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Faggots
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780802136916
ISBN: 0802136915
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 384
Publication Date: June 01, 2000
Publisher: Grove Press
Studio: Grove Press
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Editorial Review:
Very few writers have the prescience or audacity to produce one of the standard works of their era--not a classic, necessarily, but a book that defines its own cultural moment in startling new terms, like One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest or Portnoy's Complaint. Activist and rabble-rouser Larry Kramer has the distinction of having written not only one of the earliest and best-known plays on AIDS, The Normal Heart, but also the astonishing satire of gay urban sexual mores Faggots, perhaps the most reviled novel in the gay literary canon. A grim, graphic expansion on John Rechy's Numbers, which chronicled a hustler's soulless game of sexual conquest, Kramer's pornopticon turns off many readers by about page 3, when its hero, the screenwriter Fred Lemish, is offered an array of dubious pleasures in a private room at the infamous Everard Baths in New York. What Lemish really wants, of course, is true love, preferably from his elusive boyfriend, Dinky Adams. But as long as he's in the room...
Celebrated and excoriated when it first appeared in 1978, this reprint of a gay anticlassic is not for the faint of heart. For the rest of us, it is a harsh, fascinating, and somewhat eerie revisitation of the carnal excesses of a generation that couldn't hear the bell tolling over the disco beat.
Larry Kramer's Faggots has been in print since its original publication in 1978 and has become one of the best-selling novels about gay life ever written. The book is a fierce satire of the gay ghetto and a touching story of one man's desperate search for love there, and reading it today is a fascinating look at how much, and how little, has changed.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Is This How It Was?
Kramer, Larry. "Faggots", Grove Press Reprint, 2000.
Is This How It Was?
Amos Lassen and Literary Pride
When "Faggots" by Larry Kramer first appeared in 1978 people were up in arms. Some did not understand that what Kramer had written was a satire of gay life in New York City. Some felt he had written an expose of some of the seediest aspects of gay life when it reality it was a touching tale of one man's search for love and quite a desperate search at that. ... Read More
Rating: - Unscruplously Sexy and Liberating
What an amazing journey Larry Kramer takes us on with this book. He takes us back to a time long gone but never forgotten. One of the most imporant books in gay literature.
Rating:  - Tricks Are For Kids
First published in 1978, Larry Kramer's controversial novel FAGGOTS offers the story of Fred Lemish, four days short of his 40th birthday, determined to find true love and on an odyssey through the bars, clubs, baths, and various orgy rooms that catered to gay New Yorkers during that period. The result is a kaleidoscopic vision of the era, a novel that swirls with many characters, many locales, and as many sexual activities as can be crammed into its 350 plus pages.
The novel is, in ... Read More
Rating: - Unbridled Genius. One of the best
It is as if James Joyce were alive and queer in 1973 New York. Kramer is an author, dramatist and activist who helped found Act-Up. In this harsh, funny, terrifying, graphic, pornographic, brilliant, compelling book, he both honors and skewers the "gay scene" of the early '70s.
This book is simply required (though at times difficult) reading.
Rating: - Jeremiah Was an Optimist, Kramer Was a Bullfrog
The problem(s) with most would-be gadfly/naysayer/doomsday prophet types? They can't seem to transcend their own egotism, and they never find anything nice to say about anybody. Even Jeremiah had the sense to prophesy that things would eventually get better, and to refrain from blaming everybody but himself.
(A by no means irrelevant aside: by now, Kramer has lost most of whatever credibility he ever had on the AIDS crisis by calling too many undeserving people "murderer" too many times. Still, ... Read More
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