"Larry Kramer In Love & Anger"

I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on this if you watched it last night. Even though I don't think it covered any new ground, I thought it was exceptionally well done. And it made me want to read Larry's book "Faggots", which I've never read before.

From what was read from the book in the film, it seemed like it was very ahead of its time and (again, only going by what I heard read last night) could directly apply to a large portion of gay men today.

No, I don't think those words were used to describe it. They talked about the outrage it caused at the time.

Because even then readers knew a pernicious scold projecting his self-loathing out onto an entire community because he felt completely unworthy of love was not a great development for gay lit.

Kramer ran into a famous gay editor (THE famous gay editor) at the baths right after the book came out and said to him, "________, I heard you didn't like my book" and _____ replied, "That's nonsense, Larry. I would never read your book."

As I said, I read it as a teenager and it did me damage. Think of it as a novel with the tone and demeanor of the conservative trolls who pop up on here and think they're going to blow the lid off of everything liberals believe. It's like that.

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I read Gore Vidal's "The City and the Pillar" on the floor of the upstairs stacks at my high school library, and was shaken and disturbed for weeks. It's simultaneously pro-gay rights and weirdly anti-gay people.

But these are flawed books, by flawed writers, who are flawed men and flawed gay men. Larry became an Old Testament prophet once AIDS arrived. Gore became a New Testament prophet against the American Empire.

And that's who they were in the times in which they lived.

I would say go ahead and read "Faggots." I doubt it will affect you the way it affected the young FindingNamo. Then read "The City and the Pillar." They're both juicy reads.

Then, if you haven't slit your wrists, read something fun. Read "Auntie Mame."

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Or... just skip ahead to The Line of Beauty.

I'm not the scared gay teenager I was when I bought "Faggots" at a department store. I thought it was going to be about naming oppression and turning the tables on the oppressors, the way Dick Gregory had done with his book "n*." Instead, I read a harangue by an unlovable man who hated himself so much he had to do whatever he could to make everybody else feel like crap and he got revenge on everybody he assumed had it easier than he did (which let's face it, was just about everybody else because he was IN FACT unlovable) by fantasizing horrible outcomes for his characters. It's Larry Kramer's dark, twisted wish fulfillment.

Maybe it's time to read it again with all I know now.

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This is reairing on HBO (at least one of the HBO's) tonight in case you want to set your DVRs.

I am so, so, glad I read City and the Pillar as an out-and-proud adult and not a closeted teen. Vidal so fetishized what we would, in Grindr speak, call "masc only." And in the end, all the gay men he depicts are thoroughly incapable of finding love or completion.

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