Faggots

by Larry Kramer

  “Hello, Rolla,” Durwood said.

  “What is your name, child?” Rolla asked, ignoring Durwood.

  “Timothy,” said Timmy, trying on the longer, more formal version for size.

  “Timothy. A good name. Rolla approves. Will you be an uptown child or a downtown child? The Village or the West Side, or, good fortune smiling upon you, the East Side below Ninety-sixth? You certainly evince enough potential to escape the suburbs.”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “If these gentlemen are counseling you, you will no doubt shortly be actively employed. A word of warning…”

  “Shut up, Rolla,” Durwood said.

  “…about our fair city. We have good faggot folk and we have bad faggot folk. Just like everyone else. I myself, being well-heeled and in constant communication with my mother in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, whose sensibilities I would in no way injure, am able to see all sides from on high. I hope you will feel free to seek my advice, should your own judgment require counsel.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “I am impressed you have accepted me for what I am. You have not seen fit, as so many new arrivals or fresh-mouthed kids, to giggle at my appearance and make jest. Yes, I find you impressive.”

  “I used to dress up in my mother’s dresses,” Timmy shyly confessed.

  “Ah, did we not all do that! The difference is that I have perpetuated the fantasy. I am a living dream.” And, in so saying, he turned on point, and rolled his way back across the floor to Yootha and his glass of milk.

  Paulie shivered. “She still gives me the creeps. I think she’s a witch.”

  “She…he…certainly is unusual,” Timmy said. “How does…it…make a living?”

  “I believe he works for the Army recruiting office. Isn’t that a hoot? Now, can we get down to business?” Durwood pulled his chair closer to Timmy.

  “Who is that with…him?”

  Paulie squinted his eyes to look across the floor; he was tired and, though he had youth on his side, certain of his newly assumed activities were wrecking his health and stamina. “That looks like Miss Yootha Truth…”

  “…who is a starving nigger and a lesson to us all,” Durwood finished. “Now, can we get down to business?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You need a place to stay? You need a job? You need instant pocket money for the hundred-and-one things a fella longs for? You need a base of operations from which to get your feet on the ground and launch your successful moon shot into this our Biggest Apple? I know the man who can provide each and every one of these here items for the one and only you. His name is R. Allan Pooker. He is not what you would call a swell fella, but he pays on time and the sheets are clean and he doesn’t hit you or anything like that.”

  “Is it like that movie musical, Oliver?” Timmy asked.

  “No, it’s not that bad.”

  “Oliver.” Paulie tried on the name.

  “What do I have to do?” Timmy inquired, his eyes again on the poor shivering young black thing across the room, lapping up the inside of his empty glass like the hungriest of scraggy cats. “And how much will he give me for doing it? And is it any fun?”

  “I guess the best thing for us to do is go down and let you ask him yourself. Come on.”

  The three of them started across the dance floor, toward the entrance. The music was playing Direne Jones’s “Doin’ It Twenty-Four Hours a Day Don’t Make It Love,” and Paulie stopped in the middle to join a small group of daytime strays swaying to the beat, then peeled off by himself, softly establishing his own back-and-forth motion, with an animation and an interest he had not been seen to hitherto possess. He then pulled Durwood to him with one hand, and then with his other he pulled the watching Timmy as well, so that the three of them were in a circle with Paulie’s arms around them both.

