Faggots

by Larry Kramer

  It was Patty who had decided, when the old Tenth Floor was forcibly closed by the Fire Department—that most homophobic of all city agencies—to open his own place. He’d started saving and he’d looked and looked, with Maxine as a willing, if astringently mouthed companion, for possible premises. After work (Patty had been an accountant in the cookie division of Bronstein Bakeries), Saturdays, Sundays, uptown, downtown, Brooklyn Heights (“Patty, no tripping queen is going to take a subway to Brooklyn to go dancing”) until, on a very cold Election Day Tuesday four years ago, they were shown a parcel of properties on West Street, near Little Eleventh, across from the Hudson, by Alvin Sorokin (whose Immigrant Savings represented them), who told them: “A lease on this piece of shit is yours for any price.” It was a piece of shit, an assortment of ill-matching adjoining sags and warps that would have done Dickens justice; the second floor of one did not greet the second floor of its brother, but Robbie, a Mormon architect who had been expelled from Brigham Young for being caught jerking off in the middle of the night and refusing to name names of any fellow Unnatural Behavers (not that he then knew any), forcing him to receive his degree in the East, showed them in sketches (Dinky had wanted the job but Patty had told him he wasn’t qualified) how neat it would all be when a little money was spread around and how, after knocking out a few of the ground-floor walls, the street level would be dynamite. It would be, as it now was, a huge dancing womb of a place, suitable for thousands, with angled bleachers up to the d.j.’s nest, and, since one whole side had outlets to the street, there would be no Tenth-Floor-exit problem to disturb the awful Fire Department, still carrying on their tradition of unleashed homophobia. Alvin helped arrange a tight lease for ninety-nine years with the owners of the property, the Dippsy Doodle Cake Company, Limited, as Beneficial Nominee for the Lopp Trust. Patty paid $10,000 down, which was all the money he had saved from his cookies, plus $10,000 he’d begged from his aging parents in Brooklyn, plus $2,500 from Maxine and $1,000 from Laverne. It was theirs.

  Robbie, always the nice smile, the black turtleneck, the handsome silver bracelet, the muscled gymnast’s body, drew up plans as best he could under the grief of some difficulties pertaining to his current lover’s penchant for fucking around elsewhere. To effect the extensive renovations and purchase the best of sound equipment, additional monies were secured by renting out part of the excess basement space to what Patty at first thought was Tiny Tots, Inc., a job lotter of kiddies’ clothes, preschool to preteen, but which, after opening, turned out to be The Pits, a rather special gay bar. The upstairs partners were naturally upset to find competition quite so close at foot, but after Patty, unknown to Maxine, had paid a few visits to the place—as an exploratory observer, of course—and obtained true satisfaction from one blow job given and two anal intercourses, one given and one received, on his recommendation they decided not to press charges. “Listen!” he’d said, “a little competition can only help.”

  The strange bedfellows were to get along just fine, even after The Pits became a wee bit too notorious for the quality for the stage show, all those outré extensions of the anatomy’s natural abilities, all played in various forms of repertoire, thus causing overflow crowds of uptown slummers, visiting firemen, and other assorted pleasure seekers, including New York’s leading fag hag, Adriana la Chaise, disguised as a man, who, while a faggot to the extent that she evades the responsibilities that her brains, her abilities, and her energies, in a more enlightened age, would have channeled, via adult commitments, via more positive injections, into a needful society, was, nevertheless, by clitoral choice, straight, though it was her habit to enjoy slouching in dark corners, wearing military attire, sailor’s suits or soldier’s, and watch the boys do things to each other, and enjoy fainting when the beauties on the stage wilted to the floor, only to be watered by huge blacks wearing hip-length Goodyear waders and furry guardsman’s toppers and tipping wax from large Rigaud candles that sizzled neath their stream, her distinguished presence, albeit in mufti, being naturally noteworthy enough to enter the Divine Bella’s twice-weekly column in Women’s Wear, so that Billy Boner, who owned The Pits, then imposed strict membership and attire and inspection requirements, which only made business even better, both downstairs and up.

