Faggots

by Larry Kramer

  “Six. Seven. Ten. Who knows. It’s still early. I do it till my mouth feels like putty. I’ve still got some feeling left. Where’s Fred? Still waiting for Dinky?”

  “Yeah. He won’t listen to me. Not even a call or a postcard.”

  “I fixed them up. I thought their neuroses would mesh. They both talk about love. Dinky was after me and when I rejected him he went off with Laverne. Though we continued to fuck secretly, of course. I think I’ll hit The Pits and grab a beer. See you.”

  Anthony watched as Frigger crossed the highway. Then he turned toward the building. Why am I still hesitating? He lit his second joint.

  Randy Dildough stood in his thirtieth-floor suite in the Pierre Tower and looked downtown toward his thirtieth-floor office in the Pan-Pacific Tower and thought that it would be wonderful and fitting if he could walk from there to here. If a Jesus walked on the water, couldn’t a Dildough fly through the air?

  Randy did not think his last name an unsatisfactory one—combining as it did allusions to the American Big Three: sex, money, and food—because Randy tried not to think that anything about his fine self was less than perfection. And with such positive thinking, Randy has risen to the top, president of Marathon Leisure Time, part of the Pan-Pacific family of companies, headed by Myron Musselman, and at only thirty years old!, a true feat, to achieve control of a major American supplier of entertainment at such a young age, no doubt reflected in his constant yclepture by the nation’s press as the Kennedy of Leisure Time.

  He is attractive, his trim, compact, streamlined strawberry-blond-headed body sporting the snappiest of custom suits, shirts, ties, shoes, manicures, to which totality is added an exuding of strong sexuality, as so many men of power so exude, together with his dandified love for the dazzling, insolently manifested in his rabid acquisition of the latest in chauffeurs, Malibu houses, electronic wizardies, posturings, rare flowers, the company of only the greatest stars, the biggest deals, and his secret cavortings in the dens and vicepots and cesspools of the underground faggot world.

  Pause to reflect on this. The head of one of America’s major Stock Exchanged companies is a faggot. No mean feat, again, this.

  He loves living on that dangerous razor’s edge. On the one side, he satisfies his need to constantly glitter, dazzle all of his audience, baffle all of his victims, and look down from Up There on everything down here, as he continues building his empire by destruction of the enemy, humiliation of his rivals, in so doing becoming, in the grand tradition of his country, The Big Man, The Hero, silhouetted against the landscape as etched by Forbes.

  And, on the other, stands the Dreaded Secret, which he knows could fell his growing redwood.

  Such conflict, particularly in anyone who’s horny, would, needless to say, streak a blow dry with a certain frost of confusion. Who could ask for anything more?

  So, while it will not be the custom to present case histories for all of our faggots, let’s tarry a moment on this particularly unusual one.

  Cunard Rancé Evin Dildough was born thirty years ago in Stockton, California, of two fine Americans, Yvonne and Ralph Dildough. The name was Dutch-German-French-English and, as the family had distinguished branches in each of these fine countries, Ralph’s father had been reluctant to change it when he emigrated to America and discovered shortly thereafter that an instrument of the same pronunciation, if different usage, was making the rounds. Ralph owned extensive and fertile farm acreage that prospered with grapes and asparagus, and he had loved his only child very much. Yvonne, too, was a diligent teacher and a watchful and loving mother to her growing boy. Both parents were deeply religious, well-read, well-educated, well-versed in Gesell, Ilg, and Spock, and were most supportive and constructively critical throughout all of Randy’s formative years. He had, in fact, the perfect American upbringing.

  Stander F. Lure, in his classic study of homosexuality, The Perversion of Mount Ararat (which takes as its text the Biblical maxim: “…and the sons of Sennacherib shall rise up and smoot the father of his own thing…”), has this to say: “There are certain instances when perversion develops from no known cause—where parental figures have been accepted and where roles have not been confused, where, in fact, there is no reason at all obvious why the offspring should have emerged warped and abnormal. When this occurs, one must look for other, perhaps deeper and less obvious causes: incredible boredom in the home, for instance, or the desire of the child to be different if only because his parents appear so perfect, or, as a possibility, and please bear in mind that I offer this only as a possibility, where the child is just plainly a wayward, restless wind.”

