Faggots is a 1978 novel by Larry Kramer. It is a satirical portrayal of 1970s New York's very visible gay community in a time before AIDS. The novel's portrayal of promiscuous sex and recreational drug use provoked controversy and was condemned by some elements within the gay community.

Summary

The main character, Fred Lemish, is loosely modeled on Kramer. Lemish wants to find a loving, long-term relationship. His desires are frustrated as he stumbles through an emotionally cold series of glory holes, bathhouses, BDSM encounters and group sex. He becomes disillusioned with the 1970s "fast lane" lifestyle dominating the gay subculture in and around New York. Lemish also expresses discomfort with the widespread use of multiple street and prescription drugs helping to maintain the party atmosphere. Faggots details the use of over two dozen 1970s party drugs and intoxicants such as Seconal, poppers, LSD, Quaaludes, alcohol, marijuana, Valium, PCP, cocaine and heroin. The book moves through, among other locales, a gay bathhouse called the "Everhard" (based on the Everard Baths), a large disco named Capriccio, an orgy at the apartment of a successful gay lawyer, the spectacular opening of a club called The Toilet Bowl, and ends with a tumultuous weekend on Fire Island.

Characters

While Faggots contains over sixty named persons, only a few are fully fleshed-out characters. Some of the principal actors are listed here:

Reception

The book has been influential over the years, though many have criticized Kramer for perceived negativity toward his subject matter and writing style. Upon Faggots' release, the book was banned in the only gay bookstore in Manhattan. The Washington Post noted that the book focused on "a peculiarly ugly, vicious, perverse, depraved, sado-masochistic subculture in which love does not exist–a subculture that homosexuals have been at pains to say is not representative of homosexual life" and slammed Kramer for "Pretty Lousy Writing." The New York Times also criticized Kramer's writing abilities, calling it "sentence for sentence, some of the worst writing [...] encountered in a published manuscript." In the advent of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, it was discovered that the drug use, multiple partner sex and other behavior condemned in Faggots increased the risk of HIV, which seemed to validate Kramer's criticism of homosexual promiscuity. Kramer was somewhat redeemed in the gay community. The gay scholar John Lauritsen commented on Faggots, saying, "The book showed courage and insight. It touched a raw nerve. It was disgusting, and very funny." The historian Martin Duberman writes that "to me, Faggots represented not uncanny clairvoyance but merely Kramer's own garden-variety sex-negativism".