  Yes, both Balalaika and The Pits were now like old standards that keep playing and playing.

  In Balalaika’s office this Friday afternoon, before such a very big weekend, Patty, Maxine, and Laverne were talking, while Patty opened their weekly shipment of cookies and noted that neither Fig Newtons nor Oreos had been sent, but Pecan Sandies.

  Patty, while wondering what the hell they would do with seventy pounds of greasy Pecan Sandies, thought he would try to edge into the problem gracefully. “Listen,” he said, “I’m beginning to think that I don’t know what sex is all about.”

  “That’s the first I’ve heard about it,” Maxine said, sampling several of the wrong order and beginning to study his heavy dark brows in the small mirror he’d pulled out of his Gap shirt of black-and-blue plaid.

  “He told me, Leather Louie did, that it was his own special world, he’d made it just for himself, and he showed me where he strings up a number, on his gallows, erected right there, in his own apartment…”

  “In the Dakota?” Maxine was commencing to notice several stubby black hairs bristling out of alignment.

  “…in the Dakota. Listen, he beats the shit out of them with the kind of whip I haven’t seen since Mutiny on the Bounty.”

  “He showed you the whip?” Laverne sensed the conversation drifting into tributaries he’d been trying so hard to leave unrafted.

  “And the gallows. And the secret, hidden room, formerly I guess a maid’s room. But big enough. Blood on the wall. Which he giggled as he pointed out. Giggled.”

  “Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Hidden Room,” Maxine said, extricating his Avon tweezers from the back pocket of his jeans.

  “He tortures himself with his sexual fantasies,” Laverne ventured.

  “But he’s a very sympathetic person,” Patty said. “And I truly feel that underneath his appetite for extreme sadism—which he talks about very precisely, very movingly, admitting that most sadists think they’re ugly men, physically, and incapable of relating or feeling—there’s a loving human being. Hidden. Fighting to get out.”

  “Certainly fighting,” Maxine said, the tweezers now poised and ready to pluck.

  “Did he elucidate upon his…encounters?” Laverne’s toe was now succumbing, dipping into recollection.

  “Scenes. They’re called scenes. He says he prefers an evening with three scenes. The first two are pretend and the third is for real.”

  “How does he personally differentiate?” Laverne was sinking deeper.

  “He says during the third he will push the masochist further than he’s ever been pushed before. It’s in accomplishing this that the true climax for both of them occurs. I hope I’m quoting him correctly.”

  Laverne nodded to himself. Yes, it sounded familiar, only too correctly reported. “He does it to avoid love,” he mumbled.

  “Love? What love?” Maxine plucked once, twice. “Where has love been displayed? I have heard nothing about love.” Then, holding up the offending black mothers to the light, captured successfully between the grip of his forged pinchers, he added: “I’d never let anyone do that to me. There’s a growing interest in this subject I find revolting. Our sexual fantasies are ruining us. Torture. Sheer torture. We torture ourselves with our sexual fantasies. What, may I ask, were you doing in the Dakota taking this guided tour with Leather Louie?”

  “Listen, I was just curious. So many new things to check out. New kinds of love. Must keep up-to-date.”

  “I repeat: what love? Are you not confusing sex and love?” Maxine asked. What was Patty trying to tell him? Was Patty unhappy in their happy home?

  “Yes, yes, who among us does not at some time confuse sex and love?” Laverne’s thoughts had now slipped fu
lly back to Dinky. Yes, yes, it was sexual fantasies that had done the evil deed.

  Maxine released the hairs like so much scum and, pleased with his excisions, the even furrow of his handiwork, replaced the instrument in his right cheek pocket. “Leather Louie is a sick queen and love and sex are different items, Patty.”

  “Leather Louie isn’t a sick queen. He’s a composer who’s been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times and has a lovely smile. I’d take him anywhere, providing he wasn’t wearing his ritualistic gear.” Patty now slapped Maxine’s hand from a repeat sampling of the Pecan Sandies and wondered when he’d have the courage to come right out with it, communicate the news that their happy home was about to become not so happy.

