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“2,556,596 faggots in the New York City area.” So begins Larry Kramer’s infamous novel. It is a strange opening for a novel but, in some way, is indicative of this one. It is the late 1970s and this novel is an odyssey through gay New York life. The main protagonist is Fred Lemish, almost a gay everyman, who is just short of forty. He is searching for love, especially the love of the gay hunk Dinky Adams, but all he can find is promiscuous sex, recreational drug use and almost constant disappointment. This novel has so many things in it that just don’t work. Firstly, the large cast of characters makes it difficult to follow, some of them not having enough time to develop and other characters who do not add much, if anything, to the plot and left me wondering why they were there. Then there are the sex scenes, the many, many sex scenes. Some of them do add to character development but many of them felt repetitive, by the end of the book I was feeling, “Not another sex scene.” I wanted to read the novel; I didn’t want the distraction of all this sex. But what wore me down, as a reader, was its unrelenting negativity. Nothing here works out well; no characters get close to a happy ending, all of them end up unhappy in their own different ways. In one scene, a romantic relationship is sabotaged before it can even begin, which felt almost nasty on the part of the author. The characterisation here was so poor that I was left feeling frustrated. Characters are portrayed in a negative light for their actions, promiscuous sex and drug use, but there is little to no examination of why they are behaving like this. What is reinforcing such negative behaviour? This novel is set in 1978 New York and yet there is little discussion of the homophobia of that time, both external and internal. Homophobia then was more than systemic, it would have had a huge impact on these characters, it would have driven so much of their lack of self-worth, yet it is barely mentioned. This novel felt less a satire on gay life and much more an expression of Larry Kramer’s distaste for a world that didn’t accept him and that is such a shame. With his plays The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me, Kramer showed he is a writer who understands characterisation. Those plays got under the skin of their characters and examined their situations. The Normal Heart examined the homophobia that was preventing fighting AIDS; The Destiny of Me examined the events that shaped the central character, a gay man facing his own morality and the fact that there was so little treatment, then, for HIV. None of that ability is on display in Faggots, if it had been maybe this novel would have been so much better. Here Kramer tries to hold up a mirror to the world around him, unfortunately it is a distorting mirror that sneers back. Such a missed opportunity from a man who could be a great writer. Find it here on Amazon