Faggots

Faggots by Larry Kramer [Amazon]
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“Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties.” (…Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris — all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies …)

A few dozen pages into this book, I couldn’t get the quote above (from Vile Bodies) out of my head. Evelyn Waugh published his second novel, a satirical look at the partying lives of London’s bright young things, in 1930. I can’t remember when I first read it, but I do remember it cementing my belief that my preferred genre of fiction is rich people making poor choices. It’s an expansive group that includes everything from Epic of Gilgamesh and Vanity Fair to Gossip Girl and the whole oeuvre of Bret Easton Ellis. Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots fits snugly into it, though I must admit I found it a bit too…too.

Like Vile Bodies, Faggots is “a celebration of the hedonism of the young and a warning to those who believe that their license to indulge is infinite, unquestionable and without consequence”. Unlike Vile Bodies, it seems more intent on shocking than on entertaining, let alone illuminating some truth of the human condition.

The novel follows an uncountable number of people’s intersecting lives through Memorial Day weekend (1977?) in Manhattan and Fire Island. Perhaps a dozen of them are described as some level of physical and aesthetic perfection. Perhaps a dozen of them are described as extremely rich (or the children of the extremely rich). Perhaps a dozen of them are bent on some ill-defined quest for revenge culminating (or, rather, mostly fizzling out) at an outdoor sex party on Sunday night. Almost everyone uses drugs heavily and is into some form of BDSM. None of them seems to possess much in terms of actual character or individuality, Kramer seemingly content to give each ad hoc combination of stereotypical gay (or Jewish or rural) attributes and/or cliched Freudian tics.

I’m not squeamish about sex…at all. But I also think sex should be fun, and that it often (mostly?) is. But not in this novel, where it seems always to be an experience of desperation. Sex is ubiquitous here, but never sexy.

And so, instead of a bunch of people interacting with each other, it’s a novel about a crowd of one-dimensional demi-characters fucking (or fisting or scissoring, or pissing on, or…) a bunch of other one-dimensional demi-characters. The endless stream of watersports, scat, drugs, beatings, incest, (&c.) dulls the senses fairly quickly, making the thinness of the underlying fabric all the more apparent.

I picked up this book because it was mentioned in How to Survive a Plague. As a darkly satirical depiction of gay life in urban America before AIDS, it’s interesting. And perhaps when it was first published it was edgy and hip (I can’t remember). But reading it with hindsight, it did a disservice to Kramer’s community, helping the religious right (and the establishment in general) to ignore the mounting crisis, dismissing the mounting death-toll as self-inflicted. And so it made me doubly sad.