Faggots

by Larry Kramer

  Feffer had told him four years ago to make his body over. If he had, would he still have Feffer? He didn’t want him now. But he sure as shit had then. And now here was Dinky, arousing within him the exact pain, anguish, hope, love, and terror he’d not felt since Feffer. Ah, romance!

  Yes, the way he’d looked at it, this was the last chance. Harden up now, slim down now, grab your man now—because, over forty, it wasn’t going to be easy to accomplish any of these things. And, if he had wasted the years leading up to this moment in sloth and avarice and self-pity and chocolate and rejection and schlumpery and Algonqua and Lester and Harvard and bachelorhood and being the cruiser more than the cruised, the left-dangling more than the dangler, it was still not too late to yield and desist. And if the rest of his country desired to be thin and gorgeous and remained pretty much as they were, then he would not be like the rest of his country. And what better motivation for becoming a thing of beauty than being in love?

  Fred was also rather concerned with the specific. When he was feeling poorly, if a malaise should suddenly sweep over him, he wanted to know why, what to attribute it to: had he moved his bowels sufficiently, did he have to do so again, had he eaten properly, was his protein intake for the day large enough, had he slept enough last night, or too much, did his body require some food with sugar, was he finally becoming hypoglycemic?—all of these possibilities had to be adjudged and discounted. Ordinary, plain, everyday, nonspecific anxiety could not be tolerated. If checking all of the above produced no answer, and anxiety was all that remained, then Fred had recourse to thoughts of knives and wrist slashings (“Application of the knife blade to the wrist,” he would try to cheer himself with some snappy recollections from the seminal volume of Menchitt & Swinger, “indicates a perverse determination to sever the umbilical cord of some earlier trauma”) and pill overdoses and jumping from heights. He was afraid of heights. He did tend to overreact. He didn’t, naturally, do any of these awful things; they were just torture thoughts to ruin a nice day.

  Fred was—in short—your average, standard, New York faggot obsessive kvetch. Nice though. And with smiling, dark-brown eyes. But perhaps a bit too therapeutically prepared. And trying not to ponder if what he has spent all those years and dollars and pounds (sterling, not avoirdupois, though certainly that as well) to reach is quite possibly not there to be reached, but that the True End of not only therapy but Maturity is to learn to live with the inescapable fact that 97% of all human beings are getting fucked and 97% of all faggots are, too.

  He had recently studied his last year’s Seven Star Mini Diary, and this had revealed:

  Dates leading to orgasm: 87 (not counting street tricks, the tubs, or Fire Island; definitely not counting The Meat Rack).

  Dates interesting enough to want to see again: 2.

  Dates seen again: 23.

  Refusals: 23.

  Tubs attended how many times: 34.

  Discos danced at how many nights: 47 (not counting Fire Island).

  He had been dismayed at how many of the names he no longer remembered. Who were Bat, Ivan, Tommy, Sam Jellu, Beautiful Henry, Kelly Hurt (or Kelly hurt?), Joe Johns, François, Watson Datson, too many of the 23, not to mention the 87, were now unrecognizable and obviously equally as unmemorable as the how many—? 100? 200? 50? 23? orgasms he had probably forgotten to tally. He had had sex, with somebody or other, one or two, maybe three times a week for an entire year, including religious holidays, but not counting, hopefully, illnesses. He had spent a whole year (not to mention all the preceding ones!) with a faceless group of sex objects. Talk about sexist! Talk about using the body as a thing! And who the hell was Tiddy Squire? Or was it Ditty Squirt? Even his handwriting was not helpful. He recalled no Tiddy Ditty, nor what they did, nor how it felt, nor where they did it, though his notation exclaimed: “really Hot, must do it again!” Checking his address book, on those rear pages reserved for faggots, because he was certain never to recognize their names if filed alphabetically, there it was: Derry Spire, March 14th—only several months ago. How could he not remember? How could he have made love with another human being and not remember? The face? The body? Something? Anything? A wart? A smell? B.O.?

