Why Gays (and Others) Should Still Read ‘Faggots’

Abe Bronstein, self-made multi-millionaire, sometime film producer, and yiddishe papa, stalks Fire Island at the close of the bacchanalic 1970s, searching for his youngest son. Richie “Boo Boo” Bronstein—closeted, spoiled, dissatisfied with the sums of his trust fund dispersals—has staged his own kidnapping, leaving a clumsily forged ransom note demanding $1 million from the preoccupied, philandering father he’s convinced has never loved him. As Abe, with $10,000 in hand (“A holiday weekend. The bank was undercashed.”) arrives in the middle of a beachside orgy, he sees men in gleaming black leather and fears the worst: Richie has fallen into the hands of Nazis.

Growing alarmed and confused as the Nazis fondle each other’s pectorals and lick each other’s boots, Abe joins a crowd near the showers, where Richie, on his knees, is “thanking God that he likes older men.” Until Richie realizes, in a horrified flash that the man he’s just asked to suck his cock is Abe, his father. “My kleine Richie in a pit of piss!” Abe thinks, “Oh, God, you are being naughty to your Abe tonight! Please tell me what to do!”

Abe grabs hold of Richie before he can get up and run, “Oh my Richie, you make for yourself a world more awful than the one you try so hard to escape!” While Richie wrestles his father, trying to wriggle away, the revelers gather in a circle, thinking that the father-son scene is a staging of a questionable but intriguing fetish. They begin to masturbate. “Richie …” Abe whispers, “we are perhaps in some concentration camp?”

Gathering strength, Abe shouts at Richie a promise, if not quite to be a better father (Abe divorced Richie’s mother on the eve of his bar mitzvah and just prior to chasing Richie was hunting for exotic gentile wife No. 5), then to make at least himself “like” Richie better. His son, unconvinced, keeps wriggling.

But God: gives now his answer to his Abe, who takes his younger son and hurls him to the ground. And pins him under his girth of years of living and food and knowledge. And the son knees back in protest and suffocation and not quite so experienced heft. And together they toss and they turn, like some Biblical nightmare brought up to date.

Abe—Abraham, father to his people (and almost-killer of his son)—struggling with his son, struggling to like his son, wishing his son could make a better world for himself, in a sea of piss—is at the climax of one of the apparently minor plot threads in Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots, which was read then, as it is now, mostly as a frustratingly poorly written but sometimes very funny satire of the gay life in pre-AIDS New York (or rather, what participants in that culture of excess couldn’t yet have known was already AIDS New York—the unknown HIV was circulating in the revels that Kramer parodies).

Faggots is also, intermittently, a touching—groping, grasping, wrestling, wanking, clutching and embracing—Jewish domestic novel. Abe, although not its main character, is its moral pivot, unable himself to be a good father, husband, or Jew, but bringing to bear at a few poignant moments the sad majesty of his failure in those roles to wish that his son and other gays could be, in a spiral of paternal (and authorial) uncertitude, either straight and normal or out and proud, or perhaps again members of a gay world that wouldn’t look so much like a concentration camp. What he offers to his son—what Jewish life in America offers gay life, Kramer suggests—is, if not a model for how to be a man or a minority (Abe is only in the financial sense a success to be emulated), then a still-urgent reminder of what is at stake as we make, preserve, or reject the worlds of our minoritarian cultures.

Abe is not the hero of Faggots, whose protagonist, Fred Lemish, is, obviously, embarrassingly, a mildly airbrushed version of Kramer himself. A middle-aged writer (although on the near side of 40, rather than, like Kramer, rather past it), Lemish has two great causes—writing a screenplay on New York’s emergent gay culture that will make him “the James Boswell of his faggot world,” and winning the heart of Dinky Adams (based on Kramer’s real-life crush, whom he eventually did win over, years after Faggot’s publication. Persist, reader in love!). Lemish works out devotedly in Manhattan’s gayest gym to make himself worthy of Dinky’s attention (Kramer’s iron-swollen arms were prominently featured in the dust-jacket photos of early editions of the book—find me a gay author, hell any author, today who can sell a novel based on their physique) but even at his physical peak he is only “your average, standard, New York faggot obsessive kvetch. Nice though.”

Lemish wants, poor “schleppy Saint Bernard,” to find a stable, faithful lover in a milieu that seems to be organized around anonymous sex. He and his friends constantly bemoan that this is a doomed effort, that sex and love don’t mix, that the gay community has taken a terrible turn away from the very possibility of romance (a critique also made by the characters of Andrew Holleran’s much more accomplished novel Dancer from the Dance, likewise published in 1978; at the novel’s end, joining a massive gay pride march, they realize that their demi-monde of ultra-sluts comprised a tiny minority of New York’s gay population). Fred moans particularly that Dinky, promiscuous, popular, much-pursued, isn’t interested in settling down with him. The novel culminates in Fred’s uninterested love-interest getting fisted by who knows how many people on Fire Island, including Fred, who can’t resist getting his hands dirty.

