The most important things in our intimate lives can’t be discussed with strangers, except in books.
Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule everyday. If you’re not writing well, why continue it? I just don’t think this grinding away is useful.
I’m sorry,” Billy says, “but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.
Had he already inspired a passion in some stranger’s heart?
They all said the way to a man’s heart was through his asshole.
Guy believed everything in sex should be done slowly so as not to scare the wildlife and to ensure his own natural grace and poise.
Gay life is this object out there that’s waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we’ve exhausted all the themes of gay fiction, but we’ve just barely touched on them.
He thought to himself, I’ll never be this perfect again, an idea that made him sad.
You are the Perfect Young Man: honest, clean, virile.
Wasn’t it correct in America to call a man ‘handsome’ rather than ‘beautiful’?
If a writer has the desire to communicate by writing and be heard, then he necessarily cares about seeing it in print. I suppose it’s the difference between masturbation and making love—the real writer wants to touch another person.
You say that you don’t care about age and that you’re ready to push the wheelchair and hose down my bum, but how can you be sure?
He was a good boy and ‘projected’ goodness – which later would be the downfall of many a person.
In America everyone called the merest acquaintance a ‘friend’ – Guy had taken up the habit. It made him feel better about not having any real friends.
Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They’ve already lived their lives.
In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.
Why did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case that gay families were like straight families and should have the same rights. The American spirit of fair play had been invoked.
AIDS had won gays sympathy they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s.
If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution for them; gays will never be fully accepted until they can marry and adopt, like anyone else.
The culmination of a long struggle was 2013, which could clearly be labeled the Year of the Gay. State after state had legalized gay marriage, despite intense opposition from the religious right.
I don’t have to get married myself in order to campaign on behalf of gay marriage.
Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved, and now I am a reluctant groom.
Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the part of gays to resemble their straight neighbours.
I’m not such a fan of imagination. If you’re alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.