Faggots

by Larry Kramer

  But wasn’t it Lester who backed away from challenge and risks? Wasn’t it Lester who was terrified of life and sex and life and family and life and Algonqua? Lester, downed by the Depression, defeated into second-rate accountancy positions, never paying much, thus freeing up Algonqua to ply her oh so many active employments and deployments, more lucrative, and in so doing taking his ball games and his balls away. Oh, Lester Lemish, with a degree from Harvard and one from Harvard Law School, Phi Beta Kappa from the first, Law Review from the second, why did you lie down and die, in so doing, almost, almost, bringing down your younger son, you idolized your elder, he played ball.

  Yes, Lester Lemish, your totally poor record in Fatherhood included an inability to kiss and hug, keep bargains and promises, call and say Hello, inquire after studies and well-being, offer love, do anything but pull the Disappearing Act, with its constant curtain line: You Are Unwanted! I Reject You Through and Through!, delivered unto Fred, and truly bringing down the house. Yes, Lester Lemish, you were the first in the long line of danglers who held out the lollipop but who wouldn’t let Fred lick.

  So, Lester Lemish, ye who hated your son and whom your son hated right back, ye whom he blamed for making him go out and suck cock to find one of his own—and if we are going to get pyrotechnical on the matter, and evidently we are, let it be said that Fred had strong feelings on The Subject: It was men and their insecurities that made him queer and bent and faggot (were women the worse of the two evils?, and hence by the bye, with more demanding strings attached for payments on demand?, Algonqua would eat him alive!) (and he did not know that Dinky’s situation was just the reverse: it was his Poppa who sang to him “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” and his Momma who was the weak and rejecting, and needful, one), and he’d found nothing in all his comings and goings to make him feel otherwise, nothing but gropings for cocks to make his own seem real (is this any different, Fred, from the millions of straight men looking for the tit their mamas once gave them, or didn’t?) and while there’s a current trend afoot attempting to indicate that homosexuality might be caused by genetic intrusions or embryonic hormonal imbalances, and there may be truth or succor found in this, or anything else the genes boys might come up with, and wouldn’t it be nicer, easier, neater, cleaner, certainly more convenient, if homosexuals were born just like everybody else?, there is also that other school of thought, established by S. Freud and his dishy disciples (including the Messrs. Cult, Nerdley, Fallinger & Dridge), which posits that a dumb dodo of a daddy and a whiz bang whammerino of a Ma (who made Algonqua be so fucking strong, Lester, who?) can turn the trick as well (though what about Lester’s own eviscerated childhood, his own tyrant of a Mamma, she who single-handedly ran her own grocery store in a neighborhood of polacks and schvartzas and put two sons through Harvard without aid from any husband in sight, he having been evacuated when she sensed aroma of pussy not her own?)—yes, Lester Lemish, Fred thinks IT WAS YOU who drove him thusly, thus wishing your ending in hell, not for making him a cock sucker, because Fred has come, finally, to quite like that, but for thinking him a coward when in fact it was you who did not give him the image of a Man who could kiss and love and hold someone close, someone to look up to and emulate and be.

  Lester Lemish died a couple of years ago today. Algonqua, in a sadness for his memory, had called both of her sons this morning. She spoke to Ben’s secretary and Fred’s answering machine.

  The funeral had been held at the Washington Hebrew Congregation. The rabbi, Earl Chesterfield, Oxford-educated, plummy-toned, and a nose job, had not known Lester, and since the Lemish name was not a graven image on the donors’ tablets, the services were short.

  Ben and Fred had escorted Algonqua down the center aisle. She was in her moment of some sort of triumph, bawling enormous heaving Whats and Whys, wearing the black-and-violet Garfinkel shantung and tulle she’d bought years ago for Fred’s Harvard graduation, since altered, who would notice?, as she passed the many friends she’d spent a lifetime being nice to, hoping they would be nice back to her.

