Faggots

by Larry Kramer

The success of any satire is gauged by the degree of offense it provokes at its initial appearance and by the durability of that offense.

What Kramer sensed and predicted subliminally in the closing pages of his novel was simply this—the sexual body is human, not immortal; and while it is only an appendage of an entire man, it is capable of destroying both itself and him.

The purpose of satire is always peculiarly forked. It offers us oddly entertaining, generally exaggerated copies of foolish or evil behavior in order to provoke our ridicule. By implication at least, it also hopes that general ridicule will result in changed behavior—ideally, by an abandonment of the folly portrayed. Any reader of Faggots can easily identify the kind of male behavior which Kramer calls folly.

Failing to reform urban Western queer customs in the late 1970s, Larry Kramer absorbed the abuse his vision received and when—all too quickly—his dread began to realize itself in an epidemic that has proved far more ghastly than any critic could have imagined, he turned his unsleeping insight and energy into powerful social action, into the creation of eminently practical means of combating both the plague and society’s refusal to acknowledge the plain humanity of its victims. No prior satirist known to me has waded, blood-drenched, into such useful work. The fact that a mind with the observational and analytic powers of Kramer’s became the terrible and largely successful foe of Federal, religious, and private sustainers of the viciously passive witness of disaster is still as astonishing as it is admirable.

But all live satire provokes such dilemmas, and the crackling presence of so many dark questions in Faggots should keep it alive for a great deal longer. Certainly the community it attacked—and all other communities of mindless sexual adventure, regardless of gender or aim—could continue to read it with baleful laughter and enduring profit.

He belonged to two gyms and attended them regularly, alternating them to avoid monotony. At Sheridan Square (“The Magnificent Obsession”) Health Club, also known as “Bodyworks (but the mind doesn’t),” he could muscle-build close to home with the Village faggots, a serious lot much concerned with hyperbolic results to parade on Christopher Street, though they and their conversations (everyone was “she” or “Mary” and various were the opinions on opera, recipes, and yard goods) were a bit too bitchyqueeny for Fred’s taste; to him they all connoted creeping, crepuscular middle-aged dissatisfaction, on the road to leather and other arcane sexual deviances sacrosanct to the unloved, and he still had hope, if not their over-muscled definition.

And if the rest of his country desired to be thin and gorgeous and remained pretty much as they were, then he would not be like the rest of his country. And what better motivation for becoming a thing of beauty than being in love?

Fred was—in short—your average, standard, New York faggot obsessive kvetch. Nice though. And with smiling, dark-brown eyes. But perhaps a bit too therapeutically prepared. And trying not to ponder if what he has spent all those years and dollars and pounds (sterling, not avoirdupois, though certainly that as well) to reach is quite possibly not there to be reached, but that the True End of not only therapy but Maturity is to learn to live with the inescapable fact that 97% of all human beings are getting fucked and 97% of all faggots are, too.

Fred then thought of the long line of architects, gardeners, art directors, copywriters, dilettantes, drop-outs, unemployeds, unemployables, would-be’s, waiters, actors, students, dancers, which had graced his life, wondering why he fell for some of the Great Non-Givers of the World, the Invulnerables, the Defensives, the Ones in Need of Help, whom he, great Red Crosser, was there to ferry through sleet and shit like the schleppy Saint Bernard. And did.

No, he would de-kike the word “faggot,” which had punch, bite, a no-nonsense, chin-out assertiveness, and which, at present, was no more self-deprecatory than, say, “American.”

Yes, sex and love were different items when he wanted them in one, and yes, having so much sex made having love impossible, and yes, sadism was only a way to keep people away from us and masochism only a way to clutch them close, and yes, we are sadists with some guys and masochists with other guys and sometimes both with both, and yes, we’re all out of the closet but we’re still in the ghetto and all I see is guys hurting each other and themselves. But how to get out! And yes, the world is giving us a bad name and we’re giving us a bad name and one of us has got to stop and it’s not going to be the world. But even knowing all of this … where am I? And how to say all this to anyone, when no one is listening, no one wants to hear, not even his two best friends, whom he sensed weren’t listening to each other, oh what good were words, words didn’t help me and Dinky, what good were words when acts were all that counted?

These articles of clothing, or permutations of same (khakis, Levis, with button flies only, and not preshrunk, painter’s pants, Adidas, items of butch-ery) were the uniform. He felt safest wearing them, though he knew not why. Was it hiding? Or homogenizing? A way of staying anonymous to the outside world but recognizable to the inmates? If clothes make the man, what were they making? A way of insisting they were men, more men than men? And why was the same guy Hot and fuckable in a Pendleton and not in a Polo? And why did black boots on Christopher Street lure more fellows than brown? And were leather and jockstraps and football jerseys and satin boxing shorts all a send-up and a turn-on, and was this a clue to the faggot sensibility?

