Faggots

by Larry Kramer

… the ancients located the deeper emotions in the bowels.

The Jew has always waited. For the homeland, for the Messiah, for the acceptance.

Abe, the philosopher. He stood peeing in Bloomingdale’s, oblivious to Fred’s shoppers, and pondered the unending powerlessness in Jewish history and realized the commonality with Fred’s fegalim. And then he thought, profoundly, how there was something grand about living in hope, but also something terribly unreal and incomplete about it, because when you were hoping, you were not doing or living or experiencing the Now, but deferring and not fulfilling, and that those concepts of Judaism, on which he had been weaned, compelled a life lived in deferment, nothing could be irrevocably accomplished, it was like an orgasm with never an ejaculation, and if it was great to be a Waiter, wasn’t it also weak? Was it now and at last and forever time to stop waiting? But for what?!

showing off his nicely proportioned body, six feet, narrow waist, bulging biceps, well-defined pecs, lats like wings, all calculated, or so he hoped, to take the eye of the beholder off his dark, swarthy, unhappy-looking, and rather Jewish face.

Anger’s a prelude to courage?