  Timmy paused a moment to reflect upon his reactions. Events were happening quickly and he was not unaware that he was dancing with two youngsters of his own age and sex and in rather sleazy surroundings with an assortment of fellow chorines the likes of which Mt. Rainier had never seen. He did not, he decided, find it unenjoyable. Besides, he had always liked music and he thought that Paulie was cute, in a way that reminded him of Elaine Loomis, who had a round face and safe smile and sat across from him in Home Room for years. So shortly after Paulie had put his hand around his waist, he put his own arm around Paulie’s, causing the lad to give an involuntary shiver, which brought a look ceilingward of mock disapproval from Durwood, which made Timmy smile and put his other arm around him. Now they danced like a tight little unit, their insularity a protection from the outside freaks, why were there always outside freaks?, looking in, here no exception, two transvestites and a Cuba Libra, and the more sinuous Direne’s voice became, followed by Rose Tundra’s insistent, commanding version of that classic, “Dance! Dance! Dance!,” the closer the three came together, so that Paulie’s lips were brushing Timmy’s and Durwood’s both and they were all holding each other tightly like girls in the locker room before the first mixer of the season. When the beat thumped into crescendo and glissandoed into an open plateau, Timmy, vaguely aware that his crotch was fuller than usual,—he’d never got a hard-on while dancing in his bedroom—thought to himself: I might as well show them what I really can do, and spun away and performed a few graceful and intricate steps and turns which he had perfected in that bedroom, never imagining he’d be showing them off quite like this, including the mock hesitation both arms right left right right that he’d noted some kids using on a Don Kirshner TV Rock Special, and this caused Paulie to duplicate the movements, and now they were dancing together—Durwood tried but couldn’t get the tricky hesitation right—Paulie and Timmy, looking like, though they would never have heard of them, young Tony and Sally de Marco, which one Tony?, which one Sally?, in and out, arms over and down, touch hip, touch hip, down down over and back. Paulie’s eyes closed, his own crotch running over, and Timmy’s eyes closed, and they instinctively touched chests and bumped groins and whirled about to collide asses and then knock hips, right and left, and as Rose Tundra droned on and upward, their own movements became slower and their gestures tiny and delicate, weaving a spell for the coming moment of climax and ending, neither one realizing that their sweat was comingling, just that it had been a good brotherly get-together and workout that would remain as a nice memento of Timmy’s first High in the big city, which would soon evaporate and coalesce into the rest of the night, which was now about to commence, as the song was over, or rather whipped into a third one, a foot-stopping clinker of completely non-urgent intensity, designed to clear the floor and aid the waiters, which also cleared the air of mood and closeness and opened the eyes of our two dancers, who looked at each other, wrinkled their noses in distaste, hitched up their startled trousers to their former height, and instantly marched off the dance floor, smiling, friends, grabbing the less terpsichoreanly gifted Durwood, and headed, all three joined in arms and new fellowship, toward the door, waving to Rolla, waving to Yootha, Timmy feeling more a part of something here than he ever was back home, and out toward R. Allan’s and that new beginning.

  Blaze Sorority was a pen name. His real name was Alvin Sorokin and by day he was an assistant vice-president at the Immigrant Savings, specializing in trusts for the elderly. However, as B.S., the eternal Blaze, he moonlighted, writing twice-monthly features, sort of historical overviews, for the Avocado. There has been much talk of late that the Avocado, as the faggot world’s very own and special paper, has been less than courageous, more puerile than pertinent. Not true. With columns as perceptive as those Blaze was turning out, the faggot community has no basis for complaint. Blaze told it all. Witness this piece, written earlier this month:

  …let us try to summon up inspiration from our illustrious ancestors, those forefathers who, had they opened their mouths, would have made our cause great a few years earlier, had they had the guts to cry out “here I come, ready or not” to all a
nd sundry, the world at large, and stood there long enough to have their toesies counted, would not have placed us in the mess we’re in today. I am of course talking about Leonardo and Michelangelo and Napoleon (who had a small one) and Socrates and Aristotle and Alexander the Great (the Great “what?”) and James Dean and Richard the Lion-Hearted and Richard II and Walt Whitman and Lord Byron and Tchaikovsky and Dag Hammarskjöld and Brendan Behan and Marcel Proust and E. M. Forster and Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart and Hart Crane and Emily Dickinson and J. Edgar Hoover (who wants her?), Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham, Henry James, Montgomery Clift, Caravaggio, Willa Cather, Velásquez, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Queen Christina, Milton, Cellini, Marlowe, Hans Christian Andersen, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Lawrence of Arabia, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir James Barrie, Benjamin Britten, Stephen Foster, Brahms, Visconti, Verrocchio, George Gershwin, Senator Joseph McCarthy (don’t want her either), Ravel, Rodin, Swinburne, Virgil, Strindberg, Joan of Arc, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Erasmus, Pasolini, Christian Dior, St. Augustine, Horace, Samuel Butler, Flaubert, Amy Lowell, Sir Arthur S. Sullivan, President James Buchanan who was in love with his vice-president William King, William Inge, Lord Kitchener, Charles Laughton, Hadrian, Claudius, Thomas Gray, Julius Caesar, Pompey, Colette, Cocteau, André Gide, Trajan, Lorca, Goethe, Auden, Sir Isaac Newton, Cardinals Spellman and Newman, Suleiman the Magnificent, Horace-Walpole, Louis XIII & XVIII, Herman Melville, Carson McCullers, Lord Tennyson, Bill Tilden, Williams II & III, John Maynard Keynes, Edwards II & VIII, James I, George III, (Oh, to be in England), David and Jonathan (yes, Leviticus!), Ramon Navarro, Tyrone Power, Clifton Webb, Alexander Woolcott, Nijinsky, Baudelaire, Frederick and Peter the Greats, and the Popes: Julius II, Paul VI, Benedict IX, Sixtus IV, John XXII, Alexander VI, Julius III (how dare that Catholic Church be so nasty to us!), and on and on and on and you will notice that I am not mentioning the living cowards because of legal advice, but haven’t we got a lot to thank all these fellows and gals for? Thanks a lot, gang. We didn’t know about you till you were dead. You’ve made it so much easier for us to tell the world we’re here, WE’RE HERE, damn damn damn your hide, and we shall make our presence known!, felt!, seen!, respected!, admired!, loved!

