Gay Novelists

"A lot of it came out of all the research and reading I was doing. African folklore is just so lush. There’s something so relentless and sensual about African mythology. Those stranger elements aren’t about me trying to score edgy post-millennial points. They are old elements. A lot of this book was about taking quite freely from African folklore, specifically from the area below the Sahara Desert. And that’s important to me. Mostly when people think of sophisticated Africa, they think of Egypt. And even that they attribute to aliens."

"I was trying on being a writer for size…I was trying on writing about things that are close to me for size. Like sexuality. At the time, I wasn’t in any form of gay relationship. It’s funny that I’ve gone from hating pop psychology to being way too Freudian. I can see all my fears and desires in it. Ones I could never give in to because I was deep in the church and I was a super-suppressed gay dude."

"Being a big black man in America, I literally do not know how to conduct myself in a physical space. I don’t know how to meet people without it seeming intimidating. I don’t know if I should wear glasses, if I should try to look extra gay, if I should stand up, sit down, wave my ID, not reach for an ID. I don’t know. I am literally immobilized in the presence of a lot of police power. That is a reality that could cross any form of social class, because it’s racist. And it’s very Caribbean of me to think my class can exclude me from racism. It’s very Caribbean of me to think that if I just dress nicer, if I just wear a suit… It has nothing to do with that, it’s racism…"

"Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth."

"Make no mistake, there’s formula detective fiction, there’s formula science fiction…but there’s formula literary fiction too. It’s genre snobbery that we’re only ready to acclaim stuff that’s of the genre but different in some way. It’s sci-fi but, it’s fantasy but… I didn’t want to write a but."

"I think, to be what you are, don't take advice from other people. Find your advice in your heart. Yes, find your advice in your heart. It's yours and you keep it. And if you think it's helpful to other people... then share it. I think the things we share are very important."

"I didn't like movies. You see, in a play you become the play, because you start in the beginning and end up at the end of the script. Movies, you do little bits and you don't know where it fits in. You just do a little bit here and a little bit there and you never see the whole thing, you can never act out the whole thing. It has no unity. I would advise anybody-a kid-instead of doing pictures, get experience! Do theater! Get theater in his blood!"

"[Henry Rios] "We never know anyone as well as we think we do.""

"[Inez] "...If you consort with lowlifes you've got to expect complications.""

"It was sometimes easier to read the future from the entrails of a cat than get a fix on what a judge was thinking, and Torres-Jones was particularly hard to get a handle on."

"[Josh Mandel] "Most things people care about are silly. They don't think about the ones that matter.""

"[Alex] "I never knew how many ways there were to fail until I moved here.""

"Greed had always seemed to me the most self-defeating of vices, because one cannot own anything permanently: we have, at most, a life tenancy in our possessions. But I suppose the fulfilment was in the acquisition and maybe, too, someone who'd been tossed around by life needed the cosseting that money and things provide."

"[Henry] Life is a kind of exile and we all long to go home. Who said that?"

"The Abbey was on Robertson, just below Santa Monica, on the edge of Boys' Town. Low brick buildings housed cafes, clothing stores, coffee houses and watch repair shops that rubbed elbows with gay clubs and sex shops. These establishments catered to hordes of the beautiful young gay men who lived in the big apartment complexes that lined the side streets or who drove in from all over Southern California on weekend nights. I seldom ventured there, because it reminded me of San Francisco in the '70s, when I was a boy just coming out and how out of place I'd felt among the big-muscled boys who cruised each other with cold assessment. Twenty years later, only the faces and the clothes had changed; the air was still charged with the brutal calculation of lust. And beneath that was the claustrophobia of a ghetto, of fearful people looking out at the world from behind invisible fences."

"[Henry Rios] I went down to my car, got in and sat, waiting for something to happen, some tidal wave of grief or anger to overwhelm me, but all I felt was a kind of dazed fatigue. It was the mental emptiness of effort I used to feel when I was a distance runner on my high school track team, and everything got reduced to putting one foot in front of the other. What was I then, fifteen, sixteen, pounding the dirt path along the river that ran through my home town? I sought refuge in that emptiness from my first awareness that I was different from other boys. What had Chris told me about his own adolescence, that he didn't want to be different? I didn't, either. I watched my classmates being initiated into the world of men and women where everything was planned and the outcomes known: marriage, children, family. That world was closed to me. I didn't have a plan, didn't know where I would end up or with whom. So I ran, mile after mile, until my body ached and my mind went blank. What happened is that I realised I could not outrun this thing. I remember that day, staggering along the path after a stupendous effort, darkness falling in the summer sky, racked with the dry heaves, gasping "I'm a queer," the only word I knew for my condition. I was full of fear and I felt completely alone, but I could not deny the truth and there was a kind of relief in that. I had now reached the same point with Josh's disease. I couldn't outrun it."

