Faggots

It's a very different gay New York than my last couple reads. Larry Kramer's Faggots, set in the late 70s, is graphically sexual without being either erotic or pornographic. The jerking, sucking, fucking, rimming, pissing, shitting, fisting, bondage... in the bars, the backrooms, the beaches, the baths... while drunk, while high, while sober... it is all simply matter-of-fact. There is no judgement, no titillation. There is also really nothing else.

The cast of characters is huge, and confusing at time, some of them having two or three nicknames. The plot is quick, but also confusing at times, as each of those characters has their own story, all intersecting, either on the dance floor of the Toilet Bowl, the streets of Manhattan, the infamous Meat Rack of Fire Island...

Who are some of the faggots Larry Kramer has us meet? There is Fred Lemish, the writer, 39 going on 40 and lonely for love. There is Timothy Peter Purvish, literally fresh off the bus and about to be consumed by the gay ghetto. There is the Winston Man, a model past his prime but still beautiful. There is Dinky, handsome, desensitzed, seeking always new and bigger thrills. There is Boo Boo Bronstein, who thinks it easier to fake his own kidnapping than to come out to his Jewish father. There is Winky Bronstein, grandson and nephew, who is open and free and proud to be a faggot.

These are the days just post-Stonewall, when gay rights were unheard of, and when the ghetto was the only safe place. There, and only there, among others of your kind, could you be who you truly were, feel what you truly felt, do what you truly and desperately wanted to do. First, a sexual freedom, but one that broadens into a greater emotional understanding of yourself and what it means to be a gay man. Not that there at first seems to be much of that greater understanding in this book, as the characters, many of whom are faceless names with cocks, cavort "in the dens and vicepots and cesspools of the underground faggot world". Although there are moments of enlightenment, either emotional or political, most of the characters seek only "to disco and drug and fuck if we want to live fantastic. Come, my dearies, let's dance".

Drug use is rampant: uppers, downers, pills, powders, things to sniff, to snort, to smoke, and that most dangerously addictive drug of all, beauty. The beauty of youth, of the masculine. What you do to achieve it, in yourself; what you do to obtain it, in others. Timothy and Dinky are raised to pedestals of physical perfection, but to what end? By the end, we see how empty Dinky is on the inside, so desperately needing to feel and be filled (although maybe not by an arm). By the end, we see how Timothy embraces the delusion of the shallow, his childhood dreams of love smashed in pieces at his feet, but his eyes looking only at his own reflection.

It is mainly the tale of Fred, and he grows, perhaps. He sees the emotional beyond the physical. "I wanted a fantasy and that's what I got. If I'd chosen a real person, I would have had to face up to a real relationship. Too scary. Too full of Mom and Pop." He has grown tired of the ghetto, grown tired of the constant quest for physical beauty and for getting off. "Why do faggots have to fuck so fucking muhc?!... it's as if we don't have anything else to do... all we do is live in our Ghetto and dance and drug and fuck... there's a whole world out there!... as much ours as theirs... I'm tired of being a New York City-Fire Island faggot. I'm tired of using my body as a faceless thing to lure another faceless thing... we shouldn't have to be faithful, we should want to be faithful!, love grows, sex gets better..."

At times, this book is far away in time and space, but at moments like that? Dead on.

This has been a bobert review.