Free Faggots by Larry Kramer, Reynolds Price

kisser in my life?
     
     
     
    Fred thought of Algonqua. One year ago he had told her!
    Algonqua Lemish!
    She who was the middle daughter of five achieving siblings of Russian peasants also making the long schlepp to the New World, from there to here, from rags, if not to riches, at least to groceries, they always ate, her poppa, Herschel the Unsmiling, and her momma, Lena the Undaunted, ran a grocery store in Hartford, where Algonqua grew up, graduated from Normal School, taught first grade in the morning, sold shoes in the afternoon, and coached foreigners in English at night. Then she met Lester Lemish, potentially so fine, and they settled down, outside of Washington, D. C., he to not realizing that potential, and she to serving humanity, the American Red Cross, twenty-four hours a day of looking after The World—Home Servicing, Bloodmobiles, floods, fevers, epidemics, fires, Water Safety, tardy alimonies, bandaged wounded, wheel-chaired to ball games, garden partied prisoners, indigent Army wives, paraplegic veterans, missing children, wayward husbands, AWOLs, yes, Handicappeds Anonymous—thus becoming a determined breadwinner, a courageous lifesaver, a tenacious turner of losers into winners, the Director of Disasters, yes, a wonderful humanitarian and A Gigantic Ma !
    ALGONQUA LEMISH!
    Algonqua had had her left tit lopped off a year ago. She held court from her eighth-floor bed in the Georgetown University Hospital as if deprived of her best and most useful feature, rather a startling reaction from a widow of seventy and one for whom Fred and Ben automatically assumed sex came not easily if at all. While it is generally construed by all children that their parents never fucked, Fred was reasonably certain that his rarely had, or why else would he have always had such problems with kiss and cuddle and body and closeness and semen and cock and rectum and that interco-mingling of the physical, bodily, and sexual attributes with which all man is blessed?
    In that hospital room, there and then, one year ago, the commencement of the New Era, Fred Lemish had, finally, at just thirty-nine years of age, informed his mommy he was a faggot. He had not planned to do so. Had not all friends advised: Why tell? They cannot understand. It will make them unhappy. Why upset apple carts? But Fred would respond with: Why must I go on leading a secret life in the back streets? This only means I am ashamed of myself and this life and I would like to stop being ashamed of this life and me and who and what I am.
    He had spent the afternoon on a visit to the shrine. He had gone, after twenty years of various journeyings in the Outside World, to the homesite of his pubescent days. He had knocked on the Hyattsville garden-apartment door with his best successful movie-writer smile, clutching an old clipping from the Washington Post with his picture (taken upon the occasion of Lest We Sleep Alone opening to the only grotesquely bad reviews it received anywhere in the world; you can’t hit a homer in your own hometown), thrusting it to the shabby young housewife and present tenant: “My name is Fred Lemish, I grew up in this apartment, this is my movie for which I was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adaptation of a Work from Another Medium, which I first thought meant something from the supernatural, would you mind if I came in and looked around?” The helpless woman, rendered speechless by such fame, allowed Fred in, in, in and back to the teeniest of rooms (they had seemed so big growing up!), look Fred, look at the corner where you first jerked off, sure still looks dirty enough, some of that schmutz is me, look, there’s where your bed was, next to Ben’s, that bed in which you had your first wet dream after reading Havelock Ellis under the covers and on which you played, though obviously not nearly enough, “doctor” with the little girl from downstairs, and look, there’s the closet you hid in to watch older brother Ben, the