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.

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.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 15 reviews)

Is This How It Was?

Kramer, Larry. "Faggots", Grove Press Reprint, 2000.

Is This How It Was?

Amos Lassen and Literary Pride

When "Faggots" by Larry Kramer first appeared in 1978 people were up in arms. Some did not understand that what Kramer had written was a satire of gay life in New York City. Some felt he had written an expose of some of the seediest aspects of gay life when it reality it was a touching tale of one man's search for love and quite a desperate search at that. In the 70's and early 80's the book was hailed as genius one hand and excoriated on the other. It is brutal and erotic and harsh and fascinating as it deals with the sexual excesses of the period. Looking back at it now, after a careful rereading, it is a look at how much and how little times have changed. The sex is graphic and not for the squeamish (perhaps that is why I look so much).
Fred Lemish at 39 is in great physical shape and is ready to find Mr. Wonderful and settle down. He cruises everywhere looking for his Mr. Right in all of the wrong places. He has told the man that he is dating that he is in love with him and is waiting for him to answer. But while he waits, Fred takes us to all of the hot spots of gay night life, the bathhouse, the club openings, the summer parties on Fire Island. While he agonizes over his boyfriend, he is out having random sexual encounters and his friends are living in drugged out stupors.
Kramer gives us a New York that is one big party-sexy, wild and glamorous and excessive. It is a look at gay life that spares no one and nothing and the truth and honesty hit very hard--especially to those that lived like this. Kramer has written a moral satire and sadly his unwritten predictions came true with the AIDS epidemic--the music stopped, we calmed down, the bathhouses closed and we kept quiet for a while. The book hits close to home, in fact it is a bull eye's target hit. And it is funny--laugh at loud funny. It is also a novel of great courage--it is his bravery that allowed Kramer to pull everything out of the closet and slam the door behind him. He liberated gay sexuality in this book and because of that he paved the way for a more serious look at the way we live. How can anyone revile Kramer? He was simply a prophet--a man way ahead of his time. He documented an era in a wonderful social parody. This is a book that had to be written and Kramer gives us an undaunted look at the way we lived. Kramer begs for justice and love as he looks at the gay ghetto--a self-imposed area of gyms, sex clubs, and partner swapping. He has written the book that helped bring about our liberation and Kramer had the courage to write about it. "Faggots" is a book of major importance both historically and culturally and he changed the way America looked at gay men. His sense of unease with the way things were--promiscuity, drug use and sadomasochism is a look at the gay community that was needed.
"Faggots" has not gone out of print since its original publication and has remained a best seller. It is an assault on the mind and as Kramer's characters indulge in every excess, it is not for the faint of heart. The irreconcilable pursuit of sex is the theme and the action is plentiful. In the 350 pages of the book we find a kaleidoscopic vision of gay life and this is a book not to be missed--many characters, many locales and a lot of sex--could you ask for anything more?

May 07, 2007

Unscruplously Sexy and Liberating

What an amazing journey Larry Kramer takes us on with this book. He takes us back to a time long gone but never forgotten. One of the most imporant books in gay literature.
November 20, 2005

Tricks Are For Kids

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
February 21, 2005

Unbridled Genius. One of the best

It is as if James Joyce were alive and queer in 1973 New York. Kramer is an author, dramatist and activist who helped found Act-Up. In this harsh, funny, terrifying, graphic, pornographic, brilliant, compelling book, he both honors and skewers the "gay scene" of the early '70s.

This book is simply required (though at times difficult) reading.

December 19, 2004

Jeremiah Was an Optimist, Kramer Was a Bullfrog

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...
July 08, 2003

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Dancer from the Dance: A Novel
by Andrew Holleran

The Tragedy of Today's Gays
by Larry Kramer

The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me
by Larry Kramer
by Tony Kushner (foreword)

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition
by Randy Shilts

City of Night (Rechy, John)
by John Rechy