What central error in that world, then, did Kramer perceive; and what descending reality did he come to dread so ominously that it compelled him to write, not a sermon or a sociological study but a novel as full of laughter as woe? It would be easy to say, as more than one of Kramer's characters does, that the frenzied sexual activity which the male body so readily proved capable of performing made the stated goal 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.

It wouldn't have taken a mind of Kramer's quality to conclude that, whatever prodigies the male genitals can perform, the human mind is incapable of emotional focus 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? (The rise of female promiscuity in the same decades raises the question of whether heedless women can, by implication, be included in Kramer's condemnation. My own sense is probably not. Very few women appear to have been psychically impelled toward such physical extravagance.) Beneath Kramer's obvious denunciation of mindless male promiscuity, then, lies the seed of both his revulsion and his dread.

He makes, and reiterates memorably, a claim as old as the ancient Hebrew and Greek poets. Yet it's a claim not advanced by any character in Faggots nor by any other observer or participant of whom I was aware in that fifteen-year skin feast—all flesh is grass.

The human body, however groomed and buffed in gymnasia, is an unspeakably fragile organism. Depending on one's genetic heritage, the body appears to perform like an uncomplaining work horse through a fair amount of youthful excess; but in fact it neither forgets nor forgives that excess. Brain cells are destroyed or muted by alcohol and other toxic chemicals; and even without the sudden intervention of monster viruses, the magnificent web of the human immune system is subject to radical and quite early damage. Unchecked male sexual performance, once past the phenomenal power of adolescence, has now been proven to demand irreplaceable expenditures of mental and physical energy far past the warnings of the direst priest or evangelist.

What Kramer sensed and predicted subliminally in the closing pages of his novel was simply this—-the sexual body is human, not immortal; and while it is only an appendage of an entire man, it is capable of destroying both itself and him. Burdened 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 than 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.

The purpose of satire is always peculiarly forked. It offers us oddly entertaining, generally exaggerated copies of foolish or evil behavior in order to provoke our ridicule. By implication at least, it also hopes that general ridicule will result in changed behavior— ideally, by an abandonment of the folly portrayed. Any reader of Faggots can easily identify the kind of male behavior which Kramer calls folly. He characterizes the nexus of failings, with arresting indirection, by imputing the male folly to a particular woman:

"New York's leading fag hag, Adriana la Chaise, disguised as a man, who, while a faggot to the extent that she evades the responsibilities that her brains, her abilities, and her energies, in a more enlightened age, would have channeled, via adult commitments, via more positive injections, into a needful society, was, nevertheless, by clitoral choice, straight, though it was her habit to enjoy slouching in dark corners, wearing military attire, sailor's suits or soldier's, and watch the boys do things to each other...."

Bedroom

Birds

Clock

Polaroid and prints by Yair Oelbaum

Gilded silver timber mount, frame made from piano key pieces, another mounted on dibond and attatched to a piece of chipboard that I found adhered to an old print at work from the 80s (with a sun faded polka dot print now on it), other in a cream frame I found at work too