Larry Kramer Knew That an Honest Debate Was a Rude One

Fred’s arc suggests an answer as simple as separating one’s own authentic desires from the fleeting demands of lust and social pressure. (Fred’s bolt of clarity in the book’s final pages: “What am I doing?”) A reader can also see—in Kramer’s sprawling diagrams of money, drugs, and bodies flowing as one—a critique of overheated capitalism preventing a community from establishing values other than pleasure-chasing. In any analysis, the prose is so aroused by the very things it interrogates that it certainly doesn’t scan as a wholesale condemnation of sexual indulgence. What Kramer wanted was a negotiation. Like when one character refers to a newfangled carnal contraption as excessive and another shoots back, “What’s excessive?”

The beauty of Kramer’s work, both in Faggots and in his career after, is that he refused to believe that an honest negotiation was a polite one. How could a person clearly discuss matters of sex and society without a phrase like fucked to death? The question became more than academic only a few years after that first novel, when HIV began to spread among gay men. Kramer understood early on that combatting the disease would take massive agitation for government action, but it would also take some behavioral shifts within the community. Pursuing both efforts at once got him paradoxically branded a radical as well as a scold. That was the price he paid for not mincing words even while confronting a sickeningly fraught and complex crisis.

In the aforementioned 1983 editorial on AIDS published in New York Native, there’s a sentence that could have come straight out of the Faggots inferno: “We grasped at the straws of possible cause: promiscuity, poppers, back rooms, the baths, rimming, fisting, anal intercourse, urine, semen, shit, saliva, sweat, blood, blacks, a single virus, a new virus, repeated exposure to a virus, amoebas carrying a virus, drugs, Haiti, voodoo, Flagyl, constant bouts of amebiasis, hepatitis A and B, syphilis, gonorrhea.” There is also a section blasting “guys who moan that giving up careless sex until this blows over is worse than death,” which gave fodder to those who saw Kramer as a traitorous nag. But his rage was rooted always in empathy for the virus’s victims. After all, these were some of the same men whom Faggots portrayed as individuals trying to maintain their own selfhood while being swept along, as everyone must be, by history and culture. “All it seems to take is the one wrong fuck,” went another line in that filthy-urgent editorial. “That’s not promiscuity—that’s bad luck.”

Spencer Kornhaber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers pop culture and music.