46 quotes found
“Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual.”
“Seventies macho was both a look moustache, jeans, leather jacket and an attitude cool, heartless, virile that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emo...”
“The fact of the matter is that readers and audiences are never blank slates: individuals see in a work whatever they need to see at that moment.”
“Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in In Memory of WB Yeats: You were silly like us.”
“History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read ab...”
“A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.”
“Its often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where theyre going.”
“Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.”
“Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out.”
“Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history Whites strengths are sex, art and sometimes love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the others domain.”
“The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.”
“Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.”
“A career in the arts can make anyone crazy.”
“If oppression produced saints, wed want everyone to be oppressed.”
“We’re happier when the assholes are villains.”
“A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having “such a representative life”. And it’s true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.”
“Didn’t he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?”
“An obsessed reader figured that ‘Armistead Maupin’ was an anagram for ‘is a man I dreamt up’.”
“A work of art doesn’t need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in othe...”
“A disproportionate number of stories are love stories – and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?”
