In today’s post I connect an ‘Ode’ to pre-AIDS cruising by Larry Kramer to a couple of other crazy gay performances that I love—so it seemed to make sense that I should also record myself reading, although both Kramer and even my own post deserve a better narrator than me!
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I’m working on an essay on Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots—which I hated so much when I was 19 that I stopped reading only a few pages in, shortly after the narrator, an obvious stand-in for Kramer himself, wonders self-pityingly and self-congratulatingly if he’ll ever find a nice guy who appreciates Proust as much as he does.
Some years later I had a desperate crush on a Jewish boy who’d been taught to take himself for a lonesome genius. He complained to me, over lunch, knowing full well how much I was into him but somehow, bafflingly—some genius!—not knowing that one can hardly do better than yours truly, “I just want someone to read Montaigne with.” Now what about such poses of misunderstood brilliance revolt and seduce me, what about me wants and doesn’t want to inhabit them myself (a lover or crush is one way of having near me a kind of person I’d like, but couldn’t stand, to be), I hardly want to get into here, but the two episodes speak to a problem of gay literature, or rather, of gay criticism, and I suppose, mutatis mutandis, of any art and its audience. We hate seeing ourselves, what we are and what we want, accurately portrayed! Wilde says, “the rage of Caliban looking into the mirror.”
Maybe more than all the history of homophobic censorship or limitations of our small market-segment, what holds gay culture back is gays raging, seething and cringing when they look at themselves—how much more fun to see ourselves represented comically, safely obliquely and askew, with Carrie and her friends, or Frasier and Niles, acting like we do, without stirring up the “that’s not who I am! I hate that kind of fag!” incited by Looking, Bros, etc.
But, ok, I’ve read Faggots since then a couple of times—and unfortunately overcoming my annoyance at the insufferable protagonist (hey, I made it through Looking—and even a few episodes of Girls) only left me more directly confronted with the insufferable prose. Kramer is constantly getting in his own way with annoying little jokes, random observations, and what he thinks are clever phrases (now don’t you say anything to me about Caliban!).
Faggots is often called a gay version of Portnoy’s Complaint, and there is some of that, but it’s also like, a weirdly mass-market successful version of one of those insufferable Semiotexte autofictions from a French-by-way-of-LA degenerate who’s out to give a Continental intellectual gloss on cocksucking. Ellipses, exclamation marks, parataxis, name-dropping, deranged streams of consciousness crossing and one-dimensional characters—it’s honestly way more like Robert Gluck than either Gluck or Kramer might have wanted to think.
Sometimes, however, it totally works, as in this passage about cruising a transit station:
Anthony Montano lay flat on his back in the darkness of the Erie and Lackwanna terminal and wondered why. He then recollected that those three joints had been of Mantanuska Thunderfuck and had been ingested to courageously propel him inwards and had done just that. So while he might in a few moments just be able to pull himself up and climb those stairs and begin his search, he would, for the nonce, and to better ward off thoughts of imminent, surrounding dangers, or wretched concern over how to break the news to Winnie Heinz, compose an Ode again until strength, health, and muscular agility returned.