"It really was a brutal place, Los Angeles, less a city than a collection of hostile villages united only in their mutual suspicion of each other and a susceptibility to disasters, natural and otherwise. Fires, floods, riots and earthquakes; it was looking more and more like Armageddon-by-the-Pacific."

"[Detective McBeth] "Being out of the closet is a luxury that many gay people can't afford. Maybe you can't understand that, but it's something I think about.""

"And they drank. They drank to wash down the slights they endured by day and to enlarge small lives which became heroic in alcohol-glazed rumination, but at their cores the fathers knew the full measure of their unimportance and, so, finally, they drank to quiet the rage. But the rage would not be completely calmed. How could it? The church told them their reward would be in the next life, but this is small consolation for the back-breaking labors of the present, the years of enforced humility. When the rage exploded, they struck out at the only ones over whom they had any power: wives, sons, daughters, particularly the sons in whom they saw their own lost youths. The sons bore the blows and absorbed the rage."

"[Henry Rios] I said a prayer, always the same prayer. Two words. Help us."

"[Zack Bowen] "Damn, it's tough being a fag. People hate you who don't even know you, and the ones who know you, they're worse.""

"[Donati] "You see why I don't advertise I'm gay?" "No, not exactly, Nick." "Because I don't want to be confused with people like Bob." He tossed back his drink. "Drag queens, leather queens, all those sick fucks who parade around and make it impossible for the rest of us to have normal lives.""

"Having had to work twice as hard for what he deserved on merit alone, he'd developed a kind of rage, like an extra set of muscles, propelling him through life. The rage never went away. There was never enough to reward you for what you had suffered. And you never, ever, forgot you were an outsider, no matter how expensive your suits."

"As far as I was concerned, the Catholic Church was just another totalitarian political entity, like the Communist Party or IBM, but I had to admit, it put on a good show. I watched the theatrics unfold."

"He hoisted himself up to the ledge of the pool, the water running streams down his thin, hard body. "I came out here from Tennessee to go to school, a long time ago. I was eighteen and pretty and there wasn't anything I wouldn't do in bed. I had a lot of friends." He pushed wet hair from his forehead. "Thing is, you don't stay young and pretty forever. It began to take more and more booze to keep up the illusion, not that anybody but me was fooled. The friends drifted off, the party moved on, and I woke up one morning and I was thirty-one, broke and a drunk.""

"[Josh] "Just listen to me. I don't want to die, Henry. I want to be like everyone else. I want my seventy-five years or whatever, but I know I'm not going to have them and it makes me crazy." He tipped his head back and swallowed hard. "I can't help resenting you. You're going to be alive after I'm dead and you'll find someone else." He drew a deep breath. "It's not fair. I had to get away from you. I had to get away from my own resentment.""

"[Henry, to the therapist] "You people always end up wanting to talk about mommy and daddy," I said, intending a joke, but it was more hostile than funny."

"It was the mystery of my sexual nature that a body which was the mirror image of mine could be so compelling and feel so unfamiliar. When I was younger, it had seemed urgent to unravel this mystery because I believed that if it could be explained, the haters would stop hating us. Now I believed that they had no more right to an explanation about me than I did about them and, in any case, they would find other reasons to hate. Now I was simply grateful for his body beside me, known and unknown."

"[Edith] "If you tell a child he's bad long enough and often enough, he will act it out.""

"[Chuck Sweeny] "Times change, we change with 'em.""

"It was not quiet in my head."

"The defined categories of heterosexual and homosexual orientation were an invention of the late nineteenth century. The notion of the "homosexual" per se is comparatively recent, an invention of the nineteenth century; the word was coined by a Hungarian doctor named Karl Maria Kertbeny, in 1869. But the classification was not a neutral one; homosexuality was not just a phenomenon, it was a pathology. This view of homosexuality - congenital but pathological - laid the groundwork for homosexuality's subsequent psychiatrization. By [the mid-twentieth century] American culture had declared war on homosexuality as if it were an epedemic. The equation of homosexuality with sickness, and heterosexuality with health, persists in popular culture. Until 1974, when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its catalogue of mental illness, psychiatry played a long and dishonorable role in providing a basis for discrimination against gays and lesbians."

"What is happening in contemporary American society is that people who prefer to be with members of their own sex no longer see this as a reason to be deprived of the rights to citizenship, family formation, and privacy."

"[Alex] Big ideas don't pay the rent."

"The price you must pay for the enjoyment of your own liberty is the recognition that other people, especially people with whom you may not like to identify, have an equal claim to the same liberty. America requires an allegiance to the stern principle of liberty. This is the reason gay rights matter to Americans generally and not just to lesbians and gay men. Liberty, unlike nationality, cannot be safely restricted. Restriction turns liberty into privilege, and no American's freedom is safe if individual liberty changes from a right rooted in nature to a privilege rooted in custom."

