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Title: Faggots by Larry Kramer, Reynolds Price ISBN: 0-8021-3691-5 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: June, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.45 (11 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A Period Piece, But Well Worth Reading
Comment: Nobody would read "Faggots" for an introduction to the gay community today, and whether you remember the late 1970s with fear, loathing or warm affection says a lot about you and what's happened to you in the twenty years-plus since this novel was written.
The novel's main character, Fred Lemish, is a neurotic gay man on the edge of his 40th birthday. Fred is determined to find love and he thinks he has it in the form of "Dinky" Adams. Fred pursues Dinky through the worst (or "best" if you feel nostalgic) sexual excesses New York and Fire Island could offer in those years. No party, orgy or drug was off limits. People today may think that Kramer was exaggerating the gay scene for shock value, but actually he was taking the most excessive side of things and telling the story pretty straight.
Kramer's moral, that gay men should treat each other as people and not as commodities, has worn well with time, and the book is an interesting read from a time gone by. I just hope we understand it isn't representative of gay life today, and probably wasn't typical of all gay life even back then.
Rating: 4
Summary: Great satire, WAY too many characters
Comment: Larry Kramer does a masterful job of satirizing a lifestyle and mindset that treats men as commodities and sex as a game. His characters are over the top, overwrought, and overindulge in everything from drugs to "nasty" little sex games. Underneath all the excess, though, are characters who are looking for love in all the wrong places, in all the wrong people, and for all the wrong reasons. I suspect that those in New York's Gay ghettos of the late 1970's, though, were, and are, not the only ones who struggle with the boundaries of love and sex, when they cross and when they don't, and the pain and emptiness of pursuing sex to the exclusion of love.
Two aspects about Kramer's writing style, though, did bother me. First, so many characters ran in and out of the novel that I couldn't keep track of them all. Could we have done without, say, Gatsby, Paulie, or even Anthony, and still had a great story? I think so. Also, Kramer's deliberate use of run-on sentences made the narrative hard to follow at times. I can live with run-on sentences to some degree (just read my sentences sometime), but some of Kramer's were too convoluted even for me. Still, a book worth reading.
Rating: 3
Summary: Jeremiah Was an Optimist, Kramer Was a Bullfrog
Comment: The problem(s) with most would-be gadfly/naysayer/doomsday prophet types? They can't seem to transcend their own egotism, and they never find anything nice to say about anybody. Even Jeremiah had the sense to prophesy that things would eventually get better, and to refrain from blaming everybody but himself.
(A by no means irrelevant aside: by now, Kramer has lost most of whatever credibility he ever had on the AIDS crisis by calling too many undeserving people "murderer" too many times. Still, the world owes him an ENORMOUS debt of gratitude for being the firstest and the loudest to cry havoc as people started dropping like flies.)
"Faggots" is an attempt at satire that is almost never humorous, though there are a few precious bits of wickedly funny writing, such as one takeoff on the stilted dialogue that prevailed in '70's gay porno.
Kramer, at this point in his very interesting career, had overdosed on the vapid shallowness and callous, heartless promiscuity he saw all around him in Greater New York. Over and over he uses the voice of his alter-ego narrator to sound the note of alarm that gay men are just doing this life thing all wrong, and should, really really SHOULD, just drop everything they're doing and put the development of their hearts and minds over the development of their pecs and abs and the fulfillment of their groins... over and over and over and over and over and over and over again through page after tedious page.
What he never seemed to understand at the time was that: (a) Most guys who had lived significant portions of their lives west of the Hudson already knew this, and were in no rush to get to the next Red and White Party on Fire Island. (b) If you want those around you to feel and act more kind-heartedly to each other, you must start with the man in the mirror. The narrator seems to have finally begun to sense this by the novel's end, but remains too vainly preoccupied with his own pain to reflect that maybe his precious Dinky, and all the others whom he can neither forgive or forget, acted that way in large part because... they thought that's what people like him wanted. Or else they wouldn't BE there, ya know?
To put it another way, Kramer's stand-in still doesn't recognize his own role in helping along all the fashion-fascism Attitude Queen-ness he deplores. To put it yet another way: The great thing about operating in a thickly crowded social environment chock full of others of your kind is that if, for whatever reason good-bad-or-indifferent, you just don't get along well enough with Person A, there's always Person B. The horrifying thing about it is, Person B knows that too.
Well, Larry, if you ever read this, you're always welcome to ship out to some radical faerie sanctuary out here in the boonies and catch a glimpse of what you've been missing... Probably not. You do still have important things to do in the city. I hope.
As for this novel, it makes for occasionally interesting reading. We can't call it outdated because it wasn't even intended to be an accurate portrayal of its own times, but the No-Funhouse mirror through which it views its times is also outdated. Its greatest virtue, however, is that its production leveled the emotional ground within Kramer himself, blasting it to bedrock and clearing the way for his undoubted masterpiece, "The Normal Heart," in which among other things his protagonist finally awakens to the notion that even guys who get called "troll" a lot can have an Inner Twinky who needs to be put firmly in his place... like, say, maybe sending the twink out to get coffee and changing the locks while he's gone...
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Title: Young Man from the Provinces: A Gay Life Before Stonewall by Alan Helms ISBN: 0816642680 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: July, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me by Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner ISBN: 0802136923 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: October, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts, William Greider ISBN: 0312241356 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 09 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Dancer from the Dance : A Novel by Andrew Holleran ISBN: 0060937068 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 18 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985 by James McCourt ISBN: 0393050513 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: November, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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