  Randy lay dormant and did nothing abnormal until the age of fifteen, at which time he had his first experience with sadism. Like so many things in life, it was unexpected and unplanned. It happened like this:

  The ninth-grade class, of which Randy was a member, was preparing a play of its own devising about the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. The woodworking class had dismantled part of the stage floor, in order to facilitate the building of a mock river bed, in which Nancellen Richtofen, portraying Mrs. Betsy Ross, the first woman to discover sparkling sands in the river’s stream (the children were allowed to mold history as they saw fit in this early landmark attempt at psychodrama) would wade, only half of her pencil-thin body visible to the audience, the other half standing on a newly constructed platform built several feet below the level of the stage floor. Nancellen, being a tall girl, already six feet at fifteen years (useful for a Bendel’s model later but a pain in the heart now), it was decided by Mr. Petronius of Woodworking II to make the lower portion about seven feet long, the length of a good coffin, he mused to himself, half in jest and half in wish fulfillment, because, if you asked him, the whole play was a fucking waste of time, tearing up a stage just so a string-bean girl could proclaim: “Oh, sparkling sands, what doth I witness neath your trickle?,” and dangerous, too, in case she, or anyone else for that matter, should fall forward, either by tripping or being pushed by one of the many playful lads who might be overdoing the admonitions of Mr. Proctor, the director and history teacher, to “Be boisterous, boys, remember you are rough and tough, the sort who made this country Great!”

  Randy’s role in this pageant was to wear an enormous black cape and, in the person of Lord Baltimore, come from England to survey “the scene” in California before going off to Maryland to stake his claim, wave it about with furious rippling sounds and sinister motions, rather like Dracula, so that Nancellen and three boys several feet her juniors, each equipped with a mock rifle, would be mightily frightened and one of the boys would yell “Fire at the Stranger,” and the three boys would fire at Lord Baltimore, killing him, thus causing America’s entry into the Boer War.

  Worried that he might fall into the pit if he did not rehearse his cape maneuvers, Randy decided to go to the auditorium after school to do just that. Approaching the stage, he heard gurgling sounds from the mock river bed, and stealing up behind the small-scale version of Sutter’s Mill itself, complete with posters proclaiming “Wonder Bread is made here from our fine flour,” he peered down on the flicking figures of Nancellen Richtofen and fat Hattie Illcit. Joining them together was the first two-headed dildo that Randy had ever seen, perhaps one of the first to reach Stockton, certainly the first to be used by two fifteen-year-old girls on the premises of its junior-senior high school auditorium. Back and forth the two girls slid, up and down, top to bottom, tipsy ho and a bottle of rum, slithering with mounting enthusiasm and completely unaware that Randy gazed down upon them and his namesake with a growing interest and finger-pinched nose, perhaps because Hattie was a girl known around town for not being big on Johnson’s Baby Powder. As the dildoettes came closer and closer to fruition, Randy, in one of those first seizures the inspiration for which he was never able to pinpoint, grabbed hammer, nails, several boards of original stage planking, all courteously left available in a sloppy pile by Mr. Petronius’s boys from Woodworking II,
and set to work sledging in time to the grunts and growls from below. By the time orgasm was reached—the young ladies miraculously attaining it simultaneously—darkness had overcome them, along with a drop in oxygen.

  “Was it that dark in here the last time we done it,” Hattie inquired, “or is it just because I might of landed my face in your cooze?”

  Both girls then reached up and found the truth: not only were they boarded in but someone had obviously been witness to their actions.

  Randy, standing on top of them, felt a surge of power zitz through him. In the dark protection of the auditorium and his Baltimore cape, with two coiled females only inches beneath his feet, completely in his power and ignorant of the invisible force that held them captive, only this shadow knew, the True Dildough, with great pleasure and tremendous gutsy motions, yanked his full-grown penis to a gigantically pleasurable orgasm. The spurts of his semen, like some fire hose uncoiled into action, lobbed into the air and scored a direct hit on the Wonder Bread sign. He stood there for a moment, afterward, feeling wonderful himself, feeling completely his own man; he then replaced his penis neatly inside his Montgomery Ward corduroys and went home, stopping, courteously, on the way, to place an anonymous call to the police, informing them that two girls were caught fucking with each other under the school stage and an old man had sealed them in. The girls were duly rescued but, unable to dispose of the enormous dildo, they were both expelled. (Hattie married the town plumber and Nancellen, her six-foot form soon filled out in more pleasing proportions, went East to Miss Porter’s, Vassar, New York, our story, and full-time devotion to the Sapphic code.)