Both in 1978 and as the AIDS crisis developed in the early 1980s—with Kramer, heroically and presciently, leading activism for safe sex and scientific research—Faggots has been taken, not least by Kramer himself, as a statement about sex, love, and the state of gay America, which makes about as much sense, from a properly literary perspective, as reading the musings of Proust and his Marcel about the impossibility of romantic love as some kind of empirical claim rather than the comically deluded ratiocinations of a particular character (the narrator, of course, is also a character). But there is a moral and political demand that runs through the novel, circulating among its characters. Early on, as Fred explains his ambitions for what his screenplay might accomplish, he says that he wants not only to document gay life, but to do away with the word “gay,” which strikes him as a pitiful euphemism, giving a false sheen to a world that is hardly always carefree: No, he would de-kike the word “faggot,” which had punch, bit, a no-nonsense, chin-out assertiveness, and which, at present, was no more self-deprecatory than, say, “American.”

This is a delirious sentence that raises, after the initial wave of offence and confusion has passed (the novel is full of similar instances of “kike,” “yid,” “nigger,” and at one point, there appears an “Ubangi-lipped” urinal), additional confusion. What does it mean to “de-kike” a word? For Fred it seems to imply removing the bitterness and abjection, making it an aggressive, outward-facing weapon by which those previously thus designated can identify themselves forcefully and proudly, without the shame of weakness and cringing marginality that had once shadowed them. Is that what Fred Lemish imagines Jews to be in 1970s America, so thoroughly de-kiked that gays—through the helpful mediation of one gay Jew specifically—can learn from their example to be a confident minority?

It would seem so, but the words themselves—kike and faggot—remained then and remain now terms of offense one might hear just as a fist or brick makes contact with skull. Although “faggot” is also, it must be said, one of the key words of the gay pornographic imagination. Whether or not this is a triumph of destigmatization is a question that may be left to the queer theorists, or better, my therapist, but the word hardly resounds as unproblematically as “American”!

Fred reveals his wish to de-kike faggot America to Abe Bronstein, who after making his fortune in the sweets business now wants to make a killing in films. Abe becomes a surrogate father to Fred, and makes Fred’s mission his own. So inspired, he takes a meeting with notoriously closeted filmmaker Randy Dildough (Kramer’s irrepressibly bad humor at work) to pitch his and Fred’s venture, Fathers and Sons and Brothers and Lovers (“which is an excellent title … one which the masses will not confuse with the fine novel by Turgenev”). It’s time, he explains “for a movie about gay homosexuality … which I am understanding is now all over the place.”

Dildough is increasingly uncomfortable and gets lost in a rambling explanation of why the project isn’t a good fit, until Abe interjects “but you too are a fegala.” Dildough rises from the table to leave, as Abe continues, “How can you live such subterfuge?” He condemns his closeted interlocutor—like Philip Roth, famously, condemning Edward Albee for his mincing, unconvincingly opaque plays about women—“I go. With sorrow and sadness that you deny your heritage. You do not like yourself very much.”

Strikingly, Abe says not that Dildough is denying his sexuality, or his desire (or as today’s gender-nauts say, his truth, his real self)—his accusation has nothing to do with some fictive inner core of Dildough’s personal essence. Rather he says that the filmmaker is denying his heritage, transposing onto his case the terms that would more obviously apply to someone rejecting his Jewishness. We hardly think of homosexuality as a heritage, as something handed over to us—although our sexuality, our very body, was given to us without our consent by our parents, who created us out of their own sexualities, which they were given and so on and so forth back to God’s originary whim.

Like everything else our parents gave and did to us, we may as we come into adulthood wish to transform or even reject this or that element of the inheritance that we are, but we have even for doing so only such resources as they themselves gave us (no one can hurt us like our parents—but who else taught us to bear, or even forgive, such hurt?). And, beyond our own parents, such worlds we have as Americans, Jews, gays, whatever we are—the cultural spaces and forms by which we can expand and change ourselves to be something other than the mere repetition of our parents’ lives, through which we pursue the desires that make and unmake us—are a heritage, things we are given and may resist or condemn but cannot, at the risk of being irredeemably warped and stunted, deny.