  Fred, not an easy loser, was enormously, tenaciously gratified that he was not allowing a tidge of remorse to graph his heart. The day was sunny and so evidently was his interior. Thank you, Messrs. Cult, Nerdley, Fallinger & Dridge. The bastard, the prick, the old fat fart has finally fled this earth. Had not Fred waited a good many years for this, his own moment of some sort of peculiar vengeful triumph? Hadn’t he wanted it, dreamed of it, fantasized it, since he was three? And could he now not find love at last? For had not one of his new clairvoyants prophesied that love would come “with the death of a white-haired man?”

  Lester had requested burial among the war dead at Arlington, not because of any patriotic gesture, or comradeship for any remembered brothers-in-arms, but because, as a veteran of the First World War—the Great War as the English know it—he was entitled to free interment. So in he went, for nothing. Fred, ever ready for a dramatic moment with a dramatic moment, had even fantasized a funeral oration, should anyone ask him to speak, which they did not, that would begin: “I shall now speak ill of the dead.”

  One of these days he will finally realize: What a wasted life! What fine potential down the tubes!

  Dr. Irving Slough had placed the following ad in the Avocado, which had been answered by Dinky Adams:

  SEARCHING

  Lover wanted. White youth under 35, masculine-looking appearance actions tall slim dark hair good body with definition, all wanted by very affluent New York doctor/executive white 50’s with houses Fire Island Sutton Place and Greenwich. No strings attached. Your own bank account. Am keenly interested in life and all repeat all its many splendors, including traveling, sports cars, expensive restaurants, fine living, additional items. Young man must be sincere, able to relate to older man, desire Greek home several times a day. If interested, please re-read. Take particular note that youth must be masculine both in looks and behavior and not involved in anything like hairdressing. Answer in detail, with photo essential, to Box 11991 Madison Square Station.

  Dr. Irving Slough (pronounced, not as by the British, “sluff”) had come to his oldest and dearest friend, Hans Zoroaster, to exchange some niceties for tomorrow’s opening of The Toilet Bowl.

  Irving, who was from Baltimore, had been born Schlepp, a perfectly good German noun meaning the train of a dress. He was fifty-five, though not feeling it, with the very handsome face and smile and teeth of the young Cary Grant, unfortunately recently co-joined with the expanding body of W. C. Fields, and many promiscuous years of wonderful memories when the Fields part of him had been more Randolph Scott.

  Irving enjoyed thinking of himself as a modern Renaissance Man. That he was a doctor his many patients would agree; Irving was expert in attending to many a present-day malaise, from smoking to homosexuality, quite often by hypnosis, though lately he’d heard of effective results from brief periods of incarceration, which he thought he might soon be testing; that his credentials came from rather foreign universities bothered them not. But shrinking was only part of his fame and had come after his initial success as a silent backer of heterosexual fuck films. Up Your Lazy River and My Bare Lady had subsidized his medical studies; the firm and forceful personality had forged the psychiatric success. And then had come the logical next step: since so many of his satisfied patients were high on corporate ladders, what more sensible act than to form an advertising agency to promote them and their concerns? Hence, Heiserdiener-Thalberg-Slough, now number seven in international billings, and an even richer, fuller life for Irving.

  “It’s so difficult to know what to wear, Irving,” Hans said. They were in the photo-lined ground floor of Han’s handsome East 68th Street town house, photos of all the glossily gleaming smiling faces of fifty, count fifty, of America’s most handsome young men. And Hans Zoroaster loved all his famous models as if they were his sons. He never ceased looking at them, as he did now, emitting one of his unconscious sighs of prideful paternal pleasure, another fi
fty-five year-old man, though thin, he’d always kept thin, and immaculately dressed. “The first part of the evening is devoted to the Women’s Wear crowd and then events will obviously turn into more sturdy and nourishing fare and this, for us, requires two outfits.”

  “Stop it, Hans.” Irving was referring to the sighing. “You have never found love from one of your boys. You only allow them to break your heart. When will you cease your foolishness?”

  “Look who is talking! You who put ads in fuck papers! Where is your Dinky and where is his love? Two weeks of trial ‘old-fashioned’ marriage, an exclusive honeymoon, and then, poof!”

