Genre: LGBT,  Modern Classic

Narrative Style: Third person from multiple points of view

Rating: 4/5

Published: 1978

Format: Paperback

Synopsis: Fred Lemish is about to be forty. He is growing tired of the constant round of parties, clubs, dancing and fucking that occupies his life when he is not working. He is in love with Dinky Adams – as is most of New York, it transpires – and is desperate for his return so that he can cement their relationship. The novel describes the gay scene in New York and on Fire Island with no holds barred. 

Reading Challenges: 2020 Alphabet Soup – Author Edition.

On the front of my copy of Faggots by Larry Kramer, it proclaims that the book will be “disturbing, enlightening, compassionate, explicit, uninhibited, outrageous…” It then goes not to say that no one can be neutral about it. I admit, I thought this sounded a bit over the top. However, as I read I realised all these things were true. Especially that last bit. Faggots, it seems, is a book you either love or you hate.

The novel captures a moment in gay history when sodomy laws in the USA had been revoked in a lot of states and gay men were tasting more freedom than previous generations but before AIDS devastated the gay community. Sex is everywhere, male bodies are on display and I lost count of the different types of drugs that were mentioned. It describes unbridled hedonism. There is a lot of sex in this novel. Some of it is very funny and some of it is very kinky. Certainly, it is easy to appreciate the sense of freedom  – what else was there to do but have sex. There was no need to settle down or have a relationship. Why do that, when there are all these beautiful bodies?

Fred Lemish wants more. He is in love with Dinky Adams. At the beginning of the novel, he is out of town and Fred is waiting for his return as he hopes it will be the start of a proper relationship. However, the reader soon realises that Dinky is much in demand- every other character seems to be also waiting for his return. We quickly realise Fred is heading for a fall. Fred is definitely ready to settle down. He wants more than just sex and bodies. In some ways, he is like Gatsby – in love with love as much as the completely inappropriate object of his affections. Dinky does not want to settle down and Fred is left alone again at the end.

The novel this most reminds me of is Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance – another novel from 1978 with Gatsby overtones. Both novels critique the narrowness of the perceptions of what gay life could be within this scene. They also both show the interchangeability of bodies and the hollowness of relating only to the physical. Winnie Heinz – also known as The Winston Man, model for Winston Cigarettes takes a fall from a parapet while in a drug addled state and dies when he hits the dancefloor; his place is quickly taken by a younger, fitter version.

It may be for this reason that Kramer has so many characters in this novel. There are dozens and dozens of men, some given little more than a paragraph, some mentioned but not fleshed out and some returned to again and again. It was difficult to keep track of who was who, who’d had who and what everyone’s particular fetish was. Even Fred has trouble keeping track of who he has slept with. Even when he has noted that a man was hot and he would like to see them again, he can’t remember his name. He had spent a year with “a faceless group of sex objects.”

It is this endless list of characters and the overly convoluted state of Kramer’s sentences that stopped this from getting 5 out of 5. Nevertheless, an enjoyable, completely uninhibited read. Not for the faint hearted.