From Reynold Price's+ introduction to Larry Kramer's Faggots:

....anyone who experienced, or closely observed the American and Euyropean male homosexual revolution of the 1970s and early 1980s can confirm an all but incredible fact. Kramer's account of American queer culture in those years is far more nearly literal history than heightened reality....the frenzied sexual activity which the male body so readily proved capable of performing made the stated goal (1) of much of that activity literally impossible--if the goal, that is, was love or psychic intimacy between men of good sense and reasonable vigor.
....whatever prodigies the male genitals can perform, the human mind is incapable of emotional focus (2) when it's asked to experience so much emotional intensity with so many different objects. And when orgasmic sex ceases to constitute emotional intensity for its participants, then what remains in the realm of sensory possibility for the deadened veteran--human torture, murder, the consumption of children? Beneath Kramer's...denunciation of mindlesss male promiscuity...lies the seed of both his revulsion and his dread.
...The human body..is unspeakably fragile. [In fact the body neither forgets nor forgives] excess. Brain cells are destroyed or muted by alcohol and other toxic chemicals...Unchecked male sexual performance, once past the the phenomenal power of adolescence, has now been proven to demand irreplaceable expenditures of mental and physical energy (3) far past the warnings of the direst priest or evangelist.
...Burdened (4) by numbers and by detachment from person-to-person attention and care, the sexual body will sooner or later turn against the mind that propels it and reduce that mind to some less desirable thing. At the least it reduces men to metallic click-off counters of cocks-or-cunts experienced; at the worst to subhuman predators of random flesh.
...all unshielded sexual contact of whatever kind may...be assumed to be potentially lethal. Western humanity knew that fact for nearly five centuries from the arrival of syphilis until its partial control by penicillin in the mid-1940s. [The most phlegmatic virologists tell us that] the willfulness of the vast and still-lurking world of microbes must never hereafter be ignored.
...homosexual adventurousness on an epic and self-entrapped scale is foolish or wrong (5)....


Let me first say that I agree with none of Reynold Price's opinions; that I find them smugly, condescendingly, presumptuously, infuriatingly--heterosexually--wrong and wrong-headed; that contained within this pompous, evasive and cowardly prolixity is just about everything that I most hate about heterosexuals and their so nauseatingly complacent assurance that they, after all, are the repositors of Conventional Wisdom, Wise because they are Conventional, and Conventional because they are Wise. I refute it thus:

1. There was no "goal" to all that "frenzied" (would you believe "ecstatic"?) homosexual activity. It was done for its own sake, for the pleasure it gave. Period. Women, or the straight or effeminate men who resemble them, might suppose that "love or psychic intimacy between men of good sense and reasonable (?!) vigor" had been the "goal" of homosexual activity--but, trust me, men--real, gay men--had no such expectations. That was the fun of it. And fun it was.

2. "Emotional focus"? What the fuck does that mean? Whatever, if you don't have it you lose "intensity," and when you lose that, naturally, you turn to sadism, murder, and cannibalism (God I hate heterosexuals!)--an opinion which is reiterated in terms scarcely different as "click-off counters--or subhuman predators."

3. Nothing of the sort has been at all proven.

4. Large numbers of sexual partners (What else could he mean?) and detachment from one-on-one attention and care are a burden to the "sexual body"? Women, I suppose, and pussy-men probably do think something like that; and probably they think that men would think so too, if only they weren't men, and therefore, by definition, incapable of understanding themselves...But why, granted that men from that dip-shit* female perspective are nothing more than click-off counters ("mere" hobbyists--as if any woman ever understood how much a man's hobbies are his passions) or predators of random flesh--why are they "subhuman" predators?

5. I can't think of a single reason why homosexual adventurousness on an epic scale might be thought of as "foolish or wrong." To me it sounds like heroic fun**. And I have no idea what is meant by "self-entrapped"--unless it's a sly, pussy-man's way of saying "no consideration for girls." In fact, I suspect that's it.


Really, Price doesn't deserve further analysis. Since I wrote the last paragraph I've done a little research on him and found him to be a much published (1) believing Christian, (2) a devotee of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. If he were a younger fool he'd be into Derrida and Foucault. So the hell with him. And for the matter of that, the hell with Larry Kramer and his seemingly so-prescient novel about male promiscuity, which turns out to've been mere coincidence--The axe he was grinding was jealousy, having just been dropped by his architect boy-friend.



+Troll. See blogs November 28 and December 26, 2007.

* Dip-shit: One who, when given a measuring-stick to measure a certain depth of shit, holds the stick by the wrong end; by extension, a foolish, sentimental person.

** Fun: The answer given by the King of Death to the riddle proposed by a certain, very serious Charioteer, "Why is there anything rather than nothing?"