Abe, sad and self-righteous, is now swept up in the idea that he can enlarge still further the pseudo-paternal role he has taken toward Fred to become an “Abraham, Isaiah, Moses even” to “these boys,” gays who need Hollywood—itself guided by Jewish patriarchs—to teach them how to be proper, self-respecting homos (and, in the end, isn’t this rather what happened?). But, then, he remembers, suddenly, where is his own son? The severe demand on the reader, not merely to step out of the closet through a subjective admission of desire, but to take up, not so much with pride as with responsibility, all of what has been handed down, the weight of the history that has made us the particular people we are, to enter into the fullness of our inheritance and to decide what of it we will pass on ourselves, is suspended, comically undercut as we remember what a poor father, inheritor and transmitter, Abe really is.

In an interview two decades after Faggots’ publication, Kramer insisted, in his own kind of Dildough-y denial, that being Jewish meant little to him. What it meant was merely religion, which he rejected, and the better-off families at temple, “all these rich people that made me feel poor.” He said that he’d “always felt like an outsider” within Jewish life, although he was “fascinated by Jewish history.” References to the latter fill the later decades of Kramer’s work, when—as one of the first to realize the gravity of the AIDS crisis—he took up, in self-consciously hyperbolic terms, the rhetorical arsenal of modern Jewish politics, calling the government’s belated response to AIDS a “Holocaust,” likening his unpopular condemnations of gay male promiscuity to the controversy Arendt raised with her coverage of the Eichmann trials, and (the point where perhaps the fewest fellow-travelers then or now would follow him) urging gay activists—many of them facing in the charnel years of the ’80s and early ’90s certain death for themselves and all their loved ones, gruesome agonizing death preceded by months of harrowing skeletal half-life and often raving delirium—to imitate the Irgun.

While figures in the mainstream of gay intellectual life from the ’70s to the ’90s, including non-Jews like publisher Michael Denneny, might invoke Zionism as a model for gay liberation, hardly anyone meant the comparison to evoke the possibility of actual violence, shirking from the latter as Arendt (Denneny’s Ph.D. adviser) had in the late 1940s as she watched her fantasies for a zero-state solution in the Middle East evaporate. Likened by many to the biblical prophets for his angry denunciations of everyone from Ronald Reagan and Anthony Fauci to the sexually irresponsible gay man on the street, Kramer, a thoroughly modern and secular Jewish figure, might better be compared, as he implicitly compared himself, to Jabotinsky—a point sure to infuriate leftist gay Jews like Ben Miller (co-host of the Bad Gays podcast) who try to hold on to what they take to be Kramer’s “complicated legacy” (Miller’s imbecilic musing concludes that, after all, Kramer and his critics were mostly white, and nowadays, “white men, gay or not, are mostly irrelevant”—Israel, too, is to be canceled on account of its “whiteness”).

Before becoming the Jabotinsky of AIDS, however, Kramer was, already a Jewish writer, and not just in the factical, biographical sense that the people who made his writing possible were mostly fellow Jews. After years as a semi-successful screenwriter in Hollywood (where, he reminded interviewers later, being Jewish doesn’t hurt) and bomb of a playwright in New York—the world was not ready for Sissies’ Scrapbook, and apparently still isn’t—he turned to writing a novel on the suggestion of his psychoanalyst. Analyst, agent, and editor were Jews, as was the novel’s first champion, the gay Jewish poet and translator Richard Howard—and nearly all of Faggots’ characters. Even the ones who are supposed to be, say, Italian, can’t help oy-ing their way around the city, talking like Fred and Abe.

The Jewish themes are not always so heavy as Zionism and fatherhood. One of the novel’s flimsiest and funniest plotlines follows the most attractive WASP in gay New York, the model whose macho image sells Winston cigarettes (based on real-life Tom McBride—just as Richie was reportedly based on Samuel Bronfman II), on an insatiable quest for Jewish cock. He acquired the taste early in life when a teenage study session with timid Sammy Rosen, who gradually worked up the courage to feed the son of “one of America’s leading anti-Semites” brownies covered in jism and trample his back with “dirty white sneakers.” (Novels in those days did not have sensitivity readers, and the emerging gay male fiction of New York, particularly, addressed ethno-racial sexual hang-ups with the excited nonjudgmental frank specificity that readers now must go to the erotica of nifty.org to discover.)

Because of its sex, humor, and painfully stereotypical Jewish and gay characters—along with a moralizing agenda hid (if not lost) amid the incessant clown-nose honking and white-hot arcs of cum—Faggots has often been called the “gay Portnoy’s Complaint.” But to compare Kramer with Roth, in terms of literary talent, is grotesque. Kramer certainly had ambitions to be a great writer. He was inspired by novels like Yukio Mishima’s study of the postwar Tokyo gay underworld Forbidden Colors (Mishima, then a favorite of gays like Kramer and Marguerite Yourcenar, has since become a favorite of edgy closet cases and crypto-fascists).