  Innately, at this juncture, Randy sensed that he was on the royal road to self-knowledge. Little did he know that the pattern, like a quivering Royal-pudding-mold left longer in the icebox, was now being set. The reflexes were being conditioned. World beware! He had enjoyed himself, God knows; but once you’ve enjoyed the thrill of jerking off over two bodies you’ve buried alive at fifteen, what can you do for kicks at sixteen? And wouldn’t you be completely worn out, exhausted, bereft of both ideas and energy by the time you were fifty? To hell with fifty; what about thirty?

  Well, our lad was now only sixteen and one day he decided to crucify a saint. There was a saint in his high-school class, recently moved here from Salt Lake City, one Robbie Swindon, who never had a bad word to say about anyone and who always had a smile and a word of positive thinking for each (we all know the type), in addition to which he was not only good-looking, the president of his class, and liked by all the girls, and boys, too (we all know the type), but his private parts, which Randy had witnessed in the ever-popular gym period, brought out a strange sensation in Randy’s mouth which made him want to know that type, too. He could not put his finger on it exactly, but he instinctively knew that he wanted to take that saintly penis in his mouth and suck it. He had never done such a thing before and he had not had it done to him, nor had he read about it or heard about it in the casual banterings pubescents so often enjoy during their periods of Open Play. All he knew was that he was going to somehow capture young Robbie and suck that thing.

  As fate would have it, events played into young Randy’s hands or, if you will, mouth. Once again the auditorium and a pageant would prove useful. This time, Easter, with its ever-stirring panoply, its mythology made tangible, its “Christ the Lord is Risen Today, Allelujah,” would turn the trick. When it came to playing Jesus, there of course was no one in the entire school to hold a votive candle to young Robbie. There he stood, or rather, hung, that beautiful lithe body, clad only in cut-down Fruit of the Looms, leaning against the old rugged cross, reincarnated from Sutter’s Mill leftovers, his palms and shoulders and feet rubbed black and red with burnt cork and Tangee lipstick, his still hairless armpits circled to the wood with thick white rope, his eyes thrown agonizingly heavenward. Yes, he was nigh unto perfectly cast, and watching him, Randy almost came in his own pants. How to get that dick in his mouth? How to do it?

  He elected outrageous tactics. When the stage lights dimmed, then expired completely on the tableau of lone figure up on Old Rugged, Randy disconnected and pocketed several prime fuses from the backstage main electrical complex, then stealthily made his way on padded feet (in this pageant he was more happily cast as a Roman centurion, his body only lightly encumbered with his briefs and crosshatched strappings, his already erect penis easily available for exit through a distinctly non-Roman conjunction of royal purple sash and Y-front Jockey’s) to the center of the stage where Robbie hung crucified.

  “Who’s that?” Robbie whispered, hearing footsteps nearing him and wondering why the stage lights had not retwinkled in the East when the curtain had closed, as they’d rehearsed it.

  He received no reply. He did however feel a heavenly wet sensation in his genital area and, being a good Mormon, wondered if perhaps something in the nature of a quasi-religious experience might be transpiring, much akin to a Catholic’s stigmata of the hands. He did not know whether to cry out in puzzlement or prayer. If God were in fact rewarding him in some way for being such a good Jesus, as his Mommy had indicated He might, he decided he’d better recite some passages from a particularly latter-day prayer of Joseph Smith’s.

  As he mumbled and recited, Randy sucked and slobbered, and Robbie’s penis shortly heeded its call to glory. The bigger it got, the more fervent the liturgical incantations, and, at the moment of orgasm, Robbie, for one brief moment, thought he was entering the Kingdom of Heaven. He almost passed out. It was his very first coming. Randy had bagged his first virgin. Swallowing every drop that the young Jesus had given him, Randy then climbed down from Mr. Petronius’s three-stepped stairway to paradise and withdrew into the wings. And not a moment too soon!

