Larry Kramer’s eponymous 1978 novel is one whose reputation precedes it. Apparently condemned upon its publication due to its singular (and single-minded) focus on drugs-and-fucking in the New York gay scene in the 1970s, the truth is always both more. And less.Reading the book today, especially given the international brouhaha over gay marriage, and the manifestation of strange forms of agit-prop like the Kim Davis case in the US, what I found most surprising about Faggots is how unpolitical it seems.A good example of this is the infamous Everhard fire, with Kramer noting that “seven brothers perished”. But this becomes more of a footnote than a warning to the general refrain that “We have to disco and drug and fuck if we want to live fantastic!”Also, and this is probably one of the side-effects of the novel that Kramer could not possibly have foreseen: Faggots today reads like an elegy to a lost age, rather than a dire warning of a pending gay apocalypse in the form of the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s.Many gay people today come from cultures, families and countries where being gay is an exceedingly complex negotiation between societal and religious expectations and personal convictions. Many gay people have never, ever experienced the kind of totally open and life-affirming community that Kramer describes in Faggots, and which one could argue was both its artistic and personal peak.Those detractors who argue that the book focuses on drugs-and-fucking to the total exclusion of any sense of these characters’ ordinary lives ignore Kramer’s savviness as a writer. There is an astonishing set piece early on, where Garfield’s doorman clocks in a record 80 ‘single gentlemen’ before 21:30 to his apartment.The vast range of occupations and class status gives a tantalising glimpse into the depth that the gay community had achieved in what is an incredibly short period. Kramer lists these with a kind of journalistic fervour: ...five attorneys, three art directors, seven models, ten would-be models, twelve said-they-were models, one journalist, three hairdressers (one specialising in colour), two antique dealers, one typewriter repairman, one manager of a Holiday Inn, one garbage collector, two construction workers, one toll collector from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, three policemen, two firemen (one out of state), seven hustlers (three full-time), one elevator operator (Garfield’s landlord’s son), one bass player, five doctors, twelve students, one ethnic dancer, two restauranteurs (one fancy, one shit food), one judge (rather old, but Garfield had to remember business), one newscaster, one weather man, one football player, one folk singer, four truck drivers, twenty-nine on unemployment, eleven unidentified, and the new assistant Orthodox rabbi for a congregation in Seattle.(The latter is part of a very funny Jewish riff running throughout the book about the fagolim and their weird proclivities, such as ‘tinkling’ on each other).I suppose another wholly unintentional aspect of Kramer’s book is how much ammunition it gives to anti-gay detractors and protestors to decry the ‘gay lifestyle’ as utterly immoral and devoid of any meaningful social relevance or human contact.A good example of Kramer’s refreshingly direct, and therefore scandalously provocative, approach to this issue is the following comment: “Sex and love are different and any faggot given half a choice will take the former. And probably fucked with Adolf Hitler if he’d been cute!” The implication here is that sex is the be-all and end-all of gay life, and that gay men are completely indiscriminate in service of their cocks. Kramer points out 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?Drugs-and-fucking are still very much a mainstay of the gay lifestyle even today, post-AIDS, especially in countries where the simple act of being gay can be punished by death (simply think of vast swathes of Africa and the entire Middle East, while general intolerance and bigotry continues to simmer in countries like Russia).This is much more an act of defiance, I think, whereas Kramer’s point is that the energy and vitality expended on drugs-and-fucking would result in a Trojan horse type of situation within the gay community itself.Well, of course that particular dark horse was AIDS, and not even Kramer could have foreseen the subsequent decimation of the gay community that he loved, as much as its excesses and shortcomings exasperated and upset him.Of course, detractors have drawn an arrow-straight line between the excesses that Kramer depicts and the pandemic that followed. There is no doubt that the rampant promiscuity and drug use added to the death toll (and continues to do so).However, there is equally no doubt that the energy and vitality that found expression in such promiscuity and drug use also resulted in one of the brightest artistic and cultural renaissances we have ever experienced, and one whose light we still look to today, in tantalising wonder at both its fierceness and its warmth. And Kramer himself is a product of this renaissance.Another very real point to be made is that the book can be read as a general reflection of Kramer’s own prudishness, despite its explicitness. There is as much laughter as there is vulgarity, but it is a gallows humour that gives the novel a frenetic energy and pace.The fact it is also written without any chapter breaks, with short sections and short sentences almost akin to dialogue in a play, inevitably means that the characters themselves get the short end of the stick (so to speak). The names and types do tend to blur after a while, but I think this is a deliberate narrative strategy on the part of Kramer, given his subject matter.People unfamiliar with gay history (which sadly includes many gay people themselves) tend to see Faggots in isolation, but one has to bear in mind that the equally extraordinary Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran was published in the same year, another indication of the gay renaissance that Kramer seems so curiously dismissive of.Is Faggots as negative and bile-ridden as it has been made out to be? I certainly do not think so. While Kramer has a keen eye for the absurd, he also has a deep and abiding love for his characters, and the community they define and inhabit. The fact that the book ends so prosaically, with one of the protagonists turning 40, is an abiding affirmation of this enduring love.
