Kay Gabriel
TRANNIES, by Larry Kramer
1.
In 1978, Larry Kramer wrote the novel Trannies.
It’s a realist depiction of the modern bourgeois transsexual,
all four or five hundred of them. Every
character is introduced by her profession
and college pedigree. Like: enter Bunny,
35, of glamazon proportions, with honors from Columbia,
an editorship at FSG, and a view of the East
River from her Kent Ave., Williamsburg, apartment. They are all unearthly shades
of beautiful, except the very wealthy and the (occasional) very poor.
They boast vanity in proportion to how beautiful
they are, and they all have time on their hands—
to scheme, schtup, fall in and out
of love, and mostly to party, which they do with the
religious devotion of wives wrapping their hair
for mass. Kramer lifts the trannies’
arms over their heads and wriggles them into beaded,
stoned or feathered garments. He works sweat onto their stately brows;
he watches them douche, epilate and fuck.
Mostly fuck: they're very proficient.
Their insides are ribbons of satin.
Their hands and mouths are trained for Olympic feats.
Some of them top, and those trannies are in high demand,
both among the chasers who flock like flightless
birds around them, and to other trannies of the satiny ribbon variety.
They have names like Fleur-de-lys,
Babe, Fanny, Velveteen or Absolut Puss.
Kramer despairs of their pursuits.
Most work in arts and culture, some in law
and some in medicine. A number of far-sighted
trannies work in the burgeoning field of computing. What
a nice decade they’ll have. Some highly
successful DJs, experimental synth artists,
tenure-track or tenured academics, painters and critics
of painters and writers paid
for writing round out his figure. Some just roller-
skate into magazines; fame drops on them like a gag piano.
A couple are genuine celebrities, though the way
Kramer writes, every tranny earns her limelight.
They’re extremely cunt and every Fleur or Poussé knows it.
For the purposes of this poem, Kramer isn't a tranny at all.
———
2.
In 2016 we used to say: I’m a faggot till I die!
As if someone had typeset it in small caps.
We meant it metaphorically, so now you have to
consider 5-6 trannies using a metaphor.
We said it in various weights
of mesh, and some of us said it making choices we later
thought of as youthful,
like highly pigmented glitter.
Actually for 3-5 months we all wore tattoo chokers, as a joke,
until it became possible to spot another
tranny at a party based on her tattoo choker, or your tattoo
choker, which also assured both of you that you were at the right
party. Then one of you nervously stripped
hers off, to be the less conspicuous
tranny at the party that was porous
enough to trannies to have at least two of you, but in mixed
enough company that you formed a narrow and missable
quotient, scooped together in a corner, or pointedly
avoiding eye contact, two high-octane personalities
holding court on opposite barstools to competing
and rapt clusters of a non-tranny entourage
though later, when you and the cluster had
departed, you’d say: oh, I totally
know who she is, we're mutuals but we’ve never
really met IRL, didn't she date that girl Juno, and someone
else says: which Juno? And a third adds: that girl goes
by Ghost now. Or maybe you were
at the other kind of party, whose vibrating
participants are almost entirely trannies of the five
to seven currently popular tranny configurations.
At that party you didn't wear the choker at all.
You might be more likely to end up in the corner
with the other girl, assessing each other or necking like teens
about to die in a B movie. You might have come with a boyfriend;
if your boyfriend is trans, he’s probably outside peeking
at the nearby Grindr squares. If he’s cis, then you,
who never pass up a chance to peacock,
are here to peacock: you want the trannies
at the tranny party to know that you landed a prize,
say a gauntly handsome punk boy with dirt
under his fingers, or a tradey snack with a chest
piece of splayed wings, who quietly worships you and fucks
like a machine, and even takes a slice of pride
in appearing in the role of a party sidekick
while your charisma builds to Earth Mother proportions.
In that case the girl glancing almost
involuntarily in your direction may be plotting
whether and how to make out with your cisgender
boy candy, to prove that she can, even to spirit
him into the bathroom at Mood Ring—this party
could be anywhere but it's probably at Mood Ring—testing his
particular devotion to you versus his general
attachment to form and genre, in this case of a waifish
girl in a slip sucking his cock in a bar
bathroom without a toilet seat. In the tranny terms
of engagement this checks out, as does holding
a grudge against that bitch forever, or waltzing
in to reassert control, and letting go of her infraction
with an almost tyrannical indulgence. If, on the other
hand, you came stag to either the tranny or the non-
tranny party, you probably checked out the available
goods like Madeline Kahn picking her stable in History of the World,
Part 1, pitching herself higher and higher while the camera
rolls on its dolly down a line of plump Roman
asses, and in that case, too, you actively stunt
on the competition, either as the tranny who’s had
the most tranny work done, in which case you're
wearing a garment flush enough to your front to leave
no question whether or not your tuck
is a permanent install, or as the tranny who has
the self-possession and/or bone structure not to care.