  Fred then thought of the long line of architects, gardeners, art directors, copywriters, dilettantes, drop-outs, unemployeds, unemployables, would-be’s, waiters, actors, students, dancers, which had graced his life, wondering why he fell for some of the Great Non-Givers of the World, the Invulnerables, the Defensives, the Ones in Need of Help, whom he, great Red Crosser, was there to ferry through sleet and shit like the schleppy Saint Bernard. And did. He had carted the body-builder/sociologist to Paris to seduce him, only to discover he was a lousy lay. (Anthony had to summon him home with an urgent telegram signed “Barbra Streisand” to get him out of that one.) He had ported the weaver/macraméist to Marrakech to hear his vow of love, only to have anxiety attacks in the Casbah. (Said attacks obviously necessitating an urgent recall to then Dr. Cult.) They had both been called Mikie. Mikies I and II were both, somewhere, wearing Rolex Submariners, which Fred had bought them at the ending. Mikie III, the thirty-four-year-old flower child, half-architect, now truck driver, still good friend, also wore his Rolex, after their affair-let on a Caribbean Firefly Cruise.

  There had also been Feffer. Great Love Number One.

  And now there was Dinky Adams. Great Love Number Two.

  Fred had been amazed as well to discover in his address book’s rear that he and Dinky had met and tricked seven years ago, a one-nighter; Fred vaguely remembered fucking him, when Fred was visiting from London and they’d cruised each other in front of a Goya Duchess on loan to the Metropolitan Museum. Dinky was then in architecture school, too, and was filled with plans for building a more beautiful world. He’d only finished a year and a half. He’d never made it. Ah, the potential! Is this what made him so very dear?

  Feffer had been tall, blond, incredibly bright, gorgeous, his own age, a Wisconsin Phi Bete, who’d been wonderful until Fred unfortunately discovered he wanted to tie Fred up and beat him.

  Dinky was tall, dark, bright, gorgeous, with honors from Georgetown, and Fred could hardly wait for his return. He was wonderful. Again and at last.

  Fred had, at thirty-nine, hoped love would come by forty.

  He had only four days to go.

  Forty years old!

  And beloved Dinky would soon be coming back!

  And beloved Abe would produce Fred’s screenplay!

  And Life would at last be in order! Love and work co-joined!

  He soaped his tarnished, yellowed, peed-upon body in the showers. Ah, did he not hate that word “gay”? He thought it a strange categorizer of a life style with many elements far from zippy. No, he would de-kike the word “faggot,” which had punch, bite, a no-nonsense, chin-out assertiveness, and which, at present, was no more self-deprecatory than, say, “American.”

  Dinky Adams’s ass was the first ass Fred had ever rimmed.

  He had, of course, heard about rimming. It was quite popular with some of the boys. But Fred had never wanted to so taste anyone before.

  It happened almost eight weeks ago, at the end of Week 4 of their “relationship,” after Dinky had given Fred his first douche, really a harmless affair (and not nearly so frightening as Tarsh and Mikie, both clinical experts, had always made it sound), (“You mean you’ve never douched?,” “You mean you’ve never rimmed?” Dinky had asked later, incredulous over what he considered Fred’s naive sex life. “What have you been doing all these years?”): a bulbous squeezing of a couple of cups of warm water up Fred’s rectum, into which Dinky would shortly stick his nice-sized, not-too-big, not-too-small cock, while they were standing in Fred’s kitchen on Washington Square, Dinky having just sterilized the douche’s doucher in hot water on the stove. As Dinky had squeezed it in, Fred realized, horror of horrors, that he was getting turned on. He liked this Dinky! He liked that he was having his first douche with someone he liked. He liked th
at he was evidently likeable enough for Dinky to get such a nice big hard-on over him. He liked it all. Yes, he did.

