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.