Faggots Read online

  “The liberation of sexuality from the bonds of moralism has left in its wake a crying need for principled, intelligent, vigorous explorations of how a genuine morality can be introduced to our newly minted freedom. This exploration is a central part of Kramer’s historically significant literary work, of which Faggots constitutes an important beginning and a key. As a documentation of an era, as a savage and savagely funny social parody, as a cry in the wilderness, and as a prescient, accurate reading of the writing on the wall, the novel is peerless and utterly necessary. It is brilliant, bellicose, contemptuous, compassionate and—as is true of everything Kramer writes—behind its delectable, entertaining, sometimes maddening harshness is a profoundly moving plea for justice and for love. There are few books in modern gay fiction, or modern fiction for that matter, that must be read. Faggots is certainly one of them.”

  —Tony Kushner

  “Since his screenplay for D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in 1969, Larry Kramer has been a prophet of psychic health and catastrophe among us—a prophet unmatched for the accuracy of his omens and the reliability of his anathemas and remedies. His uncannily foresighted novel Faggots appeared in 1978 just as the AIDS virus flooded whole wings of the American bloodstream; now its Swiftian portrait of an all but vanished subculture stands as that culture’s visible memorial. His later plays have been clear as firebells, memorable as tracer bullets.”

  —The American Academy of Arts and Letters citation, May 1996

  “[Faggots] sends up New York’s self-imposed gay ghetto, doing for its gyms, discos, orgy rooms, army fatigues, mustaches, and advertising agencies what Portnoy’s Complaint did for Mom and masturbation. Faggots is the Uncle Tom’s Cabin for homosexual men whose worst oppression is their lack of courage to change the way they live.”

  —Library Journal

  “A corrosive study of the gay underbelly of New York…Faggots has the air of a Restoration comedy in its mix of Baroque style and bawdy, scathing humor.”

  —Women’s Wear Daily

  “A book of major historical importance—the first contemporary novel to chronicle gay life with unsparing honesty and wild humor. Larry Kramer has changed the way we think about gay men. He is one of our great humanists.”

  —Erica Jong

  “Writing as always from an affirmatively homosexual point of view, Kramer in this novel conveys a sense of premonitory unease, even foreboding, about the spread of promiscuity, sadomasochism and narcotics among the homosexual population…. more graphic than James Baldwin or Hubert Selby.”

  —Times Literary Supplement (London)

  “It would come to resemble her, Picasso said of his Stein portrait—and so with Kramer’s of New York gay life, which I had thought so entertaining, so extravagant, ever so preposterous a lustrum ago. It has come to resemble us, in tragic guise, but with tremendous application to our discordant truth: Faggots is still the mirror we must look into, fun house or carnal house—it shows the man.”

  —Richard Howard

  “Faggots struck a chord. It exuded a sense that gay men could do better if they understood themselves as fully human, if they could shed their self-loathing and self-deception…. I loved it.”

  —Andrew Sullivan

  Faggots

  By Larry Kramer

  Fiction

  Faggots

  Plays

  Sissies’ Scrapbook

  The Normal Heart

  Just Say No

  The Destiny of Me

  Screenplay

  Women in Love

  Nonfiction

  Reports from the holocaust: the story of an AIDS activist

  Larry Kramer

  Faggots

  With an Introduction by Reynolds Price

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 1978 by Larry Kramer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic. Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Originally published by Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kramer, Larry.

  Faggots /Larry Kramer.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-55584-667-1

  1. Gay men—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3561.R252 F3 2000

  813'.54—dc21 00–024178

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  This book is for:

  Arthur and Alice Kramer;

  William H. Gillespie;

  and Sam Klagsbrun.

  And for David—“our book.”

  …the ancients located the deeper emotions in the bowels.

  —Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags

  Contents

  Larry Kramer’s Faggots

  Larry Kramer’s Faggots

  an Introduction by Reynolds Price

  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. Larry Kramer’s novel Faggots—a tragedy within a comedy—was published in 1978 to mixed cries of praise, thanks, and execration from the community it portrayed. These decades later, anyone who searches out present-day responses on the Internet will quickly find that the wounds inflicted by Faggots are burning still. The fact that The New York Times did not notice the novel at its publication is yet another clear sign of success—just or unjust, the book was truly outrageous; and the gray mechanics of popular culture were prepared to ignore its existence. It has, nonetheless, proven far too healthy to bow to contumely and oblivion; and it continues to be a stumbling block for many. That’s a distinction that very few serious novels, of any era, can claim.

