Fred Lemish

Fred Lemish is the novel’s central character and protagonist, the main “faggot” of the title (he uses the term to refer to himself in the same way as the other characters use it to refer to themselves and each other). As the novel begins, Fred is about to turn 40, and is described in ways that suggest he sees himself as having the same attitudes, behaviors, and struggles as many of the thousands of other “faggots” in New York. These include being obsessed with being sexually attractive and obsessed with fitting in with a judgmental community (a community that self-isolates in the face of hatred and misunderstanding from the so-called mainstream); acting on both these obsessions through sexual promiscuity; and struggling to be something more than both those attitudes and those behaviors.

Fred, however, is also portrayed as being fundamentally different from almost all the other “faggots...