  And suddenly he found himself falling to the floor, Fred did, being careful to hold his water in, and getting underneath Dinky, and looking up at him, at that thirty-year-old beauty, towering above him, handsome like the devil, with black hair rakishly widow’speaked in the center of his forehead, darting black eyes that sometimes looked at you, a round cherubic face protected by a full, short, neat, black beard, biceps the wonderful size of smooth, firm, elongated honeydews, under which resided Fred’s favorite spot, those beautiful armpits, soft, wispily fluffy, nice-smelling of Dial soap, and that rest of his body, a personal triumph over childhood skinniness and a touch of bad feet, now perfected into faggot desirability: muscular, tough, smooth skin, not an inch of fat, to which he dashingly added a small gold earring to his pierced left lobe. Oh, it was gorgeous, this view from neath Mount Rushmore. It was so gorgeous that Fred’s own cock became gigantic. Could it be that for all these years he was unknowingly harboring a very big cock and not only not knowing it, but not using it as well? Oh, gorgeous Dinky, up there, you who like me and have come after me, wooed me these weeks of my trying to play hard to get, not be anxious, not be hungry, not fuck this one up; you who read books and design gardens and plan interiors and love to travel and dance and cook so well; you who swung me in a hammock in your sweet little Southampton house beside a canal, our Venice, as I read to you about our shared love for England; you who smiled at me as we awoke in each other’s arms after a wonderful night of love; you who have said: “I really like your profile,” “You have such nice feet,” “You’re very important to me,” “On paper we make so much sense—we have mutual interests and the sex is good,” “I believe in old-fashioned marriage, where people make commitments and out of respect the love just grew and grew,” our first month of truly filling simple things, being alone together, you are giving me this hugeness!

  Then, just as suddenly, still on his knees, he crawled around in front of Dinky’s perfect ass. He took both cheeks in his hands and he buried his face in it like an elegant pillow in a perfect Italian palazzo overlooking the blue Mediterranean where they could be when they were living happily ever after. If they hadn’t moved to England. Then he moved his face down and under, and inspected, like a mechanic beneath a Porsche on the overhead rack. The cock was perfect, the balls were perfect, the conjunction of all parts was perfect. Fred was glorying in the knowledge of true ownership: this Perfection is Mine! I love it!

  And in he stuck his tongue into Dinky’s asshole.

  He just did it. It tasted good. It tasted very good. It was smooth and clean, rather like a good quality moist satin. Dinky’s asshole was lined with a lovely ribbon!

  And Dinky was obviously enjoying it, because he was growing an even larger hard-on than any Fred had seen him grow during their times together, which had not always been the case, Dinky’s hard-ons, which was something Fred didn’t like to think about or look at, as he now was looking at Dinky’s own present giganticism.

  Then they went into Fred’s bedroom, which was a perfect room of plants and indirect lighting and soft music and a wide mattress upon a gray platform with a hanging black-and-brown curtain of duck canvas to wrap around it all as they had their secret picnic with each other. After a slight detour to the john, Fred then allowed himself once again to be fucked.

  It hadn’t always been such. Before Dinky, Fred had not liked to get fucked, even though he had noted over the years that those he was fucking always seemed to be enjoying it more than he was in doing it to them. No, it took Dinky to show him the way, in a manner that no number of years of advice and pamphlets and manuals on “Painless Rectal Intercourse”—replete with their diagrams of all canals and passageways and orifices and advice to “relax,” so that these could bend and sway—had been able to do.

  No, Dinky had showed him how. With tenderness. Dinky was the most tender lover Fred had ever known. He was soft and, while not actually giving—Dinky was not a kisser or a toucher, unless stoned, when he did both beautifully—he managed to convey in lying there, with Fred sitting on his cock above him, that the gentle movements back and forth—making them one, oh happiest moment of moments! Making Them One! Dinky and Fred! get the embroidered towels ready! order them now! find that spot in the country! sign the lease! Dinky will remodel! happily ever after is beginning right this very Now—were the most pleasing Fred could ever recollect receiving. From anyone. Did not such tenderness mean his heart beat for Fred!

  Indeed, to be fucked pleasurably is a gift.

  And then Fred said it: “I love you, Dinky.”

  Richard “Boo Boo” Bronstein stood at the dark end of an abandoned pier by the mighty Hudson and, while he was having his cock sucked by a balding, bobbing head belonging to an older gentleman, further fantasized that with which his life was now obsessed. His own self-inflicted kidnapping.

  The papers would be full of it. Richard Bronstein, the twenty-four-year-old son of the multimillionaire cake-mix manufacturer turned movie producer who had divorced the sporting-goods heiress after the bar mitzvah of their second son, Richard, in order to marry the former teen-aged cover girl from New Zealand, who was then replaced by Miss Australian Butter, and then Miss South African Gold, had disappeared. Through her tears, Mrs. Ephra Lopp Bronstein, the first, rich, and American one, would announce on Walter Cronkite that it was all her husband’s fault.