  “Yes, Dinky went away,” Irving courageously admitted, “but he has just sent me a postcard from Savannah saying he is returning, and he said to me before he left that he likes me and that we have many similar interests and that the sex is good and that on paper we make sense. So I have hope.”

  “He is twisting your heart, not calling you, disappearing, sticking his thing into you only whenever you order from him another plant or bush.”

  “He is redoing my terraces and he has great talent for beauty in this area.” Irving was not courageously admitting that Dinky had also told him he was additionally seeing a Fred Lemish.

  “Do you know that last year four hundred and nineteen of Fortune magazine’s top five hundred corporations used my boys in their advertising? How is that for market penetration? How is that for bringing beauty to this world? I too bring beauty.”

  Hans said these words from a flat position, looking upward from the long white Bishop’s table, his sheer batiste shirt opened for Irving, who, with a clean, sharp needle, was repiercing for the opening, Hans’s pointed right tit.

  “You know, I too have my chickens,” Irving said, smiling. “I have my Malmouth Chickens, which I have made into the chickens one out of two chicken-eaters eat. I have the Winston Man…I also have Necessa Autos, which put Manila on the map as a major automotive exporter, though perhaps a bit slow in spare parts. I have the Monomain Railroad, the Ivascar Home Deodorant Plan, the Pan-Pacific Group of Companies including Marathon Leisure Time, I have Bronstein Bakeries, I have the fashion empire of Dordogna del Dongo…Yes, Hans, I think this will prove a clean repiercing. I have wrought from a tiny nothingness a power which attracts greater powers that would not so many years ago so much as piss on me.”

  “I would piss on you,” Hans said softly, knowing full well that Irving would choose not to hear. So, after a suitable pause, he continued: “Do you remember our first conversation, so many years ago in Frankfort? Krafft-Ebing. With him everything was a case history. ‘Case 196: I am an official and as far as I know come from an untainted family.’ Dressing up in drag was ‘effemination.’ When he really wanted to get juicy, he would write in Latin. Remember? I was seventeen before I realized that immissio penis in os meant sticking it in the mouth.”

  “And immissio penis in anum, those who practiced that, he called us moral imbeciles and moral depravities, certain barbarous races devoid of morality. I grew up in constant fear!”

  “I, too! And there in Essen was my mother effeminating in tailored tweed suits and there was my father with his pet pig. How far we’ve come!” He had not meant to have his philosophical point end on such an upbeat, so he lowered his register and appended: “To what?”

  “Yes, Hans, how far we’ve come,” Irving agreed, once again not electing to pick up on Hans’ little pudendum. Instead, he paused in mid-operation and waved his needle in the air. “You must listen to my latest realization. I am writing it up for the International Journal of Psycho-Sexual Hysteria, of which, as you know, I am on the Board of Advisors. I shall say that it is my considered heterosexual opinion that every faggot, though I shall not use this word, considers his homosexuality as very special to him, in the sense of sacrosanct, like a pain which he has lived with a very long time. Thus it becomes a sacred pain, and one which is difficult to challenge on the one hand, or to share with another faggot on the other, whose comprehension of exactly the same pain would seem to make him the obvious choice of sharer, helpmate, lover, but which, in fact, makes him just the opposite: makes him a combatant in the same arena, fighting to see who is the victor over the same spoils—these spoils being the same Pandora’s Box of pain.”

  He finished with a flourish, a descending splurge with his needle, a bravura sweeping gesture not dissimilar to the final sew-up on one of his eviscerated Malmouth Chickens before a pop into the oven, and indicated to Hans that he could now button up his shirt and rise. He knew, too, that Hans would look up at him now with gratitude, with worshipful eyes, admiring not only his skill, but also his knowledge and perception. How important it was to have a good audience!

  Hans, as he had been doing uninterruptedly for thirty-five years, ever since their meeting in that German gay bar, both young soldiers, Hans not knowing Irving to be an American spy, so long ago, what difference had any of that warfare meant for today?, tried again: “If you were to allow me, I would give you a little pain.” But then, as he sat up, and dangled his feet to the floor, and stood, and as if, at last, the show might soon be over, he looked at his cherished friend and asked: “Please to tell me truly about your two-week marriage.” He was almost sad that it had not worked out for Irving, just as it had not worked out for Hans.

