Faggots [Paperback]

Larry Kramer (Author), Reynolds Price (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2000

Larry Kramer's Faggots has been in print since its original publication in 1978 and has become one of the best-selling novels about gay life ever written. The book is a fierce satire of the gay ghetto and a touching story of one man's desperate search for love there, and reading it today is a fascinating look at how much, and how little, has changed.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Very few writers have the prescience or audacity to produce one of the standard works of their era--not a classic, necessarily, but a book that defines its own cultural moment in startling new terms, like One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest or Portnoy's Complaint. Activist and rabble-rouser Larry Kramer has the distinction of having written not only one of the earliest and best-known plays on AIDS, The Normal Heart, but also the astonishing satire of gay urban sexual mores Faggots, perhaps the most reviled novel in the gay literary canon. A grim, graphic expansion on John Rechy's Numbers, which chronicled a hustler's soulless game of sexual conquest, Kramer's pornopticon turns off many readers by about page 3, when its hero, the screenwriter Fred Lemish, is offered an array of dubious pleasures in a private room at the infamous Everard Baths in New York. What Lemish really wants, of course, is true love, preferably from his elusive boyfriend, Dinky Adams. But as long as he's in the room...

Celebrated and excoriated when it first appeared in 1978, this reprint of a gay anticlassic is not for the faint of heart. For the rest of us, it is a harsh, fascinating, and somewhat eerie revisitation of the carnal excesses of a generation that couldn't hear the bell tolling over the disco beat.

From the Inside Flap

Graphically sexual and one of the all-time best-selling gay novels, Faggots is the story of Fred Lemish, who at thirty-nine has built up his body into a fatless state of being in Great Shape. Lemish is ready to find Mr. Right. But from the Everhard Baths to the Pines on Fire Island to that place of myth and story, The Meat Rack, he is looking for his dream lover in all the wrong places. Faggots is a fierce satire of the gay ghetto and a touching story of one man's desperate search for permanence, commitment, and love.

"A Vesuvian explosion about the gay life that spares no one and no thing...there is much truth and honesty to be found here."--Seymour Krim, Chicago Tribune

"True comic brilliance--a vicious Swiftian satire that, like all satire, contains a strong moral voice."--New York

"Faggots, for all its excesses, is frequently right on target and, when it is on target, is appallingly funny."--Edward Albee

"Larry Kramer has more than come out of the closet, he's housecleaned the neighborhood. Faggots is a novel of courage...a journey worth the chronicle...a noble gesture."--Baltimore Sun

"Larry Kramer is one of America's most valuable troublemakers. I hope he never lowers his voice."--Susan Sontag

"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 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

"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 it, in tr

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (June 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802136915
• ISBN-13: 978-0802136916
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #171,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars a classic November 27, 1996

By A Customer

Format:Mass Market Paperback

This novel is a classic. Actually, when I first read it upon publication, the style kind of drove me nuts. But the honesty of the content is astonishing. Of course, Kramer didn't know it, but he was describing a way of life -- the late 70's New York gay party scene -- that was about to vanish into history as a result of the onslaught of AIDS.

Kramer caught considerable flak at the time from other gays who felt he was telling too much, exposing sexual excesses that enemies of gays could use. Only one problem: the lifestyle he was documenting existed, and his take on it was accurate and true.

The novel now stands as a cultural artifact as much as work of fiction. After decades of repression, the gay excesses of the seventies were perhaps inevitable and certainly understandable. But the side-effects of sex as a drug, sex as everything, were not always pretty, and Kramer doesn't flinch from the emotional damage.

It would be nice to think that time has vindicated him, which to my mind it has. But the matter of gay sexuality will probably always remain controversial -- among gays themselves, let alone straights. Kramer's novel stands as a brave and honest record of a brief time when sex (gay or otherwise) seemed to be without consequences.

James Robert Bake

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Way We Were February 5, 2001

By Joseph P. Barri

Format:Mass Market Paperback

It took a bit of serendipity for me to purchase FAGGOTS--I was in the check out line at Borders when I noticed this marked-down soft-cover with the alluring images. For someone who was married in 1978 when the Book was first published, came out to himself and the world a year later and was diagnosed with HIV in 1994, this Book explains better than any other the history of gay life in the 70's. Most importantly, it explains why loving relationships between same-sex oriented people are what makes life worth living for most of them, just like for most everyone else.

The characterizations are complex and sometimes it seems that there are too many characters to keep track of, but Mr. Kramer manages to pull it all together in a Book that reveals a multi-faceted mosaic of all the faces and souls and all the tensions in an environment frought with everything but enduring love. Reminiscent of LORD OF THE FLIES, except in reverse, this Book shows the struggle of an evolving community, lost at the time in its own excesses and looking for love in all the wrong places, set up by destiny for the plague to hit. It is a must read for every member of our community, new or old.

FAGGOTS provides an excellent opportunity to learn from history.

Joe Barri

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Period Piece, But Well Worth Reading May 4, 2000

By Allen Smalling TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Mass Market Paperback

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.