  Boo Boo knew he would cry when he saw his mother on the news. But the experience will be very good for her, he thought. She is entirely too selfish. Besides, she should hate Pop as much as I do.

  And, just thinking about it, he came in the older gentleman’s mouth.

  The father, Abraham Bronstein, he who was the son of immigrant German peasants, escaped from the pogroms of their native Dienstag to peddle rolls and nuts and eventually parlay cakes and cookies, pies and pizzas, into a fortune in the New World (reported in last Sunday’s Financial Section of The New York Times as producing a record fiscal profit from all divisions, 29% over last year, $2.03 dividend per share, $146,000,000, Abraham Bronstein, Chairman of the Board), would undoubtedly suspect foul play of the most heinous sort.

  “God is finally getting his revenge,” Richie would hear Abe sadly confide to Walter. “For my success. For my hubris. For my not loving my Richie.”

  Even at this moment of climactic triumph, Boo Boo wouldn’t cry. “Unh, thanks,” he said to his kneeling benefactor, who had actually swallowed the stuff, a feat which always amazed Boo Boo, who wouldn’t stoop so low.

  “What’s your name,” the balded one asked, creaking to an upright position and liking even more what he saw. “You have a phone number so we can do it again? Indoors.”

  “My name is Tex. No phone.”

  And Boo Boo walked away.

  Patty, Maxine, and Laverne were the best of friends and had been ever since they met dancing years ago at the old Tenth Floor. Each danced in a similar style, two legs implanted solidly on the ground, movement only from the knees and hips, the former back and forth, the latter side to side, hands discreetly undulating in and out and only within a modest circumference from the upper torso, eyes always straight ahead or closed. It was either a lazy man’s dance or a wise one’s, since its lack of caloric intensity allowed, with the aid of a few chemicals, for non-stop participation midnight till dawn and was, for all its rootedness to earth, still quite graceful.

  Jack Humpstone was called Laverne because he was, with Manny and Moe, partners in the flourishing discotheque, Balalaika, and because there were three thirty-year-old friends and partners named Manny, Moe and Jack, they were christened, faggot-style, Patty, Maxine, and Laverne.

  Patty, who was tall, thin, balding, hyperactive, and completely unable to delegate authority (“Listen! it’s easier to do it myself than to trust just any slag”), was definitely in charge, to the relief of the other two, who still pursued independent careers. Maxine, who w
as Patty’s lover, and who was addicted, in moments of stress, to dressing up as Elizabeth Taylor, was hefty, bouncy, and sharp (“Closets, schmosets, everyone’s out of the closet. Now where the fuck are the men!”), and currently sold women’s shoes at Lord and Taylor, where the ladies always asked for “that young man who knows my feet so well.” He and Patty had been together for seven years, and Maxine was not aware that an itch had now descended on his lover and it wasn’t coming from crabs.

  Laverne, who looked like John-Boy Walton with his neat and trim body, his youthful face and demeanor, and his slightly off-kilter hillbilly smile perking under his close-cropped steel-blond hair, was a schoolteacher in White Plains (“They are as retarded in Westchester as they are everywhere else”), where he tried to instill a love of English literature in heathen, suburban minds. He was a Southern Baptist boy from Birmingham, Alabama, and he was as together as anyone could be with an itinerant preacher for a father and a mother who was Betty Crocker All-State Finalist twelve years running, and who had discovered his own sexuality while a scholarship student at Washington and Lee, not with one of his classmates or instructors but with his Uncle Jeeter back on the farm—and who had just extricated himself forcefully from a six-year affair with Dinky Adams, to whom he had given himself in innocence and expectation, and by whom he’d been intimidated out of both

  But Jack was now going to a dyke shrink who had offered the hopeful, positive suggestion: “Mr. Humpstone, I think you may be a heterosexual manqué,” and so perhaps not distant would be the day when his current inferiority (an impotency brought on by the fact that his cock had a head like a mushroom, which Dinky, claiming it hurt him when Jack fucked him, had utilized as an excuse to have sex elsewhere, which destroyed poor Laverne and his fantasy of love and sex melding into one by a hearthside yet unbuilt) would vanish, freeing himself up for sparking, roaring fires with the wooing Robbie Swindon, so patiently waiting in the wings.