away--to a woman in trouble or, more frequently, to a woman who was biracial--not because he actually cared about her, but because he didn't want her child to live as he had.
.....Right or wrong, Eric believed that if he had never been born, if he had never existed, then maybe his mother wouldn't have stayed in a relationship with an abuser. And maybe, just maybe, the one parent who always accepted him--who always loved him, who even helped answer the phone at his clinics--could have enjoyed a better life.
Jim wasn't out of the picture long before Eric found someone else. He fell for a wealthy abortion doctor named Steven Brigham. But Eric couldn't be harnessed. There was always Louisa and the others, there was New York, and now there was drag.
.....Yes, Eric became a female impersonator--a drag queen. What started as a Halloween prank soon became just one more escape. He had no desire to be a woman; he was just having fun. He was tall and exotic-looking, and oh, how they loved him! He was fabulous, he was fierce. The red wig, the green, beaded gown and the six-inch pumps--he was a human Christmas tree! He sang show tunes, he lip-synched Streisand, he adopted a stage name: Alexis "You Know You Want Me" Horowitz.
.....But eventually, as with everything he did, Eric got bored. He sparred with reporters--he played a liberal one moment, a conservative the next. He defended abortion, then complained that there were too many. He spoke aloud of leaving the industry, maybe opening a cappuccino stand. Few believed him. Why should they?
.....In 1994, Eric and clinic owner Soll were fined $43,000 for clinic workers flushing fetal tissue down garbage disposals. The pair claimed ignorance of the law and struck a deal with prosecutors.
.....The next year, the Harrah-Soll partnership disintegrated. Brigham, Eric's new partner, owned a string of clinics in the Northeast--some profitable, some not so. Some Brigham wasn't even allowed to work in. The abortionist gave up his Pennsylvania medical license in the heat of an investigation. Other states simply took his license away.
.....But Brigham didn't need to perform abortions to make money. He only needed clinics. Enter Eric. Eric gave Brigham the cover he wanted, the cover he needed. If one of his clinics ran into legal trouble--as they sometimes did--Eric was the spokesman, talking to the press, taking the heat. Eric's name was all over the clinic documents, making it nearly impossible for authorities to trace ownership back to Brigham.
.....Now Brigham wanted to open a new clinic in Pennsylvania and, oh, the numbers looked good. Very good.
Go to Part 2: The Only Way To Stop Me Now Is To Kill Me.