  And now for the news. The season’s opening Fire Island dog show, toy groupings only, will begin at one A.M., not P.M., as previously announced by your reporter. (Maxine gave me the wrong slip of paper.) And, shooting forward a bit, the High Holiday services for those of you of the Jewish persuasion will be held, as in seasons past, at the beautiful bayside home of Alan (“Nana”) Herskowitz, which was also the setting for the wonderful hat party, at last summer’s end, which brought a little sunshine into that rainy day.

  I’ll bet you can hardly wait to start it all again! Neither can I! Another summer! I’ll see you on the Island!

  And now, brothers, sisters, let me be sad. Let me be. Oh, my little babies, where is he? Where oh where oh where?

  And when he appears, will we know him? Will we follow him? Will we love, respect, admire, emulate, follow him?

  Oh Miss God: Give us a leader to follow. A Hero!

  Pretty please.

  “Leaders!? Heroes!? Whatever is that ditz Blaze Sorority going on about?” the Divine Bela, Bertram Bellberg, big and burly and with a lovely, constant smile, said aloud in his one-room apartment on Weehawken Street, his own pen awaiting inspiration for his twice-weekly Women’s Wear column on happenings in fashionable New York.

  “We have so many wonderful models and leaders! Winnie Heinz and divine Lork, whose English improves with every collection, and Horst Esterhazy, the stomach of deaths muscles up to here, and Ronnie Gartenhoffer, our best dancer, and the perfect Adriana, though she’s straight, and the distinguished Dr. Irving Slough, he’s very leader-y, and I have heard tell about that top movie-man, Randy Dildough, and Hans Z. and all his other models, and that writer, Fred Lemish, and Billy Boner, our very own empire builder, and Patty, Maxine, and Laverne, and that most gorgeous, though very wicked, Dinky Adams, whom simply everybody falls in love with, though he’s not someone I’d like my brother to marry, if I had a brother…

  “Oh, goodness, dearie me, whatever is Blaze foaming on at the mouth about so!”

  We now come to matters of a rather delicate nature. These would seemingly pertain to Fred Lemish’s problems with his bowels and his regularity, or booms, as Algonqua was wont to euphemize them when he was a lad. Whatever had gone wrong with his early training, toilet or otherwise, he could for years not consider being out of range of a john; when be had not daily voided, he would be reluctant to leave his current home base unless he could pinpoint a clean extra-home toilet somewhere along the way.