The closets are empty. New York has no more full closets.

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?

“Love is many things to many people. Love is very complicated. Love is a many-splendored thing.”

But he knew there was more. He saw it with his eyes and he dreamed it in his dreams and he fantasized it in his daytimes and he knew he was in trouble. For he knew there was a pit of sexuality out there and that he longed to throw himself into it.

I have to! I have to! he would torture himself before several hours napping in his lofted bed. Because it’s part of the faggot life style—to find abandonment and freedom through ecstasy—fucking and being fucked and light s & m and shitting and pissing and Oh I want to be abandoned!

I shall say that it is my considered heterosexual opinion that every faggot, though I shall not use this word, considers his homosexuality as very special to him, in the sense of sacrosanct, like a pain which he has lived with a very long time. Thus it becomes a sacred pain, and one which is difficult to challenge on the one hand, or to share with another faggot on the other, whose comprehension of exactly the same pain would seem to make him the obvious choice of sharer, helpmate, lover, but which, in fact, makes him just the opposite: makes him a combatant in the same arena, fighting to see who is the victor over the same spoils—these spoils being the same Pandora’s Box of pain.”

I have told you many times that we are no different from other people, who are base and self-centered and greedy. And hopeful.” Yes. And hopeful.

Ah, the streets, the Streets, the streets, let us pause for an Ode to The Streets, Gay Ghetto, homo away from home, the hierarchy and ritual of The Streets, incessant, insinuating, impossible Streets, addictive, the herb superb, can’t keep away from you, always drawn to you, STREETS, speak of them singularly in the plural, like Sheep, Kleenex, Jell-o, blending, coalescing, oozing, all into one, all for us, how dramatic, how important, how depressing, fucking loneliness of walking alone and looking, displaying, on the streets—where so much time is spent, summer and winter, cold and HOT, You Can’t Go Home Again, anyway you can’t go home, who wants to go home, no cock suckers at home, dreary home, how many nights, hours, days, weeks, months, years, who’s counting, do these fellows, not me!, walk The Streets: Christopher Washington Greenwich Hudson West and Sheridan Square, such a parade, everyone dressed alike!, Hitler could recruit right here, the Gay White Way, Black, too, and Spanish, French, German, Italian, for Christ’s sake, Icelandic, those firemen really visit, every guidebook advises Hit Those Streets!, Mary, Show Them Pecs, Strut Them Buns, Pad That Crotch, Visit Them Bars: Keller’s, Ty’s, Cell Block, Ramrod, Stud, International, Peter Rabbit, Bunkhouse, Rawhide, Badlands, Tulip’s, Boots and Saddle, Cynthia’s, Tubie’s, Mine Shaft, Glory Hole, Pits, Anvil, Cock Ring, tomorrow night the new one: THE TOILET BOWL, oi!

And Dunnie, again giving himself the look of the loved in that tilted mirror, further said: “I think sometimes we’re lucky to know certain things early, like being shown what’s in the crystal ball at the beginning of your life instead of at the end. I know I want to be looked at by everybody and to pass around my beauty …,” at this point he took Sammy’s damp hand and used it to make his further illustrative point, “… and have everybody touching me all over and letting me do the same to them and … maybe we better not tell anybody about this …”

Pause to reflect on this. The head of one of America’s major Stock Exchanged companies is a faggot. No mean feat, again, this. He loves living on that dangerous razor’s edge. On the one side, he satisfies his need to constantly glitter, dazzle all of his audience, baffle all of his victims, and look down from Up There on everything down here, as he continues building his empire by destruction of the enemy, humiliation of his rivals, in so doing becoming, in the grand tradition of his country, The Big Man, The Hero, silhouetted against the landscape as etched by Forbes. And, on the other, stands the Dreaded Secret, which he knows could fell his growing redwood. Such conflict, particularly in anyone who’s horny, would, needless to say, streak a blow dry with a certain frost of confusion. Who could ask for anything more?

When the beat thumped into crescendo and glissandoed into an open plateau, Timmy, vaguely aware that his crotch was fuller than usual,—he’d never got a hard-on while dancing in his bedroom—thought to himself: I might as well show them what I really can do, and spun away and performed a few graceful and intricate steps and turns which he had perfected in that bedroom, never imagining he’d be showing them off quite like this, including the mock hesitation both arms right left right right that he’d noted some kids using on a Don Kirshner TV Rock Special, and this caused Paulie to duplicate the movements, and now they were dancing together—Durwood tried but couldn’t get the tricky hesitation right—Paulie and Timmy, looking like, though they would never have heard of them, young Tony and Sally de Marco, which one Tony?, which one Sally?, in and out, arms over and down, touch hip, touch hip, down down over and back. Paulie’s eyes closed, his own crotch running over, and Timmy’s eyes closed, and they instinctively touched chests and bumped groins and whirled about to collide asses and then knock hips, right and left, and as Rose Tundra droned on and upward, their own movements became slower and their gestures tiny and delicate, weaving a spell for the coming moment of climax and ending, neither one realizing that their sweat was comingling, just that it had been a good brotherly get-together and workout that would remain as a nice memento of Timmy’s first High in the big city, wh...