  Laverne hauled himself back to his schoolteacher role. “We…we should be smarter.”

  “Listen, I only said that I don’t know what sex is all about!” Patty slammed the carton of cookies closed. He only knew that he wanted to leave Maxine and move in with Juanito, Capriccio’s Puerto Rican d.j. with the skin of velvet, tasting of honey and maple sugar.

  Laverne stood up and looked out the tiny window, across the highway, over the river and far away, at least to New Jersey, so ugly, as were his thoughts of earlier eras. When would insight, knowledge, hope, and beauty meld? “No,” he uttered to the far horizons, not looking to see if his best friends were ready for another of his major statements, not realizing that they no longer received them as major, just as part of his much too long ordeal of rejecting Dinky Adams. “No!” he said again. “We don’t have anything together. And, as an elite, a minority privileged to count among its large, if indistinct membership, many of the world’s greatest minds and talents and potentialities—though in undershirts and jeans on the dance floors of Balalaika and Capriccio at five in the morning very few of us are exactly capable of thought—as this true elite we should have more of our collective acts, and scenes, together. We have the ultimate in freedom—we have absolutely no responsibilities!—and we’re abusing it. My sister-in-law does not speak to me, not because I’m a faggot, to which news she is now adjusted, as am I, but because she says I’m a coward, I’m not in there pitching to make this world a better place, I’m running away, I’m not relating to anyone successfully, I’m not proving to the world or to myself that I know what to do with this freedom, and Leather Louie isn’t helping me, while she is chained to a mobile home in Mobile, Alabama. If I could do that, then I’d be listened to, respected, not scorned, mocked, feared as something unfit to teach children. But when I look around me, all I see is fucking. All we do is fuck. With dildoes and gallows and in the bushes and on the streets. My sister-in-law doesn’t fuck on the streets.”

  Maxine decided enough was enough. “Laverne, please stop being so heavy.” He patted Patty’s tush. “When there is love, everything can be worked out. Patty, how can they not have sent Oreos?”

  “No one will notice the difference,” Patty answered. “And they might make a nice change.” He sighed to himself. He couldn’t do it.

  Laverne was not finished. “What did Leather Louie give as the reason for the sadist pushing the masochist further than he’s ever been pushed before?”

  Now it was Patty’s turn to look across the river. “Pushed to a greater connection to the ultimate, and a search for identity on the part of both of them to find out who and what they truly are. Which brings them pleasure.”

  “Crazy. That’s what and who they truly are!” Maxine pulled out the tweezers again and studied his face in the mirror again and found out he had nothing else to pluck, causing him nervous frustration. “You’re right,” he said to Laverne. “We don’t have our acts together.”

  Laverne nodded and sighed. Yes, sex and love were different items when he wanted them in one, and yes, having so much sex made having love impossible, and yes, sadism was only a way to keep people away from us and masochism only a way to clutch them close, and yes, we are sadists with some guys and masochists with other guys and sometimes both with both, and yes, we’re all out of the closet but we’re still in the ghetto and all I see is guys hurting each other and themselves. But how to get out! And yes, the world is giving us a bad name and we’re giving us a bad name and one of us has got to stop and it’s not going to be the world. But even knowing all of this…where am I? And how to say all this to anyone, when no one is listening, no one wants to hear, not even his two best friends, whom he sensed weren’t listening to each other, oh what good were words, words didn’t help me and Dinky, what good were words when acts were all that counted?

  He reached out and took Maxine’s hand and he reached out and took Patty’s hand and he hoped and prayed they were all trying to feel as one.

  How do I feel about being pissed on?

  Fred mulled this thought as he walked uptown to make final weekend plans with Abe. His body wore its marine fatigues, its sturdy work boots from L. L. Bean of Freeport, Maine, its plaid shirt of flannel, already too hot and ready to give way to summer Lacostes or gray Healthknit T’s; his hand carried, how unpredictable the temperature, the Navy aviator’s flight jacket by the Brothers Schott; and his heart, head, face, smile, crotch, and all interior regions wore the warm, anticipating mittens of Dinky’s forthcoming return.