  While this way, as noted, had led him into the various inner sanctums provided by the distinguished Messrs. Cult, Nerdley, Fallinger & Dridge, and while their joint investigations into these sanctum sanctorums had provided him with various intellectual hypotheses as to why he might be who he was and is (including the current favorite Reasons for The Problem: 1: Algonqua smothered me to death with her “Love”; 2: Lester hated me; 3: I want to be Hurt; 4: I don’t want to be Hurt; 5: I want to Hurt somebody else; 6: I seek the tensions of my shitty childhood; 7: I seek as lovers only those who embody the identical responses that Algonqua and Lester, those cocked-up fonts from whence all patterns flow, programmed into me; 8: I refuse to compete in any way with ultra-straight brother Ben; 9: I’m still trying to be accepted as “one of the boys” I never was in youth; 10: I have a bad relationship with my body and need constant re-affirmations by a bevy of parading beauties that I Am Hot; 11: The World, and God, say I must not be; 12: I’m afraid of the Outside World and its Responsibilities, plus 97 others, ((…but what if I was just born responding to cock and ass, like Ben was born responding to tit and cunt?…what if all those neurotic Reasons were just post-natal…re-adjustments?…)), plus other questions, or rather, the same question asked a number of different ways: why can’t I get out of this life style that is going crazier and more out of control and more mad, and legitimized!, by the minute?, is it just a reluctance to leave the familiar and fear of exploring the new and different?), this way had also not yet revealed to his satisfaction why it continued to localize its revenge on his stomach and its adjoining tributaries.

  Yes, why was everything so complex and difficult to comprehend?

  And when would he get some pleasure from his ability to feel?

  And when would he be able to swerve his restless passions toward shaping his deeds, perhaps toward altering the world a little?

  Was he naïve?

  God damn it, it’s hard.

  These perplexing conundrums, perhaps not yet to be answered, were ones that daily made their unsolved presence known. Perhaps the sufferer had to live a bit first—the Reasons and intellectual Hypotheses, indeed the Questions, nought until one Lived! Experienced! The Liver could be in analysis for those 12 or 97 years, but until that inner sanctum was vacated, until ONE WENT OUT INTO THE WORLD—to quest, to explore, to EXAMINE, to do!—does anything become clear…?

  Was Dinky, and Love, his ticket to ride?

  He had made a certain amount of progress. He could actually highlight when the courageous change came about, permitting him his breakthrough, or breakout, into the utilization of nonresidential conveniences. It was when he was twenty-seven, and on a pleasure trip from his then London film-executive duties, to Dublin, to visit a married writer classmate and his very dissatisfied wife. Fred simply could not shit in their tiny room with no heat and freezing seat, and if an instrument for pure torture had been created just for him, he was sitting on it. Later, when he and the bickering couple (shades of Lester and Algonqua and their snappy banter: “It’s your fault!” “He’s your son, too!”) were on a tour of the lyrical Irish countryside, all pale mists and the sun trying to break through to greet at least the afternoon, he was of course woefully in need of evacuation. When finally death seemed preferable, he modestly requested that the Mini Minor be stopped, he bolted behin
d a wen or shillalah or whatever the fuck they call a hill-cum-tree in Ireland, he dropped his drawers, gave three solid days of solid Irish fare an exit visa, and then utilized one pair of Harrod’s boxer shorts and strips from the tail of his favorite black-and-white checked Turnbull & Asser shirt to wipe his blushing ass. Then he returned to his host and hostess, and their journey, feeling better in one way, not in another, when oh when would these traumas pass, such an appalling inability to control myself!, when will I be able to shit where and when I want to?, what terrors am I so internalizing?, and directing toward myself and not courageously out against the world?, the heritage traced back, its ancient lineage, always to that memory of his third grade in Hyattsville, when he had to Go, and ran, not down to the little boys’ room, but thunderously, would he make it!?, all the way home, a half-hour’s jog before jogging was fashionable, or necessary, hopefully scrunching in his cheeks, not quite making it, shitting in his Woodward & Lothrop Kiddie Shop (Size: Husky) underpants two blocks from Target Zero, then waddling the remaining distance, sheepishly making entrance to the garden-apartment building through its rear, furtively checking into its garbage room, removing first the corduroy long pants, and then the sack of offending offal, disposing of the latter in the covered metal can, stooping then to utilize some Washington Star to wipe as best he could his browned-off bottom, reuniting with the corduroys, walking pensively upstairs to the empty-as-usual Lemish residence, crying one of the last cries he can remember crying, taking a bath, disinfecting his tush and his long pants with some of Lester’s Lilac Vegetal, and finally heading back to third grade, wondering what reason he could give to Mrs. Hand for his absence that would not be construed a lie.