Faggots by Larry Kramer, Reynolds Price

“You’ll read the reviews.”
     
     
     
    While we’re at it, and with so many of our leading faggots yet to introduce, dare we pause a moment to tarry over the likes of kvetchy, schleppy, nasty Lester Lemish? Yes, he passed through his lifetime a sissy and a coward, a doormat with nary a star of love to guide him, though he would have named himself a true man through and through. Dare we offer a requiem moment to the ghost of Lester Lemish?
    He certainly was a screamer. “Go out and play with the boys! Stop playing with the girls!” he’d helpfully bombard the younger son who wouldn’t listen to the Yankees or the Redskins, little knowing that such an impressionable lad would choose to obey both dicta to the lifetime letter. “You sissy!” he’d then helpfully append, chomping on his fat cigar, and adding further traumatic damage, as such a word delivered from father unto son and indicating a tidge of lovelessness could possibly so intidge.
    But wasn’t it Lester who backed away from challenge and risks? Wasn’t it Lester who was terrified of life and sex and life and family and life and Algonqua? Lester, downed by the Depression, defeated into second-rate accountancy positions, never paying much, thus freeing up Algonqua to ply her oh so many active employments and deployments, more lucrative, and in so doing taking his ball games and his balls away. Oh, Lester Lemish, with a degree from Harvard and one from Harvard Law School, Phi Beta Kappa from the first, Law Review from the second, why did you lie down and die, in so doing, almost, almost, bringing down your younger son, you idolized your elder, he played ball.
    Yes, Lester Lemish, your totally poor record in Fatherhood included an inability to kiss and hug, keep bargains and promises, call and say Hello, inquire after studies and well-being, offer love, do anything but pull the Disappearing Act, with its constant curtain line: You Are Unwanted! I Reject You Through and Through!, delivered unto Fred, and truly bringing down the house. Yes, Lester Lemish, you were the first in the long line of danglers who held out the lollipop but who wouldn’t let Fred lick.
    So, Lester Lemish, ye who hated your son and whom your son hated right back, ye whom he blamed for making him go out and suck cock to find one of his own—and if we are going to get pyrotechnical on the matter, and evidently we are, let it be said that Fred had strong feelings on The Subject: It was men and their insecurities that made him queer and bent and faggot (were women the worse of the two evils?, and hence by the bye, with more demanding strings attached for payments on demand?, Algonqua would eat him alive!) (and he did not know that Dinky’s situation was just the reverse: it was his Poppa who sang to him “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” and his Momma who was the weak and rejecting, and needful, one), and he’d found nothing in all his comings and goings to make him feel otherwise, nothing but gropings for cocks to make his own seem real (is this any different, Fred, from the millions of straight men looking for the tit their mamas once gave them, or didn’t?) and while there’s a current trend afoot attempting to indicate that homosexuality might be caused by genetic intrusions or embryonic hormonal imbalances, and there may be truth or succor found in this, or anything else the genes boys might come up with, and wouldn’t it be nicer, easier, neater, cleaner, certainly more convenient, if homosexuals were born just like everybody else?, there is also that other school of thought, established by S. Freud and his dishy disciples (including the Messrs. Cult, Nerdley, Fallinger & Dridge), which posits that a dumb dodo of a daddy and a whiz bang whammerino of a Ma (who made Algonqua be so fucking strong, Lester, who?) can turn the trick as well (though what about Lester’s own eviscerated childhood, his own tyrant of a Mamma, she who single-handedly ran her own grocery store in a