Faggots by Larry Kramer, Reynolds Price Read Free Book Online

only too correctly reported. “He does it to avoid love,” he mumbled.
    “Love? What love?” Maxine plucked once, twice. “Where has love been displayed? I have heard nothing about love.” Then, holding up the offending black mothers to the light, captured successfully between the grip of his forged pinchers, he added: “I’d never let anyone do that to me. There’s a growing interest in this subject I find revolting. Our sexual fantasies are ruining us. Torture. Sheer torture. We torture ourselves with our sexual fantasies. What, may I ask, were you doing in the Dakota taking this guided tour with Leather Louie?”
    “Listen, I was just curious. So many new things to check out. New kinds of love. Must keep up-to-date.”
    “I repeat: what love? Are you not confusing sex and love?” Maxine asked. What was Patty trying to tell him? Was Patty unhappy in their happy home?
    “Yes, yes, who among us does not at some time confuse sex and love?” Laverne’s thoughts had now slipped fully back to Dinky. Yes, yes, it was sexual fantasies that had done the evil deed.
    Maxine released the hairs like so much scum and, pleased with his excisions, the even furrow of his handiwork, replaced the instrument in his right cheek pocket. “Leather Louie is a sick queen and love and sex are different items, Patty.”
    “Leather Louie isn’t a sick queen. He’s a composer who’s been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times and has a lovely smile. I’d take him anywhere, providing he wasn’t wearing his ritualistic gear.” Patty now slapped Maxine’s hand from a repeat sampling of the Pecan Sandies and wondered when he’d have the courage to come right out with it, communicate the news that their happy home was about to become not so happy.
    Laverne hauled himself back to his schoolteacher role. “We…we should be smarter.”
    “Listen, I only said that I don’t know what sex is all about!” Patty slammed the carton of cookies closed. He only knew that he wanted to leave Maxine and move in with Juanito, Capriccio’s Puerto Rican d.j. with the skin of velvet, tasting of honey and maple sugar.
    Laverne stood up and looked out the tiny window, across the highway, over the river and far away, at least to New Jersey, so ugly, as were his thoughts of earlier eras. When would insight, knowledge, hope, and beauty meld? “No,” he uttered to the far horizons, not looking to see if his best friends were ready for another of his major statements, not realizing that they no longer received them as major, just as part of his much too long ordeal of rejecting Dinky Adams. “No!” he said again. “We don’t have anything together. And, as an elite, a minority privileged to count among its large, if indistinct membership, many of the world’s greatest minds and talents and potentialities—though in undershirts and jeans on the dance floors of Balalaika and Capriccio at five in the morning very few of us are exactly capable of thought—as this true elite we should have more of our collective acts, and scenes, together. We have the ultimate in freedom—we have absolutely no responsibilities!—and we’re abusing it. My sister-in-law does not speak to me, not because I’m a faggot, to which news she is now adjusted, as am I, but because she says I’m a coward, I’m not in there pitching to make this world a better place, I’m running away, I’m not relating to anyone successfully, I’m not proving to the world or to myself that I know what to do with this freedom, and Leather Louie isn’t helping me, while she is chained to a mobile home in Mobile, Alabama. If I could do that, then I’d be listened to, respected, not scorned, mocked, feared as something unfit to teach children. But when I look around me, all I see is fucking. All we do is fuck. With dildoes and gallows and in the bushes and on the streets. My sister-in-law doesn’t fuck on the streets.”
    Maxine decided enough was enough. “Laverne, please stop