I'll admit it—I didn't want to like Faggots. For starters, there was that title, which I have a hard time even typing. Then there was the snippets I'd always heard, the vague impression I got that the book was school-marmish scourge against any kind of gay Fire Island fun.

Well school-marmish it is not. And whatever agenda Kramer wanted to push, he did it with so much charm and wit that I couldn't help to laugh out loud in parts. Quite simpy, I loved it. If Dancer From the Dance is an elegy then Faggots is a stand-up act, one in which gay mores and customs of the time—1978—are the butt of the joke.

And they could just as easily be gay mores and customs of 2013. Kramer was using humor to address the same timeless things Holleran addressed through poetry and the two of them for me present two sides of a fascinating coin. Faggots deploys dialogue and sex to propel the action quickly and keep the reader engaged while Kramer slips in larger—and more troubling—themes about commitment, image, and the struggle to find love. It was a technique I knew I immediately I wanted to adopt.