In this arms race nobody gets out
alive and nobody wants to, least of all
the trannies themselves.
But why did we say it?
For some of us, it applied as a straightforward
fact, if anyone can be described
as an actually existing faggot. We grasped it with a sense
of “finally succeeding in looking like others” (Hardwick,
who wasn't a tranny), and we felt that the empirical
faggots among us, trading Lou Sullivan
buttons and approaching leather like monks in their cells
might practice matins, earned their occasional smugness.
Others tripped into a pleasant abjection,
which they hadn’t known to lay claim to before, and which
clung so tightly to their pastel lipsticks, makeup
staches and mullets fresh out of the box
that they found after a while they couldn’t shake it loose.
Still others said it with a firm possessiveness
over wilfully discarded flesh, living
or attempting to live the aspirations
of an eclipsed category like “crazy queens
who went too far.” To us it sounded like something
out of Larry Kramer's Faggots, which holds in juicy contempt
the outsized characters, mostly Black, who won’t
de-drag into boy names and faces, not even in the Meat Rack,
the navel of Kramer's personal faggot hell.
In Kramer's calculus, is it more faggotted to be en
femme until you get properly railed, or to clutch
after a sexless but infinitely more glamorous state like
going full-time? He dodges the question, and heads
back to his scolding chair.
Those of us who could be described as non-
empirical faggots, faggots not of this
world but the next, said what we said out of:
A) a desperate attachment to sin, which we believed in,
and which faggot with its air of wilful depravity appeared
to offer better than the definitely more pornified tranny;
B) haughty self-preservation; or
C) sunburnt contempt for former lovers still
pumping blood at Golden Boys USA.
Oh, I made it sound like a gym.
We held in equal contempt the chasers who secretly
believed that wanting to fuck us made them
kind of gay, so you could say our former
lovers refused to see in us the phantasm
that our current lovers palpated, and in exemplary
tranny tradition, we spited them both, wrenching where
possible the cum out of their bodies and sending up
our fervent prayers to see them buried up to their necks
in Hell’s hot sand, like plaintive NPCs in a video game
level we could unlock, beat and leave behind
while they spawned, brunched, perished and spawned again.
—
3.
Faggots, by Larry Kramer, is a highly
religious and basically devout book.
I'm almost tempted to say Catholic, in its rapturous
attention to the body, the fetish it makes
of its many beautiful corpses, though Faggots is also largely
a satire of a gay Jewish man, edging on 40, in broad outline similar to
Kramer himself, I mean, he's got an Oscar.
Faggots has a worshipful attachment to the male sex,
so worshipful that in writing his carnival of bodies
worming, panting and pushing their way
into an Inferno dressed up as Berghain,
Kramer nearly, but not entirely, neglects
to add a couple girls, and the ones who crash-
land in his novel come in two flavours: Jewish,
wealthy, old, and tetchy; indigent, Black,
clever and recognizably trans. For
his part Kramer probably grouped the latter
in with faggot extremity, so it’s likely, although
he wrote us into his ungenerous cosmos, that Larry
Kramer didn't know from trannies. His fools line the curb to get
into Hell, whither Kramer’s Oscar-
winning self-insert dutifully tiptoes like a pilgrim
absent Virgil: horny, sober, sad, and ISO the epiphany
he eventually trawls out of a river of piss, all while his screaming
queens gleefully descend the rungs of an increasingly
scatological underworld. Kramer is a Dante
of other people’s shit: part mapmaker of downward
mobility, part vice’s rapt chronicler, coughing
up a pressed pill and taking revenge
on the fortunates who snubbed him
in youth, and in age would go on to landscape his Hudson
Valley home, by making them party upside
down in a toilet bowl. If it’s a swirlie, why does
everyone think it's fun? Probably mass
social hysteria. Their names—“Boo
Boo Bronstein,” “Randy Dildough,” “Bilbo,”
“Dom Dom,” “Dinky Adams”—really are
childish, as if skimmed from the age when toddlers
learn both language and bowel control,
and before they turn into trannies.