Ah, home away from home, ah black hole of Calcutta, ah windswept, storm-toss’d, fire-ravaged skeleton of former grandeurs! That you are still standing!, with your three stories gutted yet still here. Holes in you for entrance, holes within your stockings, fetid waters underneath, your bottom twisted and rippling like wooden waves, You Are a Woman! Our Ellie, Barbra, Kate, Bette, Diana, Marlene, Tallulah, Judy! Survivor, standing after all these ravages upon your face and body, from users and abusers of your finery, but still submitting, still bearing outrage, how many pints, quarts, gallons of semen spilled into your pock-marked skin?... now, now… into your tent creep this warm night, creep any night, crawling in and into this biggest womb and void of spacious blackness, total darkness, tread carefully, don’t trip, holes are many, beams are loose, floorboards missing, and oh the river is wide, and cold, and schmutzig, and beneath me, oi, also this building has no back, this lady wears a strapless, feel movement around me, who knows how many? Two thousand? Two hundred? Two? Me and my murderer? Me and my next beloved? What a fantasy trip, I don’t have to see you and you don’t have to see me, you are John Wayne with real hair, and so up up up, I am now getting up, ignore handpainted fluorescent warning: LAST JULY A GUY WAS MURDERED HERE AND ROBBED OF HIS CARTIER WATCH AND STABBED IN THE GUTS with the underscrawling: “Glad to hear someone’s got guts,” up up up and… as I grow more bold, does not a proud young woman inspired a return of strength, she’s made it, I Can, Too, sing it Barbra: “He’s my man and I love him, no matter that he’s left me,” sing it Greta: Mein Mann ist mein Herz und meine Liebe und mein Leben,” sing it Vera, “There’ll be birds of love and laughter, when you come back to after,” sing it, Edith, “mon homme, mon homme, mon homme, mon hoooooooooooooome,” and Barbara, fat Barbara, our new cookie, sing the anthem “Who’s going to make me gay now?” yeah girls, you made it, so can I, my heart’s still beating, my tit’s aren’t sagging, my pecker’s hopefully still pecking, I’ve made it through another winter, now I deserve a break today, go out, go up, go show them that I’m still Alive! Show them that I’m still gorgeous and still gutsy and desirable, and while I may be going down the tubes, I’ll go down getting my cock sucked as I start another year of life!
Wow! Not for nothing did Kramer write the screenplay to the movie version of DH Lawrence’s Women in Love (which contains almost two minutes of naked male wrestling) which proves in its blazingly purple dialogue how unbearable Lawrence’s writing really was. But here the excess works—in part through its ecstatic synthesis of diverse gay voices and energies, bringing together the dark transgressive cruisy vibes of Wojnarowicz’ Close to the Knives (which I can’t stand) with the camp of Koestenbaum’s book of aria-poems on his early fumbling orgasms and movie diva impersonations, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender.
It’s in that sweet spot of Sandra Bernhard channeling Sylvester, with the irony just a thin outer layer more revealing than protecting her tender identification with the doomed and loved scene she briefly inhabits. It’s Tim Miller ridiculously-earnestly conceiving himself in My Queer Body (racing past the straight sperm to ‘dialogue and power-share’ with a lesbian egg) and Buddy Cole mourning the loss of his gay friends in the early 90s to dinosaur attacks. Kramer’s text demands to be read aloud, on stage, by a real queen who can do all the voices or at least Lypsinka her way through them.
Questions remain. Is Alaska Thunderfuck 5000 heiress to the Ode’s herb? Are we actually supposed to imagine the text (oi!) as the voice of an Italian-American? How come I’d never heard Barbara Cook singing “He Was Too Good to Me”? Questions sure not to be answered in my forthcoming essay.
But how thrilling to remember that in an age when gay writing seems to be the reserve of fat losers who putter and mutter lethargically, sprinkling their involuted musings with tasteful glints of the ‘literary’ or superannuated postures of transgression (no one ever tell me again to read Greenwell or Purnell!!), that at the foundation of gaylit in the late 70s were writers like Kramer, who even if they were often unforgivably unstylish, clumsy, stupid, nevertheless so thrummed with vitality that they sometimes swept even annoyed readers up in pleasure, beyond the limits of good taste and the anxieties of identification. Am I Anthony or Fred Lemish (the Proust-loving grating protagonist)? I don’t know, I don’t care, in this moment I just want to be Larry Kramer serving cruisy Barbara Cook!
Bad take—Close to the Knives is great! Well, the more literary sections are, but the book might actually be my favorite piece of gay lit—a low bar, tbf. You are right on the money about why gay representation fails. I always felt that adultery novels, e.g., Anna Karenina, The Awakening, Madame Bovary, made better gay fiction than gay fiction—desire gone awry, hot girl problems, etc.
lol