Faggots by Larry Kramer, Reynolds Price

Italian, for Christ’s sake, Icelandic, those firemen really visit, every guidebook advises Hit Those Streets!, Mary, Show Them Pecs, Strut Them Buns, Pad That Crotch, Visit Them Bars: Keller’s, Ty’s, Cell Block, Ramrod, Stud, International, Peter Rabbit, Bunkhouse, Rawhide, Badlands, Tulip’s, Boots and Saddle, Cynthia’s, Tubie’s, Mine Shaft, Glory Hole, Pits, Anvil, Cock Ring, tomorrow night the new one: THE TOILET BOWL, oi !…
    Anthony then hitched up his Levi’s, which carried the wonderful nine inches of his cock, coiled and ready, recollected that the Pope, God bless Her, had just come out, yet again, against the faggots, “indecorous and sacrilegious,” who could blame Him, Toilet Bowl indeed!, wished his best friend, Fred, were with him to throw down these gauntlets together, pocketed the small Oxford volume of Classic British Short Stories he had thought might be useful in luring a fellow of like-minded intelligence, wondered, again, why he was having so much difficulty getting it up of late, was this his Change of Life?, must come from working too hard, don’t like doing this trip, but have to do it, got to get it off, medical emergency, psychiatric one, too, and plunged across the highway toward the River. Somewhere, over there, in that big former shipping palace, must be a savior to put a poor man out of his misery and in some nook or cranny suck my cock.
     
     
     
    In a handsome apartment of English and French antiques, deftly combined with American Ward Bennett, on East 66th Street, between Madison and Park, lives the Winston Man. Yes, Virginia, there is a Winston Man.
    It is unfortunate that his personality is so submerged in this nefarious product, but the fact remains that to his friends and to his fellow models at the Hans Zoroaster Agency he is known, not by his given name, which is Duncan Heinz (his father is a very distant and almost as rich cousin to the pickle-soup-ketchup family, though devoted not to foodstuffs in his own financial empire but to the manufacture of rubber goods for home and farm, more specifically, though naturally the family does not spread this about, the production of items of “prophylaxis” for the conduct of sexual intercourse, their Model B-12 widely used in animal husbandry, particularly suited for well-endowed bulls), but as Winnie.
    Winnie’s is the true beauty of our moment in time, the face that, years from now, when we remember, and we shall remember, will be looked back upon as representing our era. His glacially green eyes, his perfect classical nose, his hay hair, his skin of an overall perfection that could sell cream to cows or butter to Danes, all represent today’s desirability and have served to make him not only America’s highest-paid male model but also the ideal god every faggot looks up to as what he’d choose to look like if he could choose to look like anyone.
    Winnie’s Philadelphia Main Line background was evident in the tweed and flannel button-downed and Shetlanded aura he had maintained ever since being expelled from the University of Virginia for a disinclination to read. He still looked thirty, claimed to forty, and still didn’t have to work, his father’s “health products” fortune more than ample to provide for him. But a Master of Winnie’s at the Hill School in Pottstown had encouraged in him a lifelong desire to go his own way, be his own man, when he had taken the then thirteen-year-old lad aside after a particularly clumsy dropping of a right-field fly and told him point-blank that he was going to be a fairy when he grew up.
    Winnie, or more correctly, Dunnie, as he was then called, didn’t know what a fairy was, such being the insularity of Main Line education even then. So calmly, that same night, with that quest for curiosity, that vigor for knowledge which deserted him at some point between Hill and U. Va., he asked one of his classmates, a cute Jewish scholarship student from Shreveport named Sammy Rosen,