| "He didn't speak of the pain, never said a word about it. Sometimes his face would quiver, he'd close his eyes and clench his teeth. But he never said anything about the images he saw behind his closed eyes. It was as if he loved the pain, loved it as he'd loved me, intensely, unto death perhaps, and as if he preferred it now to me."
~The Lover by Marguerite Duras "And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he'd love her until death." ~The Lover by Marguerite Duras "Passion is the hardest taskmaster." ~From A Buick 8 by Stephen King "He who knows true pain has learned a great deal." ~The Song of Roland by ? "Lying, prevaricating, hiding the truth, whatever you want to call it, gay people do it better than any other segment of society, excluding politicians, of course. It is a Darwinian survival mechanism designed to protect us from persecution. The need to lie becomes obvious at a very early age. From the moment we realize that we are attracted to members of our own sex, and how reviled that attraction is, the lying starts. From the moment we hear our first snide queer joke, or a slur against fags or dykes, the lying starts. We realize then that we are, without choosing to be, in a society that is hostile to our very existence. We learn to lie, are encouraged to conceal our identities and deny our feelings. Lying is sanctioned. Expected almost." ~Uncle Max by Chris Kenry "He wanted someone to find him attractive, to desire him. He wanted someone to really like him, not just for one fuck or one night, but for a lifetime. He wanted to fall in love. And that wasn't going to happen in a bar." ~Last Summer by Michael Thomas Ford " 'A friend of mine says that gay men spend their twenties trying to be the guy everyone wants to fuck, their thirties being the guy everybody wants to marry, and the rest of their lives chasing after the guys in their twenties and thirties.' " ~Last Summer by Michael Thomas Ford " As a teen, I felt that, at times, it was an us against them situation: 'the sky is falling' adults versus 'well, if it does, let's see what happens' youth." ~The Privilege of Youth by Dave Pelzer "About 3,000 gay men a week streamed to the gargantuan bathhouse at Eighth and Howard streets, the Club Baths, which could serve up to 800 customers at any given time. Joe figured that the attraction to promiscuity and depersonalization of sex rested on issues surrounding a fear of intimacy. Joe knew these were not gay issues but male issues. The trouble was that, by definition, you had a gay male subculture in which there was nothing to moderate the utterly male values that were being adulated more religiously than any macho heterosexual could imagine, right down to the cold, hard stares of the bathhouse attendants. Promiscuity was rampant because in an all-male subculture there was nobody to say "no" - no moderating role like that a woman plays in the heterosexual milieu. Some heterosexual males privately confided that they were enthralled with the idea of the immediate, available, even anonymous, sex a bathhouse offered, if they could only find women who would agree. Gay men, of course, agreed, quite frequently." ~And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts, page 89 (this does not try to summarize life or life, it’s just hot) “...Another lunatic, this one a young man of perhaps twenty-five with muscles that looked tuned (I think he meant toned) by Nautilus and Cybex, bolted from an alley just in front of them and went dashing across the street, hurdling the locked bumpers of two cars, foaming out an unceasing lava-flow of that nonsense-talk as he went. He held a car aerial in each hand and stabbed them rapidly back and forth in the air like daggers as he cruised his lethal course. He was naked except for a pair of what looked like brand-new Nikes with bright red swooshes. His cock swung from side-to-side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock on speed. He hit the far sidewalk and sidewheeled west, back toward the Common, his butt clenching and unclenching in fantastic rhythm. ~Cell by Stephen King, pages 28-29 (hardcover edition) (this, too, does not try to summarize. I found it funny) “ ‘Eminem might have been a jerk, but he was right about that guy,’ Tom said morosely.” ~Cell by Stephen King, page 175 (hardcover edition) *In the line before, someone was talking about Moby Dick, but the second guy thought the first guy meant the music artist Moby, not the literary figure. (another bit that does not try to summarize, I like it because it mentions Western New York) “Oddly, this was one of the things that appealed to Mike about life in Cold Falls. He’d lived in larger cities, Albany and Syracuse for several years and a brief three-month stint in Buffalo one summer, but he preferred the quieter atmosphere of the smaller towns. Not that Cold Falls was merely a flyspeck on the map of New York State.” ~Looking For It by Michael Thomas Ford, page 5 (soft-cover edition) “Now he was left to grow old alone. He supposed to many people he already was old. At sixty-five, he was far older than most of the men he knew. Certainly he was far beyond being attractive to them. He knew this, and accepted it. Old gay men were not, in the general scheme of things, hot properties. They could be funny. They could dispense advice. If they were very good, they might be allowed to pay someone younger and more handsome for the privilege of touching his body. But they were not supposed to desire any more than that. It was in poor taste. They’d had their chances, and it was expected that they would now relinquish the rights and privileges of love to those coming up behind them.” ~Looking For It by Michael Thomas Ford, page 47 (soft-cover edition) “Simon paused again, thinking. ‘I believe that God - if He exists at all - is what we want him to be. The true God is unknowable, and so we dress Him in costumes that make Him visible to us. Then we come up with a lit of very silly rules that we attribute to Him and tell everyone that if they don’t follow those rules, they can’t be part of the gang.’ ‘That’s oversimplifying religion a little, don’t you think?’ asked Mike. ‘Religion is simple,’ Simon answered. ‘It is the religious who make it complicated. Everybody wants to be right.’” ~Looking For It by Michael Thomas Ford, page 80 (soft-cover edition) “The problem, of course, was finding someone else who appreciated what he’d become. He realized that he was something of a rarity among gay men, an older man who preferred the company of older men. He was familiar with the other variety, the men who longed for the smooth skin of men half their age. He didn’t look unkindly upon such men. He understood them. They didn’t want to die. They wanted to embrace youth and, by doing so, perhaps slow their own inevitable decline.” ~Looking For It by Michael Thomas Ford, page 161 (soft-cover edition) “With the realization that he was falling in love with Thomas had come, however, a reawakening of a fear Mike had tried to bury. Along with the excitement of finding someone with whom he felt comfortable had come a flicker of doubt, a tiny nagging worry that it would never last. He had tried to ignore the feeling, but it had been persistent, returning again and again despite his best efforts to push it away. Nothing lasted forever. The freshest emotions would eventually sour. Even the most solid of foundations hid fault lines that, once disturbed, would result in crumbling.” ~Looking For It by Michael Thomas Ford, page 227 (soft-cover edition) “...Seldom did their curiosity about one another extend any further than finding out more, unless perhaps it was to seek out the answers to questions answered in the bedroom: How big was he? Did he give it or take it? What secret desires did he have? These things they might display some interest in knowing, might even spend some time and effort into researching, but once they had their answers, the spotlight of their curiosity quickly panned to another face, another crotch, another distraction. None of them were looking for anything real. They might tell themselves they were, but they lied. Mike had seen enough during his years in various bars to know that ultimately they were simply prisons, cells in which condemned men waiting to die spent their time. Oh, they always hoped for a pardon, for someone to come along and release them from whatever held them there. And sometimes, briefly, they were granted a reprieve. But almost always they came back after a time, looking even wearier than they had before they left. Over time they grew accustomed to their fate, until finally, accepting it, their faces acquired a resignedness that masqueraded as contentment.” ~Looking For It by Michael Thomas Ford, pages 228-229 (soft-cover edition) “But like an ex-lover, he and the bar had outgrown one another. He no longer needed it. Staying together would only keep him in one place, endlessly treading water. It was time to let go and move on. He wished it well, wished its other lovers - the ones who still came to find comfort in its arms - well.” ~Looking For It by Michael Thomas Ford, page 274 (soft-cover edition) |