So much to say on this book! It’s never gone out of print and is one of the most widely read gay books of all time, which to me is remarkable. I know about two gay men who could read and finish this book. I know many more who should but the graphic sex, perhaps the most graphic in any book I’ve ever read, and the drug use would turn a lot off.From the introduction:“The purpose of satire… offers us oddly entertaining, generally exaggerated copies of foolish or evil behaviour in order to provoke our ridicule.”This the book does. It took me about 100 pages to really get where the book was going and to fully understand the satire. In some ways nothing has changed from 1978 when this book was published and the tales of sexual excess still rang very true. It was only when I read of the white man having sex with the black man, the white man calling him the N word and the black man, pumping away, yelling “…you done take our cotton fields away!,” that I got that this was satire.The book starts off with Kramer’s doppelganger Fred, and a refrain that will ring true then and now:“All I want is someone who reads books, loves his work, and me, too, of course, and who doesn’t take drugs, and isn’t on unemployment.”But this desire for a mate is impeded by Fred himself, and many gay men, by, as Kramer says:“And every faggot couple I know is deep into friendship and deep into fucking with everyone else but each other and any minute any bump appears in their commitment to infinitesimally obstruct their view, out they zip like petulant kids to suck someone else’s lollipop instead of trying to work things out, instead of trying not to hide, and…unh…why do faggots have to fuck so fucking much?!”In this I think Kramer relates the struggle of all gay men and the eventual growing up, or not, they must do. To me this is ultimately the point of the book, its one man’s struggle to weed out the excesses in his life in an attempt to see the forest for the trees. There are sub-points about gay identity and self-worth, but in the end the book is presented as one man’s struggle, and presented, I think, in the hope that we can find ourselves in that struggle. There was much backlash against this book, and judging by the reviews on here, there still is a lot of negativity directed at Kramer for writing it. The only gay bookstore in Manhattan banned the book upon its release. And something I learned in a course recently applies here, out of the 100% that is your negative reaction, what if 5% applied back to you?That is I think there’s a lot that applies in this book. The desire for a mate sounds so simple but it’s really unattainable in that you cannot find someone who is not sabotaging themselves, we all do it. Kramer takes these sabotages to the extreme with the hope of asking why in a smart and funny way. The book isn’t easy to read, there are a lot of wayward tangents, lists, and run-on sentences like the following two:“And so it was while watching one of the members fucking himself by sitting on a stationary twelve-inch rubber dildo while being bound hand and foot, the dildo impaled to a cross, the cross mounted on a stage, and the fellow also sucking the cock of a gentleman clad entirely in chain mail, except of course for his genitals, which were exposed, and enormous, and holding in his hand while mouth-fucking the impaled acolyte, not one but two hissing rattlesnakes, reputed to have been defanged but dripping something from their mouths nevertheless, all of this witnessed by forty-nine other members, each donged with grease, each jerking off either himself or a fellow clubber, in some sort of cockamamie version of the daisy chain, don’t Southern Californians have wonderful imaginations, whatever happened to King of the Mountain?, well, perhaps this was King of the Mountain—it was while watching all of this, and of course participating, he couldn’t be a spoilsport, that Randy had an epiphany. He began to realize to what lengths it would soon be necessary to travel to receive kicks sufficient to cause erection, and while he was finding these ceremonies reasonably exciting (and certainly a nice time-out from his studies), in that he had a good stiff one on while those two snakes were up there hissing away, he knew he had neither the time