  These articles of clothing, or permutations of same (khakis, Levis, with button flies only, and not preshrunk, painter’s pants, Adidas, items of butch-ery) were the uniform. He felt safest wearing them, though he knew not why. Was it hiding? Or homogenizing? A way of staying anonymous to the outside world but recognizable to the inmates? If clothes make the man, what were they making? A way of insisting they were men, more men than men? And why was the same guy Hot and fuckable in a Pendleton and not in a Polo? And why did black boots on Christopher Street lure more fellows than brown? And were leather and jockstraps and football jerseys and satin boxing shorts all a send-up and a turn-on, and was this a clue to the faggot sensibility? He paused to juggle jacket and insight and to jot a note in his faithful Wire-In-Dex for future filing.

  He did not, as many others did, wear-and-tell all. He scorned the ass kerchiefs and keys, posted and peeking for all the boys to see: navy for fuck and yellow for piss and mustard for big cock and red for fist fucking and robin’s egg for 69 and lighter blue for cock sucker and olive for military and green for hustler and brown for shit and orange for Anything and this kerchief or keys on the Left Side means I Do It To You and on the Right Side means You Do It To Me and on certain streets on certain days at certain times the code might be slightly altered if you knew certain people, and though all of this told all, what did any of it mean?

  Yes, he thought, to Stendhal and Columbus and Vespucci and Boswell, I must now add Lévi-Strauss.

  Then, striding forth with renewed gusto, pocketing his note pad, momentarily free of any unsettling thoughts, he once again renewed his pledge:

  Yes! I must go forward, continue to go forth and forward, to encounter all and to forge in my smithy the uncreated conscience of my sex!

  Ever since Miss Australian Butter had been replaced by Peetra Kant, a leggy model he’d discovered while viewing a South African documentary on Gold, Abe had seen little of Mrs. Bronstein Number Four. Peetra loved to shop and, since she was an organized young woman with a tendency toward great methodology, she had shopped her way from London, where Abe had viewed her, through New York, where Abe had married her, and was currently applying her vim to Paris, where rumor had it she might be about to deliver forth the third Bronstein heir, before motoring south to St. Paul de Vence for an indefinite purchase.

  So Abe, while instructing his older son and lawyer, Stephen, to prepare papers for divorce and possible custody proceedings, and before setting forth to seek another poopsie to brighten his declining years, moved back in with Ephra.

  It was not that Ephra either wanted him or was forgiving. She would answer “Who wants him?” or “Forgive him?” to a discussion of either topic. But the large Park Avenue apartment she preferred to “that wilderness he
gives to me on Lake Candlewood which is not even a natural lake but a man-made lake where once, years ago, we had a happy summer,” was in his name and he still liked to live in it, even though Peetra had insisted they buy the Soho loft, now Richard’s, where Abe had sprained an ankle, perhaps on the night young junior was conceived, disembarking from the circuitous metal staircase from their aerial nuptial bower to make himself a hot Ovaltine to regain his strength.

  Abe, home again on Park and 58th, looked down ten floors and across to where there was once a fine Mayflower donut shop and where there was now only yet another store pushing chotchkies, the chotchkification of America, and spoke to young Fred Lemish.

  “Fred-chen, I worry, I worry. Is the world really ready for a faggot-sexual movie? Are the mommies of this world really ready to learn about the sodomitic activities of their bubbalahs?”

  “Abe, it’s time. I know it. And I must write about what I know. All these years of masquerade, writing Rebecca, thinking Rupert. There’s millions of me now, Abe. The closets are empty. New York has no more full closets. Please, let’s be brave, bold pioneers!”

  “Freddie, New York is not the world. We are more sophisticated. The rest of the world is not sophisticated. The rest of the world is Main Street, the story of a doctor and his young wife. Please, have you given any thought to writing the story of a doctor and his young wife?”

  “Abe, neither of us is interested in medicine. The great innovators, the landmark men, are the ones who went against the current of the main street. Besides, the first respectable faggot Love Story will clean up. Ryan O’Neal and Robert DeNiro together will bring them out of every household, tent, and igloo in the world.”