Faggots by Larry Kramer, Reynolds Price Page A

whom Dunnie had been spending a lot of time with because Sammy was well-versed and hence helpful in time of test and trial, and as luck would have it, Sammy knew, as Dunnie knew he would. Sammy also shivered as he dispensed the knowledge, so both of them realized, at precisely this moment in time, that they were about to learn even more comprehensively what a fairy was.
    “Want to come to my room and have some of my Mama’s brownies?” Sammy began haltingly.
    It was as simple as that.
    “What will you do when you finish college?” Sammy asked, trying to keep the conversation light, even though he’d been wet dreaming for several months about such an opportunity as was obviously now creeping up on both of them, as they sat on his bed munching away at Mrs. Rosen’s brown squares and waiting for whatever was going to happen to happen.
    “I think I’m very handsome,” Dunnie said quite matter-of-factly, in response to the question. Was this not a Future Great Model in embryo even then? “Don’t you?”
    “…Yes…,” Sammy replied, wondering what one thing had to do with another.
    “I wish to do something that will allow the world to appreciate my handsomeness.”
    “Oh. Like be a movie star?”
    “Heavens, no. I don’t want to have to talk. I just want to be seen.” And to illustrate his point, he cast a long look at himself in Sammy’s bureau mirror, which was tilted just his way. “And, of course, to be talked about. And worshipped and adored.”
    “Oh.”
    “I guess that means I have to be a famous model, though even that’s less than perfect. I really don’t want to be associated with any product. But I guess that can’t be helped. But I’ll see to it that my picture is large and no one will pay any attention to whatever it is I’m selling.”
    This news hung in the air for moments as the two boys—like cute animals in Walt Disney cartoons, which, when confronted with anything intractable, simply engorge it whole—stuffed huge brownies into their mouths. Dunnie was pleased that his future was clear and Sammy was impressed with such direction.
    Then Dunnie prophesied again: “I’ll tell you something else. I don’t want to get married. Ever.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “I know it. My parents are married, so I just know it.”
    “I…I know it, too.” Sammy continued to marvel at such common sense. Then he recollected the fairy business and asked: “Do you…do you look at me in the showers as much as I look at you?”
    “Yes. I do.” And Dunnie, again giving himself the look of the loved in that tilted mirror, further said: “I think sometimes we’re lucky to know certain things early, like being shown what’s in the crystal ball at the beginning of your life instead of at the end. I know I want to be looked at by everybody and to pass around my beauty…,” at this point he took Sammy’s damp hand and used it to make his further illustrative point, “…and have everybody touching me all over and letting me do the same to them and…maybe we better not tell anybody about this…”
    Poor Sammy. He was not only on scholarship but was also getting very excited. His schoolmate, between reaching for the maternal brownies, was massaging his penis, now bulging mightily within Sammy’s only pair of gray-flannel trousers, which he had begged his mother and father to buy for him on the trip to Philadelphia at the start of term and he had summoned up all his courage to ask for them and to say that every boy in class had at least one pair except him and his dad had mumbled something about how the fucking scholarship Sammy had should include a gray-flannel-pants allowance but had bought them for the boy anyway and Sammy had never been able to wear them without a slight tinge of guilt and if Dunnie rubbed him anymore he might explode white stuff all over the gray and then he’d have to throw the pants away.
    “Please, Dunnie, could I…please…take off my gray flannels?”
    And that