But his prose resembles not so much Roth as Erica Jong, who supplied an enthusiastic blurb for the novel, as did Women’s Wear Daily (Jong was also, pathetically, wrapped in her own delusion about being the female Philip Roth).

Kramer and Jong share the same shapeless but pretentious style, bumblingly attempts to be shocking or even realistic, and relentlessly whining, self-pitying, un-shut-up-able characters. (Someday someone will have to write a monograph to explain the strangely enduring phenomenon of utterly dislikable, worried, garrulous female leads, from Cathy of the comic strips to Carrie of Sex and the City and Hannah from Girls.) In fact, when I first tried to read Faggots in college, out of a sense of duty to the gay ancestors, I made it only a few pages in before I gave up, blocked by annoyance at the narrator and main character, who share a double compulsion to signal that they took college French (“New York’s premier palais de danse …”) and to undermine their bathos-deep whinging with juvenile humor.

Nearly every personage in the novel has an absurd, unfunny name (Randy Dildough isn’t even the worst offender), along with whatever even less humorous nickname their friends come up with—it’s all enough to make one long for the relative wit of such drag queen monikers as Bertha Venation and Rachel Tensions. A combination of insistent, intellectual showoffiness and tasteless joking prevents hardly any sentence from coming out as a sincere expression of a straightforward thought or feeling, as if the only thing less tolerable than not making others constantly aware that one is smart and funny would be to endure being responsible for an unqualified statement.

There may be a particular gay-Jewish-New-Yorkish cultural complex at work, which, from my college-age vantage in deepest Arkansas, was incomprehensible in its silly-seriousness. Certainly Richard Howard, who glowingly blurbed Faggots and supported Kramer when many members of the New York gay literary scene (people who had published stories in The New Yorker or dreamed of doing so) excluded and maligned him, had a high tolerance for combining, even in a single line, displays of erudition and descents into schoolyard humor, expecting to be awarded plaudits for range. Another of Howard’s former protégé’s, Wayne Koestenbaum, may take the prize for having created the most irritating textual assemblages of the highfalutin, bodily functional, and maudlin, but there seems to be, or perhaps have been, (who are the heirs today to this particular mode of annoyingness?) a local form of preciosity consisting in the skill of shuttling as rapidly as possible among these tactics for getting attention—one could call it, echoing Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais, homoglossia.

Kramer was no Howard, who brought to his showoff shtick an omnivorous brilliance—he is not even, it pains me to say, a Koestenbaum (who is as off-the-rails these days as the emancipated Britney Spears). Faggots is more of a first draft than a book, and not even a first draft of a good book. It has all the faults of Jong’s soppily artless fictions. Yet gays still read Faggots—and, I’ve been arguing, heterosexual Jews with strong stomachs should give it a try as well—however, because, it is, even in its authorial self-absorption, the furthest a book can be from the dim glum worlds of contemporary fiction, with their sad glints of “literary” craft (boutique adverbs, cloying pauses and leaden concluding sentences heavy with pseudo-significance, endless tarrying with emotional ambiguities, and affectless musing narrator-protagonists who seem more afraid of embarrassment than boredom) amid the gray waste of Iowa-ruined prose. Forget, reader, the scandal of the CIA using the Iowa workshop to advance American imperialism by training foreigners to love deadened small intimate fare over social-realist political epics—because let’s face it, our empire is still the best game in town, may it reign forever, and if that means no one writes their country’s version of And Quiet Flows the Don, so be it!—but someone must pay for the crime of letting Garth Greenwell and Brandon Taylor loose on a gay community still only just recovering from AIDS.

For better or worse, Faggots is unhinged, sprawling, multiple, and aims less to document its irritating protagonist-author than to use him as a means of transport across a gay terrain extending geographically only from Hoboken to Fire Island, yet still teeming with names, references, styles, tones, pleasures, excesses, disasters and ecstasies—a world Kramer documents, delights in and excoriates. Like the gay world as witnessed by Kramer and his characters, Faggots is what we have, not what we would wish it to be. It is in many ways a terrible novel, but, in spite of all its irritations (what novel today has the courage to make us hate it, to stop reading out of revulsion rather than tedium?) it grabs us, like Abe grabbing Richie, demanding our attention—and demanding that its readers, gays and Jews, “de-kiking” themselves, take up their heritage. For gay men today Faggots and its author are, as frustratingly and undeniably as our sexualities and our parents, what we come from, what we cannot without unmanning ourselves deny.