"This argument is not about sexual practices or particular lifestyles. It hinges on whether gay and lesbian Americans are entitled to the same enjoyment as their fellow citizens of the freedom to make choices about how to live their lives without suffering discrimination in consequence."

"The common experience of being gay is deeply individual. You discover your sexual identity yourself, your closet is your own, your coming out is individual. Coming out represents a decision to transform one's life from the inside out, choosing the natural over the conventional at great personal cost. The process of coming out is harrowing, but it can leave in its wake an unshakable core of certainty of self. Coming out is more than an acknowledgement, acceptance, or even announcement of one's sexual identity. It represents a continuing process founded on an act of compassion towards oneself - a compassion, alas, seldom shown by one's own family or friends, let alone society. That act is the acceptance of one's fundamental worth, including, and not despite, one's homosexuality, in the face of social condemnation and likely persecution. Coming out is the process through which one arrives at one's values the hard way, testing them against what one knows to be true about oneself. Gay men and lesbians must think about family, morality, nature, choice, freedom, and responsibility in ways most people never have to. Truly to come out, a gay person must become one of those human beings who, as psychiatrist Alice Miller writes, "wants to be true to themselves". Each gay man and woman has to come to terms with his or her homosexuality, decide whether to accept it, deny it, or try to change it, and face the consequences of the choice."

"We must also again emphasize that gays and lesbians do not seek the right to be homosexual. This "right" is not one within the authority of government to give. They are fighting for the right to secure the conditions under which they may lead ordinary, civilized lives."

"[Madero] "An eye for an eye ends in blindness.""

"Madero focussed his magnetic gaze on Sarmiento. "Arresting Huerta would not have solved the problem because the problem is not Huerta, it's the army. Huerta's replacement would have also schemed behind my back and his replacement and his replacement. Don't you understand, Miguel? Until the army finally submits to civilian control, México will never be a real democracy. The army must stop thinking of itself as a branch of the government. Its generals must stop thinking of themselves as presidents-in-waiting. Until then, México will be condemned to repeat the last one hundred years of coups, countercoups, civil wars, and military dictatorships until Jesus arrives in the glory of his second coming and puts an end to it.""

""War is destruction and destruction is easy," Madero said."

"My father was a man of many sayings," Sarmiento replied. "And one of them was "A mas honor, mas dolor." No risk, no reward."

"Sarmiento waited for Luis at a sidewalk table at the Cafe Colón on the Reforma. Two sumptuous carriages filled with beautifully dressed women passed beneath Columbus's monument. They were the advance guard of the daily procession of the rich that wound its way up the boulevard and around Chapultepec in a stately and pointless show of opulence. Meanwhile, ragged Indian men swept the sidewalks with branch-and-twig brooms, bent over at their labour and ignored by the passers-by. The distance between the silk women and the pauper Indians was the true history of México, Sarmiento thought."

"[Jorge Luis, to young José's mother] "You must help him accept his nature," Luis replied forcefully. "Do not let him do as I did and stumble for years in the darkness trying to make sense of his feelings and his shame. Can you do that, Alicia?""

"[Henry Rios, with Raymond Reynolds, therapist] "Somewhere along the line, I had died." "What does that mean, Henry?" he inquired in his mild voice. "The thing that makes us human, the recognition of being alive, I had lost that. I drowned it in bourbon and kept myself so busy with work that I hadn't even noticed until that moment.""

"Downstairs, in the bleak cafeteria, a crazy woman sat at a table carrying on an animated conversation with someone who wasn't there. The crazy woman got up and shook hands with the air."

"This struggle is not about sex. It is about privacy, individuality, and civil equality and the right of all Americans, not just gay and lesbian Americans, to be free."

"What blocks gay equality is prejudice. What fuels the movement for gay equality is the conviction that this prejudice is not constitutionally protected, but that the individual rights of homosexual Americans are."

"I walked over to the railing and watched the traffic stream up and down the boulevard. A blond in a Jeep cruised by slowly, his cassette player blaring a disco tune from the seventies. Ah, the hunt, I thought, remembering the nights I had stood in San Francisco bars listening to that same song while I ingested a little liquid courage. Or, rather, a lot of liquid courage. Most nights I would stagger out alone and take the train back to school. Once in a while someone would pick me up, or I would pick him up, and I would toil in a stranger's bed for a few hours, trying to get out of my skin by going through his. I imagined that I was having fun, and sometimes I was, but not nearly often enough."

"The fighting had ended and his old routines had begun to be re-established ‑ even El Morito had reappeared, skinny and flea-ridden - but nothing was as it had been. He was like someone who had stepped into a long, dark, and frightening tunnel and, coming into the light, could not blink away the darkness that continued to cloud the periphery of his vision. The world was a more arbitrary and crueler place, and even though his family surrounded him, he knew now that he was essentially alone in it."