If you’re a hygienist of the Pines,
everything’s a cavity. If you’re a latter-day Augustine,
Long Island looks like Carthage. That G’d-
out twink on the helipad might be God’s plan, as might the
incomplete douche job you pulled last night, or
accidentally polishing your cousin’s monster knob. Lot’s
daughters passed up Sodom for something
more delicious. You get your rocks off and power up
today’s harangue, and when, post-publication, the bitter
disco perverts stop inviting you to the nightlife you
love to hate, as indeed they stopped inviting Kramer,
you take comfort in feeling allegory
churn around you like a slightly less satisfying anal wall.
Reading Faggots is like riding a tour bus through a circuit
party where everybody's shitting in each
other's boots, except Kramer, who
piously goes in the bushes and comes out
the other side a changed man, without a Gabriel
or a horn to blow on, tapping at the gates of Heaven’s
exurbs while, behind him, the despoiled souls on the tranny-
faggot continuum stroke their corrupted flesh
forever in Gomorrah and feel basically okay.
4.
You tried to write fact and instead you wrote faggot.
God made you do it, like He made
RuPaul tweet the trains flag, and atone for it
perpetually by indulging transsexuals draped
in blue and pink pastels like babies wrapped in cotton
candy. God set you up to fail,
and when you took a Xanax after
the underwear party in the Grove
and it bobbed in your throat
like a buoy, that, too, was God,
keeping you awake and making you look like an
ass in front of your slightly square boyfriend,
the trans one who, last time we saw him, was peeking
at the nearby Grindr squares and who,
when the swallowed Xanax melted and made you walk
like an uncoordinated puppet into bed,
remembered and cited this incident in his litany of
reasons to dump you, though technically—
anticipating that he had fallen out of love
with you in part but not entirely because of
your predictably chaotic use, in part but not entirely
because he believed that you
were laying down a mile of pipe—you got there first,
springing the jump on him when he got back from a car
trip to Montreal with his FTM bros and complaining
of his inattention, like a creature
who lives to be sensuous and adored,
under continuously stained cheeks.
We never see each other any more,
you said, through heavy tears, and then
you made sure it was true.
The runny eyeliner is not God,
but the bellowing volume you reach
when you come gets pretty close.
So does the rip in your tights nestled
at the crotch, the one months later you got your rave
date to enlarge, to bite and tear at,
and eventually to fingerfuck you through
in an anonymous café on Nostrand Ave.,
near Sugar Hill, which first opened its
doors in 1979, when Kramer partied despite
himself, and which, while you and the
date throbbed on molly and you deep-
throated him on the dance floor, cushioned
your delicate knees. He's straight,
so under other circumstances you might
wonder what his damage is, when if ever he might
begin to suspect the degeneracy
of pleasure-seeking in the way you seek it,
and whether he’ll resent himself for seeking it
with a distracted tranny, or rather recommit
to a profligate, non-natal thrill, and place it
on his mental list of tremendous
inventions like insulin, running water,
light rail, PrEP, Naloxone, the moon
landing, solar power, nylon rope and LSD.
Under other circumstances, you might wonder
if and when he clocked you, whether
it turned him on, what he believes that
says about him, whether he’ll be weird
about it and whether when he tells
his friends he’ll highlight or disguise
how he fucked a tranny right there where
God could see, and the dancefloor, and the DJ,
you might even have thought, oh, am I
still a faggot, theologically, and does it matter
if and when he thinks so, too,
but you aren’t under other circumstances,
you're high, and a sex change is not
a canticle. It’s not a canto.
It’s not Carthage or Balzac.
Actually, it might be a little Balzac.
It’s not Delany but it's not not Delany.
It’s not Andrew Holleran, it’s a little Larry
Kramer. Do you think he ever thought about it?
I'm not saying Larry Kramer was a tranny.
Not even an edge case. I meant it
when I said: in this poem, “Trannies, by Larry Kramer,”
Kramer isn't a tranny at all.
But do you think he considered the idea?
If he did, maybe the thought passed through him
with a shudder, like you might imagine closing a
window on your hand, or maybe he felt a tug
in his groin, like a kid smoking his
first cigarette and thinking, wow.
Kay Gabriel is the author of A Queen in Bucks County (Nightboat, 2022) and Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (Rosa Press, 2021; Nightboat, 2023). With Andrea Abi-Karam she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. She lives in Queens.