Rating: 
Summary: Tricks Are For Kids
Review: 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 theory, a satirical condemnation of the lifestyle it displays--but Kramer makes a very fundamental mistake. He tends to assume that this sexual hedonism is the norm for gay men. He also creates a cast of characters who lack the inner resources to create any viable alternative to it. Consequently, the novel reads rather like a cleft stick: Kramer condemns his characters for failing to escape from what he essentially posits as an escape-proof trap.
That is a tremendous flaw, but it is hardly the only one. With relatively few exceptions, the characters are shallow--and while that is part of the point of the novel, it also makes it very difficult to think of them as anything more than names on the page. As a result, you tend to read the novel less for story than in order to see what unexpected sexual acrobatics might be described next. And that's the hallmark of pornography plain and simple. It becomes very, very difficult to accept the book as the serious work of fiction that it proclaims itself to be.
There is a tendency now to look upon FAGGOTS as a portent of the AIDS epidemic--and certainly it does give you a very good idea of how easily the disease was spread within gay subcultures like the one Kramer describes. But it is worth pointing out that Kramer was as oblivious to the impending disaster as everyone else, and whatever merit the novel may have as prophecy arises only in hindsight. Ultimately, this is a novel that will most interest gay men who either recall this sort of subculture from direct experience or those who wish they did. It is readable, but it is hardly original (Vidal beat Kramer to the punch by some thirty years and Rechy by close to twenty), and while it is reasonably well-written for what it is ... what it is isn't much. Recommended as a curiosity only.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
Rating: 
Summary: A Big Letdown
Review: I put off reading this book for a long time and was looking forward to reading it this summer. Even though Larry Kramer can be called a prophet with his lacerating vision of what happened when gay liberation came along at a time when America was on a sexual expedition (and unaware of the awful plague that was coming down the pipeline), the novel gets weighed down with too much repetition and not enough objectivity. Not even halfway through the book, I got tired of reading exploit after exploit without any narrative balance. I'm sure it's accurate in its depiction of the era, but I would've liked one narrator to step in and throw some kerosene into the mix. After a while, the satire becomes bland and you could care less about any of the men. Still, it's frightening to see how little some things have changed.
Rating:
Summary: A Big Letdown
Review: I put off reading this book for a long time and was looking forward to reading it this summer. Even though Larry Kramer can be called a prophet with his lacerating vision of what happened when gay liberation came along at a time when America was on a sexual expedition (and unaware of the awful plague that was coming down the pipeline), the novel gets weighed down with too much repetition and not enough objectivity. Not even halfway through the book, I got tired of reading exploit after exploit without any narrative balance. I'm sure it's accurate in its depiction of the era, but I would've liked one narrator to step in and throw some kerosene into the mix. After a while, the satire becomes bland and you could care less about any of the men. Still, it's frightening to see how little some things have changed.
Rating: 
Summary: Unbridled Genious. One of the best
Review: It is as if James Joyce were [...] in 1973 New York.
Kramer is an author, dramatist and activist who helped found Act-Up. In this harsh, funny, terrifying, graphic, [...], brilliant, compelling book he both draws and skewers the "[...] scene" of the early '70s.
This book is simply required (though at times difficult) reading.