10: I have a bad relationship with my body and need constant re-affirmations by a bevy of parading beauties that I Am Hot; 11: The World, and God, say I must not be; 12: I’m afraid of the Outside World and its Responsibilities, plus 97 others, ((… but what if I was just born responding to cock and ass, like Ben was born responding to tit and cunt? … what if all those neurotic Reasons were just post-natal … re-adjustments? …)), plus other questions, or rather, the same question asked a number of different ways: why can’t I get out of this life style that is going crazier and more out of control and more mad, and legitimized!, by the minute?, is it just a reluctance to leave the familiar and fear of exploring the new and different?), this way had also not yet revealed to his satisfaction why it continued to localize its revenge on his stomach and its adjoining tributaries.

R. Allan ran both Stud Studios and One Touch of Penis Modeling Agency. He looked as expected for this dual role: fifty, seedy, nicotined, with sparse hair, bushy eyebrows, and a drool that increased in lubricity when it liked what it saw. Which it now did. He had never, in his entire lifetime, by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, been attractive, handsome, even personable, and hence his mission to bring beauty to the world was set young. He drooled early.

Besides what was the point of having a Central Park West penthouse in the sky if not to stay at home, make a few phone calls, and ask some friends to drop in for a quiet evening chez moi. Word would be passed around with speed, and by nine, or ten at the latest, he would have an apartment full of humpy numbers. Garfield just loved being a faggot in New York. One got things done so quickly here.

Timmy did not know that anyone was looking at him. He did know that everyone was looking at everyone else, as he was, too, much like you rummaged through the loose tomatoes at the Safeway to locate the one you liked the best. There was so much to look at, his mind was such a jumble of impressions, that he knew he might as well just relax and go with the evening, because it was already too exciting to make much sense of.

Troy seemed to be paying that little bit of extra attention to him and he sort of liked the way the big man—not fat, mind you, just large and hefty, in his handsome business suit and aviator glasses—did so. He was old enough to be his father, if only his father had had the sense to be as attractive and worldly and well-dressed and to smell of nice cologne and just-brushed teeth, and Timmy was a bit surprised to discover that a tingly feeling was appearing not only in his head and arms but in his crotch as well. He found himself relaxing into Troy Mommser’s warm, enveloping arms.

The pretty ones are always bores in bed, Troy thought to himself,

what was it with him that he so attracted youth?—was it just that he looked like what everyone wanted for a father, without the threat or the control?, he kept his mouth shut, he liked to laugh, he didn’t get possessive, and being dressed by Paul Stewart when everyone else was dressed by Army surplus made just that extra bit of difference.

And the Men! Have you never seen so many Hot Men! Gloried, storied, muscled, fatless, mustached, youthful, smiling, sexy MEN! “How are you!” “Haven’t seen you since last weekend!” “See you tomorrow at The Toilet Bowl!” “See you Sunday on the Island!” Yes, our very own Country Club, everyone chatting, passing through crowds, such nice vibrations, all our passing Friends! And the Drugs! “I’m trying something new!” Tarsh yelled, his mind a buzz of wonderful feelings, his body, too, in each of its many small parts, rippling with tinglings and happinesses and electricities and energies enough to make him more than fine and best and perfect. He would tell them later all about it: It’s called Super K, it’s from England, it’s a pre-op sedative used for children, it’s a powder to snort, a cross between coke and Valium, and it’s fabulous!

Fred took no drugs. He’d tried them all, found no answers, and he was on a pilgrimage for answers. “They are identity-supporting, not identity-giving,” he would try to say. “And I want to prove to you what a good time can be had by simply staying straight.”

Disbelief on both sets of arms is rampant, on the part of young Timmy’s that they feel so good, and on the part of our Randy’s that at last they hold his sought-for conquest, something so perfect that nought else compares, do I really, actually, maybe, have a heart in working order that can make me feel so warm and good? Whatever hidden fantasies are coming true, the two of them stand there tied up in minglings of passion, need, affection, desperation, sweat, hard-ons, or is it hards-on?, neither could, in a steam room, distinguish which from which. But holding each other they definitely are.