  In retrospect, what was even more remarkable about Kramer’s voice in 1978 was that his long yet astonishingly controlled cry—a cry that, to many, seemed puritan and self-loathing—was in fact a prophecy of a sort that’s virtually impossible to match in the prior history of satire in English. Certainly the most famous of twentieth-century satires—George Orwell’s widely known visions of universal totalitarianism and Communism—have proved deceptive. Perhaps only the muffled Russian overtones of approaching social and spiritual disaster in Gogol’s Lost Souls or the late novels of Dostoevsky provide parallels, and even they were less precise than the vision that Kramer so relentlessly embodied in his crowded spectacle.

  To glance at his subject first, however—anyone who experienced, or closely observed, the American and European male homosexual revolution of the 1970s and early 1980s can confirm an all but incredible fact. Kramer’s account of American queer culture in those years is far more nearly literal history than heightened reality (the merely accurate and nonjudgmental word queer has always felt right to me, though the misleading and now appallingly ironic gay has triumphed). The book’s first extended set piece—the teeming party/orgy at Garfield Toye’s apartment—chimes with more than one episode which I knew of; and the climactic sequence at Fire Island only condenses into the arc of a single weekend the substance of straight-faced reports (with only minor stretches) that were available, in those days, from the soberest veterans and the hardest-core pornographic films.

  What central error in that world, then, did Kramer perceive; and what descending reality did he come to dread so ominously that it compelled him to write, not a sermon or a sociological study but a novel as full of laughter as woe? It would be easy to
say, as more than one of Kramer’s characters does, that the frenzied sexual activity which the male body so readily proved capable of performing made the stated goal of much of that activity literally impossible—if the goal, that is, was love or psychic intimacy between men of good sense and reasonable vigor.

  It wouldn’t have taken a mind of Kramer’s quality to conclude that, whatever prodigies the male genitals can perform, the human mind is incapable of emotional focus when it’s asked to experience so much emotional intensity with so many different objects. And when orgasmic sex ceases to constitute emotional intensity for its participants, then what remains in the realm of sensory possibility for the deadened veteran—human torture, murder, the consumption of children? (The rise of female promiscuity in the same decades raises the question of whether heedless women can, by implication, be included in Kramer’s condemnation. My own sense is probably not. Very few women appear to have been psychically impelled toward such physical extravagance.) Beneath Kramer’s obvious denunciation of mindless male promiscuity, then, lies the seed of both his revulsion and his dread.

  He makes, and reiterates memorably, a claim as old as the ancient Hebrew and Greek poets. Yet it’s a claim not advanced by any character in Faggots nor by any other observer or participant of whom I was aware in that fifteen-year skin feast—all flesh is grass. The human body, however groomed and buffed in gymnasia, is an unspeakably fragile organism. Depending on one’s genetic heritage, the body appears to perform like an uncomplaining work horse through a fair amount of youthful excess; but in fact it neither forgets nor forgives that excess. Brain cells are destroyed or muted by alcohol and other toxic chemicals; and even without the sudden intervention of monster viruses, the magnificent web of the human immune system is subject to radical and quite early damage. Unchecked male sexual performance, once past the phenomenal power of adolescence, has now been proven to demand irreplaceable expenditures of mental and physical energy far past the warnings of the direst priest or evangelist.

  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. Burdened by numbers and by detachment from person-to-person attention and care, the sexual body will sooner or later turn against the mind that propels it and reduce that mind to some less than desirable thing. At the least, it reduces men to metallic click-off counters of cocks-or-cunts experienced; at the worst, to subhuman predators of random flesh. What Kramer didn’t quite know was something that he might have suspected, though apparently no one did (and had anyone perceived and predicted a global epidemic caused by a hideously ingenious and merciless virus, avid for blood and semen, even the most conservative witness might have declined to listen).