  Irving answered, looking into space, as if Hans were not present, which in fact, for Irving, he was not. “It was, for me, wonderful. Even though it was most unsatisfying. Dinky is frightened, with which he refuses to agree with me. If you arouse him slowly, he will fuck, though not the three times a day I advertised for. It is no doubt much easier for him to have sex with strangers. But I find I am in love with him. He is very dear and touching.”

  “Wonderful! Dear and touching! You are not getting even a little heinie!”

  “I know. I know.”

  “You are a psychiatrist! You should know better!”

  “You are right. You are right. I ought to know better. He is driving me crazy. But he is the first person to come along in many moons to press my buttons. My youth, which was also so wonderful, so promiscuous, so 57 varieties of fun, was also…a few years ago. It will be me! Dinky exudes this to me! I believe this!”

  Hans said softly: “Irving, our time is running out.” Each time he heard of another Dinky, Hans felt himself slipping further and further away from a co-starring role, even a supporting player’s, in Irving’s, and his own, aging saga.

  Irving, thinking of Dinky, thinking of no Dinky, thinking suddenly of two old men in a limed-oak paneled library, surrounded by a wall of beauties, both with much money in the bank, and little else, for once admitted agreement. “Yes, Hans, it is,” he quietly answered.

  “Perhaps this is a start,” Hans said, kissing his dear friend on the cheek; he would have made the mouth but Irving parried. “Perhaps just this admission is a start. Come, we shall go upstairs and I will show you some new items.”

  As they climbed the stairs of the town house, up to the top of the aerie, Hans, trying to lighten the atmosphere, waved ephemerally toward the skylight and asked one of his rhetorical questions: “Do you think that boys all over the world are wondering if somewhere out there there is a group of intelligent, like-minded individuals, devoting ourselves to stimulating pursuits, and if they could only find us, we would be the perfect future…?”

  Irving, not in as good shape as Hans, heaving himself upward as best his bulk would allow, schlepping, no, mustn’t use that word, dragging, no, that is not the right word either, huffing himself up the four flights, and a nonsmoker, too, replied: “They do. And they, too, will use hope to blanket disappointment. I have told you many times that we are no different from other people, who are base and self-centered and greedy. And hopeful.” Yes. And hopeful.

  “The voice of the true psychiatrist!”

  “No, the voice of the successful advertising man.”

  They reached the top where Hans opened his private preserve, a double-doored closet t
hat housed his leather and accoutrements and sex toys and incunabula.

  “Irving, please to take some of these new chains. I bought them thinking of you.”

  “No, Hans, only the leather executioner’s mask.” He pulled it down from its shelf, from among the full battalion of items for all extreme occasions. He was now feeling better. Those recollections of earlier days of triumph had perked him up. Why should it be any different now? He was still the same Irving. His mind, which had always been his strong point, was still the same Irving’s. And one of these days he would introduce Dinky to leather, and take him to the Marquis de Suede and let him choose anything he desired, and they would then go to his secret hideaway fuck-nest in Tudor City with the terra-cotta floors and have a wonderful night of scenes. Just the thought and anticipation made him throw off another realization. Perhaps he would use this, too, for the Hysteria. “What we have invented, Hans, is a new religion. Oh, not the moralistic and old-fashioned theological kind with that God who does not want us, but one with brutal splendors, magnificent contemporary rites and rituals, scenes, gestures, sacrifices, humiliations, terrors, tremblings, mortifications, degradations, phantasmagoric transfigurations into other realms of feeling, new realizations that will come from this cleansing purge, and then transcendencies unto a New World of our own making, with our own new rules and rewards and justifications.” No, perhaps this was not for the Hysteria.

  Hans listened. He had heard it before. He had once believed it. Now, again, he did not respond with adulation. “This is only because we wait too long. This is only because we become too old. So we make up some new religion to excite us and get up our things. We should have been lovers years ago, my friend. We could have worked it out.”