“The disaster, as Dad and others saw it, was the emerging AIDS crisis and the cultural attacks instigated by conservative against gay men and women in the early 1980s. It was found in the cruel indi...”

“The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.”

“My days of torment were over, but the damage was done. I conflated the bullies and my bathroom accidents with an inchoate sense that something was wrong with me. I broadcast my sense of otherness t...”

“If he once failed as a father, it was a noble fail.”

“In late 1985, the Reagan White House blocked the use of CDC money for education, leaving the US behind other Western nations in telling its citizens how to avoid contracting the virus. Many America...”

“Of course, it’s now obvious why he was so angry that day. People don’t move into hospice to live but to die. And that half an egg sandwich I ended up making him–that sandwich was the last meal he a...”

“Kind of gay? I wanted to say. Do you have any notion how many homosexuals sweated their ass off on the dance floor to make this soaring bit of derivative trash possible? How many died of AIDS, OD'd...”

“You are a hole in my life, a black hole. Anything I place there cannot be returned. I miss you terribly. Ci vedremo lassu, angelo.”

“The disaster, as Dad and others saw it, was the emerging AIDS crisis and the cultural attacks instigated by conservative against gay men and women in the early 1980s. It was found in the cruel indi...”

“Mental illness People assume you arent sick unless they see the sickness on your skin like scars forming a map of all the ways youre hurting. My heart is a prison of Have you tried?s Have you tried...”

“The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.”

“Chronic illness is hard. Pain is hard. Isolation is hard. The financial cost is hard. Grieving is hard and necessary and sometimes takes far longer than we every imagined.”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”