  At the simplest and most realistic, what sane observers have learned—or relearned—since the onslaught of AIDS late in the 1970s might be stated as a future certainty: barring further notice all unshielded sexual contact of whatever kind may rationally be assumed to be potentially lethal. Western humanity knew that fact for nearly five centuries from the arrival of syphilis until its partial control by penicillin in the mid-1940s (it’s worth recalling that the period of safe unshielded sex in America lasted no longer than thirty years). And while the HIV virus may now appear—for the affluent—to be yielding to newer and newer drugs, the willfullness of the vast and still-lurking world of microbes must never hereafter be ignored. Even the most phlegmatic virologists calmly tell us no less than that.

  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. He characterizes the nexus of failings, with arresting indirection, by imputing the male folly to a particular woman—“New York’s leading fag hag, Adriana la Chaise, disguised as a man, who, while a faggot to the extent that she evades the responsibilities that her brains, her abilities, and her energies, in a more enlightened age, would have channeled, via adult commitments, via more positive injections, into a needful society, was, nevertheless, by clitoral choice, straight, though it was her habit to enjoy slouching in dark corners, wearing military attire, sailor’s suits or soldier’s, and watch the boys do things to each other….”

  Assuming, then, that the reader can at least consider the proposition that homosexual adventurousness on an epic and self-entrapped scale is foolish or wrong, could any reader have acted usefully on the dread which Kramer attempts to impart? It would be consoling to think that the answer might have been—and could still be—Yes, for a great many readers. Any such hope, though, fails badly when we admit the imperfect nature of satire and the final dilemma of all its creators.

  Very little human behavior can have been changed by assaults from the greatest satirists—Aristophanes, Juvenal, Rabelais, Swift, Pope, Dickens, Waugh. And certainly the glare of Larry Kramer hardly slowed the frantic momentum of the mindless and lethal coupling of certain men at a certain time (even today, almost twenty years after the surfacing of AIDS—in the face of ubiquitous warnings and lessons in the ease of avoiding the virus—the majority of those infected in the United States continue to be queer men). Though the objects of political satire have frequently jailed their satirists, the fact is that folly—political, sacred, or secular—seldom recognizes itself in even the most accurate portrait.

  What’s left, then, in the way of reward for a brilliant satire and its eagle-eyed creator when the men of Athens and Sparta refuse to cease murderous warfare and rejoin their wives in conjugal bliss, when the Irish refuse to boil and eat their excess babies, the assorted bourgeois vulgarians of Dickensian London fail to convert themselves into generous saints, or the queers of urban America continue their inhuman spree?

  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.

  All the same, even the most sympathetic reader may wonder if Kramer’s public mission in the 1980s and 1990s would have succeeded so well if the authorities whom he attacked had actually read Faggots. Wouldn’t the novel’s characters have only confirmed the self-justifying stereotypes held by presidents, cabinet members, bishops, ministers, and private citizens and sealed them tighter in their loathing and neglect? And who, reading Kramer, could have foreseen that the ego-rapt community which he portrayed could have—for the better part of two decades—so memorably converted itself into a force for the most humbling kinds of nursing care and deathbed vigils (is there a historical precedent for another group which transformed itself so quickly)? 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.

  Faggots

  There are 2,556,596 faggots in the New York City area.

  The largest number, 983,919, live in Manhattan. 186,991 live in Queens, or just across the river. 181,236 live in Brooklyn
and 180,009 live in the Bronx. 2,469 live on Staten Island, substantiating that old theory that faggots don’t like to travel or don’t like to live on small islands, depending on which old theory you’ve heard and/or want substantiated.

  Westchester and Dutchess Counties, together with that part of New Jersey which is really suburban New York, hold approximately 297,852, though this figure may be a bit low.

  Long Island, or that which is beyond Queens, at last count numbered 211,910. (This goes all the way to Montauk, remember.)

  Suburban Connecticut (not primarily of concern here, nor for that matter are suburban New Jersey or suburban New York—but you might as well have the advantage of all the statistics, since they were exhaustively collected), which includes the heavily infested Danbury triangle area, has 211,910 also, which makes it a sister statistic to Long Island, which is as it should be since the two share a common Sound.

  There are now more faggots in the New York City area than Jews. There are now more faggots in the entire United States than all the yids and kikes put together. (This is subsidiary data, not overtly relevant, but ipso facto nevertheless.)