Customer Reviews

Faggots

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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

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

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.

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.

First published in 1978, Larry Kramer's controversial novel FAGGOTS offers the story of Fred Lemish, four days short of his 40th birthday, determined to find true love and on an odyssey through the bars, clubs, baths, and various orgy rooms that catered to gay New Yorkers during that period. The result is a kaleidoscopic vision of the era, a novel that swirls with many characters, many locales, and as many sexual activities as can be crammed into its 350 plus pages.

The novel is, in theory, a satirical condemnation of the lifestyle it displays--but Kramer makes a very fundamental mistake. He tends to assume that this sexual hedonism is the norm for gay men. He also creates a cast of characters who lack the inner resources to create any viable alternative to it. Consequently, the novel reads rather like a cleft stick: Kramer condemns his characters for failing to escape from what he essentially posits as an escape-proof trap.

That is a tremendous flaw, but it is hardly the only one. With relatively few exceptions, the characters are shallow--and while that is part of the point of the novel, it also makes it very difficult to think of them as anything more than names on the page. As a result, you tend to read the novel less for story than in order to see what unexpected sexual acrobatics might be described next. And that's the hallmark of pornography plain and simple. It becomes very, very difficult to accept the book as the serious work of fiction that it proclaims itself to be.

There is a tendency now to look upon FAGGOTS as a portent of the AIDS epidemic--and certainly it does give you a very good idea of how easily the disease was spread within gay subcultures like the one Kramer describes. But it is worth pointing out that Kramer was as oblivious to the impending disaster as everyone else, and whatever merit the novel may have as prophecy arises only in hindsight. Ultimately, this is a novel that will most interest gay men who either recall this sort of subculture from direct experience or those who wish they did. It is readable, but it is hardly original (Vidal beat Kramer to the punch by some thirty years and Rechy by close to twenty), and while it is reasonably well-written for what it is ... what it is isn't much. Recommended as a curiosity only.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

My friends and I read this when it first came out - covertly. We were all very young and just coming out ourselves. Within the pages of this book we found exactly what Larry Kramer did not intend for us to see: a sexy, partying, unfettered, glamorous gay New York. Uh,huh. The satire was lost on us. Rather, we all talked about partying our ....off and moving to New York. We lived in Boston- so we did the weekend thing instead. Anyway, this is one trippy, weird and excessive novel. I really think all the excess undoes his intent and turns this into a Jackie Collins on hormones and mda extravagana. Of course, that does not mean that it wasn't entertaining and the not-to-distant future ultimately proved Larry's point for him. Dance from the Dance does a much better job at tackling this theme.

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...

The book takes the reader on a disorganized - and ultimately, very repetitious - tour of the most sensational parts of urban gay male life in the late 70s. It caused a small flurry when it came out, not in the least as previous reviewers seem unaware, because it was such an unexpectedly schlock piece of writing from the man who had won an Oscar for the script of "Women in Love." Despite his top drawer university education at Yale, his great success as a writer for the screen, and a bundle of cash in the bank Mr. Kramer did not find true love in the arms of Mr. Right in the Fire Island Pines or the Hamptons. Oh cruel fate! The answer is more likely to lie in his obsession with himself, as witnessed in a string of mind-numbingly self absorbed works that followed this one, rather than in the raging hormones and simian brains that he attributes to his contemporaries in "Faggots."

This book would have been far better had it been considerably shorter, and had it been written by someone with a real talent for satire - the subject wanted a gay Tom Wolfe, and it unfortunately got a cranky sorehead. The era of the Seventies, whether you look at its wackiness or lament its excesses is comparable to the Twenties, and it's regrettable that the author couldn't have contributed something with more insight and humor.

If one is looking for a negative view of life in the fast lane of the gay world then Alan Helms's "Boy from the Provinces," would be an excellent book, and even though it makes zero attempt to be a barrel of laughs it manages to be far better balanced and more interesting than Mr. Kramer's novel.

Mr. Kramer's claim to fame, and to the thanks of many, will lie with his work as an activist in during the AIDS epidemic, an effort that initially at least probably benefited from his irascibility and megalomania, though in the end he abandoned his endeavors because he felt unappreciated here too. Perhaps somewhere along the line he should have learned to stop taking himself quite so seriously, and the world a little less so.

I put off reading this book for a long time and was looking forward to reading it this summer. Even though Larry Kramer can be called a prophet with his lacerating vision of what happened when gay liberation came along at a time when America was on a sexual expedition (and unaware of the awful plague that was coming down the pipeline), the novel gets weighed down with too much repetition and not enough objectivity. Not even halfway through the book, I got tired of reading exploit after exploit without any narrative balance. I'm sure it's accurate in its depiction of the era, but I would've liked one narrator to step in and throw some kerosene into the mix. After a while, the satire becomes bland and you could care less about any of the men. Still, it's frightening to see how little some things have changed.

An interesting story featuring the life of different gays living in New York. Their pet names, their lifestyle, their loves, their parties, their summers at Fire Island, thier hopes their dispair.
Fred Lemish is tired of the life and wants to settle down with one person. Two aging gays who love leather and younger men, but have each other.
Life at the Everhard Baths. Their round of parties and dressing up.
It was a wonderful peak into how they lived, loved, hated, dressed up and hid their lifestyle.