Following a man in his late 30s (based on Kramer himself) who is seeking out a loving, long-term relationship in a sea of hedonism, the novel has a clear message: gay men need to start loving each other instead of being so obsessed with getting fucked up and (literally and figuratively) fucking each other.
We have the ultimate in freedom – we have absolutely no responsibilities! – and we're abusing it. Upon publication, Faggots was dismissed by many as puritanical and self-loathing for its criticism of gay men's obsession with vanity, promiscuity and recreational drug use. Yet, when AIDS hit a few years later, the same words of warning sounded almost prophetic. And while, on one level, the book is a wild (if at times problematic) window into an era of gay culture 40 years in the past, it also felt like it had a lot to say about gay culture today. What even does it mean to say "gay culture"? In mainstream gay media, the phrase almost always refers to a fairly specific subset of the LGBTQ "community" largely made up of white gay cis men - even though many of the battles won around queer rights were fought by people of colour, trans and gender-nonconforming folks, and queer women, and in fact the modern Pride movement itself was in large part initiated by Black trans women. If an impression of a monolithic "gay culture" defined by such a homogeneous demographic exists, it is because white gay cis men have until very recently dominated mainstream representation under the LGBTQ umbrella and have, in general, been handed a level of privilege in the last decade that is wildly disproportionate to any other demographic under said umbrella. (Prophetically enough, Fire Island is where the climax of Faggots - Kramer's excoriation of "gay culture" - takes place.) The most extreme and problematic representatives of this "culture" are the men, one of whom knowingly had COVID-19, who partied on packed beaches on Fire Island last week. Reading Faggots this past month made me consider my own inheritance of its themes.