  The auditorium lights went on, the curtain swung open, and there, before a simply riveted audience of nine hundred boys and girls, swung a wan and exhausted Jesus, his panties down around his lipsticked ankles and his dangling (unfortunately uncircumcised and therefore historically miscast) penis dribbling the last few drops of distinctly mortal fluid. Neither Robbie nor his audience knew exactly what was up, or down, though all were beginning to consider that whatever had happened had nothing to do with Easter.

  Randy, beside himself with the joy of completion, a task well mastered, stood now in a cubicle in the empty boys’ room, wiping his own wet member off with toilet paper. Yes, he’d brought it off. What next?

  Let us not toil with his continued exploits in secondary school. Since he began more frequently tarrying with the fellows who hung out at the notorious Casa de Blanca, it was not long before he learned that the male body appeared to be limited in what it could give and receive from another male body. A fuck here and there, a blow job, a jerk-off—: once you’ve been to the White House, where’s left to visit?

  With the solution of this problem he was fortunate, as have been so many successful men, in acquiring the services of a mentor. Lance Heather was a true teacher. Randy met the handsome young blond Alan Ladd while they were both on a college student tour of Universal Studios. Despite the effeminacy of his patronymic, Lance was the leader of the Los Angeles organization known as the Defenders of Zeus. This group met twice a week, more often if their bodies recovered, in an abandoned ranch house in Nichols Canyon. There they played not only with ropes and thongs and whips but also with chains and buzzsaws and live snakes. Lance had not been kidding when, on that guided tour, he had promised Randy “many a new kick and thrill.”

  And so it was while watching one of the members fucking himself by sitting on a stationary twelve-inch rubber dildo while being bound hand and foot, the dildo impaled to a cross, the cross mounted on a stage, and the fellow also sucking the cock of a gentleman clad entirely in chain mail, except of course for his genitals, which were exposed, and enormous, and holding in his hand while mouth-fucking the impaled acolyte, not one but two hissing rattlesnakes, reputed to have been defanged but dripping something from their mouths nevertheless, all of thi
s witnessed by forty-nine other members, each donged with grease, each jerking off either himself or a fellow clubber, in some sort of cockamamie version of the daisy chain, don’t Southern Californians have wonderful imaginations, whatever happened to King of the Mountain?, well, perhaps this was King of the Mountain—it was while watching all of this, and of course participating, he couldn’t be a spoilsport, that Randy had an epiphany. He began to realize to what lengths it would soon be necessary to travel to receive kicks sufficient to cause erection, and while he was finding these ceremonies reasonably exciting (and certainly a nice time-out from his studies), in that he had a good stiff one on while those two snakes were up there hissing away, he knew he had neither the time nor the abundant imagination to play “Can You Top This?” every time he wanted to get his rocks off.

  So and thus, while he was dimly aware that his rejection of Lance Heather, who was mightily enamored of him, was not taken graciously (and might prove bothersome in the chapters of his life to come), Randy knew it was time to reroute his direction, to quit both the Defenders of Zeus and Pepperdine University (a rather right-wing, religious place, on the way to Malibu) and, with an appetite whetted by so much experience in theatricals, to enter show business at last.

  His lengendary rise has been amply documented in the annals of business and finance, not to mention the tabloid press. He went from mail room to board room in lickety-split time by a combination of charm, insolence, innuendo, instinct, chutzpa, brains, various chicaneries and good lucks—in other words, your typical American rise to the top, stopping along the way to mingle among these woofs and warps those other typically American threads that have so helped to weave his legend. From the mail room of a major network he sighted and rescued the skids-ing career of a once-famous chanteuse, restoring her quite miraculously to international chirpdom while zinging from her new revenues an over-generous portion of her notes; through this song he met and thoughtfully escorted to premieres a famous actress, only to be shot, in a parking lot, in his groin, by her jealous husband, a major studio’s Head; he displaced said Head in said studio’s affections, elbowing out as well his own sagging Uncle Darrel; he conveniently married a convenient Lesbian, only to be shot at once again when she turned and took up with a jealous Mafia chieftain; he forged some checks and launched his first successful Number One Nielsen series, Men At War!—yes, he’d made it to the top, and the annals of business and finance, not to mention the tabloid press, noted all with grateful thanks. Such good copy! Such a captain of industry! And such a cocksman! (And still a virgin!)