nor the abundant imagination to play “Can You Top This?” every time he wanted to get his rocks off.”There’s enough wit to get through but the book could have used an editor with a heavier hand. An example of the wit:“His skin was that deep white which tans nicely and is associated with health, vigor, keeping regular, drinking milk, chewing Wrigley’s, using Colgate, and walking in Keds.”Some comments about the gay community can be scathing:“Sex and love are different and any faggot given half a choice will take the former. And probably fucked with Adolf Hitler if he’d been cute!”But it’s really no worse than we’ve all heard other gay men say. The book ends with some home truths but it takes a very circuitous route to get there. The following quote was memorable for me:“I’ve lived all over the world and I haven’t seen more than half a dozen couples who have what I want.”Dinky’s voice chirped up in relief: “Then that should tell you something!”The quote goes on and Fred justifies himself but I think the retort itself is worth noting. What if what we’re looking for doesn’t exist? With so many gay men there was never the option of the white picket fence and 2.2 kids, so what else is there and what does that look like? And is it even there for straight people? I agree, maybe half a dozen couples have a marriage that I would want, but what about our easy access, no responsibility culture is causing that, and what are we doing ourselves to cause that? Is it possible we don’t want what we want?The book mentions “And a commitment to the notion that our shitty beginnings don’t have to cripple us for life.” I think a lot of gay men still have these terrible beginnings, and maybe that does make it harder to find love and happiness, but as Kramer would say, that doesn’t mean we have to act like faggots and make it more difficult for ourselves. As the book says: “There will always be enemies. Time to stop being your own.”
What do You think about Faggots (2000)?
For exactly 13,500 days — from June 26, 1944 (when the U.S. Army began standardizing treatment of syphilis and gonorrhea with penicillin) to June 5, 1981 (when the Center for Disease Control published a report on a disease that would later be called AIDS) — Americans could more or less have sex with one another indiscriminately without the imminent fear of death. Kramer’s irreverently named book “Faggots” presciently detailed how the days of living never-ending sexual fantasies helped engender the nightmare of AIDS.As a 37-year-old gay man, few detailed narratives of a prurient nature -- such as those in "Faggots" -- shock me. What really hit home was the self-loathing, self-destruction, and vapidness of its main characters. Each one, including "hero" Fred, was deep as a 1AM Craigslist ad. I really couldn’t empathize with any one of them, though we couldn't help but like Timmy Purvis? But maybe that was the point? “Oh, Dom Dom, what’s happened to kiss and cuddle?” “They’re coming back in the eighties.” And did they ever. Little did Kramer (or anyone else) know at the time when he wrote this book (late 1970s) how prescient those words would actually be.
—John
oh Nancy. I'm so sorry for your loss and the sadness of today. I also get your inspiration to watch something to do with HIV. I did the same thing myself one time, for a similar reason, except it was the HBO film And The Band Played On. I made a sad day even sadder. sigh. oh the things we do to ourselves!
—mark monday
If I could give this book zero stars I would. Unbelievable dialogue, run on sentences, and numerous punctuation errors only begin to describe this book. There were actually characters named Billy Boner and Randy Dildough. I'm not certain there was a plot. None of the characters seemed to learn any sort of lesson. Not to mention the authors diction was just plain offensive. I get the story takes place in the seventies but that's not excuse to freely toss around 'nigger' left and right.I constantly found myself hoping Larry Krammer would have died from AIDS midway through the story and the remainder of the book would have been blank pages. I was not so lucky. I finished this story in the hopes there may have been a redeeming quality, but again, I had no such luck. Don't even bother with this one.
—Redmar