Rating:
Summary: The Way We Were
Review: It took a bit of serendipity for me to purchase FAGGOTS--I was in the check out line at Borders when I noticed this marked-down soft-cover with the alluring images. For someone who was married in 1978 when the Book was first published, came out to himself and the world a year later and was diagnosed with HIV in 1994, this Book explains better than any other the history of gay life in the 70's. Most importantly, it explains why loving relationships between same-sex oriented people are what makes life worth living for most of them, just like for most everyone else. The characterizations are complex and sometimes it seems that there are too many characters to keep track of, but Mr. Kramer manages to pull it all together in a Book that reveals a multi-faceted mosaic of all the faces and souls and all the tensions in an environment frought with everything but enduring love. Reminiscent of LORD OF THE FLIES, except in reverse, this Book shows the struggle of an evolving community, lost at the time in its own excesses and looking for love in all the wrong places, set up by destiny for the plague to hit. It is a must read for every member of our community, new or old. FAGGOTS provides an excellent opportunity to learn from history. Joe Barri
Rating:
Summary: The Way We Were
Review: It took a bit of serendipity for me to purchase FAGGOTS--I was in the check out line at Borders when I noticed this marked-down soft-cover with the alluring images. For someone who was married in 1978 when the Book was first published, came out to himself and the world a year later and was diagnosed with HIV in 1994, this Book explains better than any other the history of gay life in the 70's. Most importantly, it explains why loving relationships between same-sex oriented people are what makes life worth living for most of them, just like for most everyone else. The characterizations are complex and sometimes it seems that there are too many characters to keep track of, but Mr. Kramer manages to pull it all together in a Book that reveals a multi-faceted mosaic of all the faces and souls and all the tensions in an environment frought with everything but enduring love. Reminiscent of LORD OF THE FLIES, except in reverse, this Book shows the struggle of an evolving community, lost at the time in its own excesses and looking for love in all the wrong places, set up by destiny for the plague to hit. It is a must read for every member of our community, new or old. FAGGOTS provides an excellent opportunity to learn from history. Joe Barri
Rating: 
Summary: Great satire, WAY too many characters
Review: Larry Kramer does a masterful job of satirizing a lifestyle and mindset that treats men as commodities and sex as a game. His characters are over the top, overwrought, and overindulge in everything from drugs to "nasty" little sex games. Underneath all the excess, though, are characters who are looking for love in all the wrong places, in all the wrong people, and for all the wrong reasons. I suspect that those in New York's Gay ghettos of the late 1970's, though, were, and are, not the only ones who struggle with the boundaries of love and sex, when they cross and when they don't, and the pain and emptiness of pursuing sex to the exclusion of love. Two aspects about Kramer's writing style, though, did bother me. First, so many characters ran in and out of the novel that I couldn't keep track of them all. Could we have done without, say, Gatsby, Paulie, or even Anthony, and still had a great story? I think so. Also, Kramer's deliberate use of run-on sentences made the narrative hard to follow at times. I can live with run-on sentences to some degree (just read my sentences sometime), but some of Kramer's were too convoluted even for me. Still, a book worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Great satire, WAY too many characters
Review: Larry Kramer does a masterful job of satirizing a lifestyle and mindset that treats men as commodities and sex as a game. His characters are over the top, overwrought, and overindulge in everything from drugs to "nasty" little sex games. Underneath all the excess, though, are characters who are looking for love in all the wrong places, in all the wrong people, and for all the wrong reasons. I suspect that those in New York's Gay ghettos of the late 1970's, though, were, and are, not the only ones who struggle with the boundaries of love and sex, when they cross and when they don't, and the pain and emptiness of pursuing sex to the exclusion of love. Two aspects about Kramer's writing style, though, did bother me. First, so many characters ran in and out of the novel that I couldn't keep track of them all. Could we have done without, say, Gatsby, Paulie, or even Anthony, and still had a great story? I think so. Also, Kramer's deliberate use of run-on sentences made the narrative hard to follow at times. I can live with run-on sentences to some degree (just read my sentences sometime), but some of Kramer's were too convoluted even for me. Still, a book worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: sourpuss attitude undermines any satire
Review: Larry Kramer has never been able to forgive the cosmos for the fact that he is neither handsome nor endowed with the physique of a god, and this juvenile obsession crops up in and flaws almost everything he writes. Faggots is no exception. This satire runs afoul of Kramer's personal problem and sputters out in boring waspiness. A tiresome book.
Rating:
Summary: How to describe ....
Review: My friends and I read this when it first came out - covertly. We were all very young and just coming out ourselves. Within the pages of this book we found exactly what Larry Kramer did not intend for us to see: a sexy, partying, unfettered, glamorous gay New York. Uh,huh. The satire was lost on us. Rather, we all talked about partying our ....off and moving to New York. We lived in Boston- so we did the weekend thing instead. Anyway, this is one trippy, weird and excessive novel. I really think all the excess undoes his intent and turns this into a Jackie Collins on hormones and mda extravagana. Of course, that does not mean that it wasn't entertaining and the not-to-distant future ultimately proved Larry's point for him. Dance from the Dance does a much better job at tackling this theme.
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