All close friendships are marked with competition. Our earliest tests are against our siblings and playmates, and some of that rivalry endures amongst friends into adulthood. Like dogs play fighting, you learn not to bite hard.

You know how hard it is to actually touch the world? To make a mark on it? You die and they bury you in it.

He tried to imagine the handsome couple by the refrigerator as two sweaty bodies in a bedroom, one on top of the other. Which did what to the other? Mills kept rotating the two men in his mind, which he never had to do when he imagined straight couples having sex.

That’s what children eventually were for their aging parents: custodians of technology, free personal IT departments keeping them from disappearing forever from the universal cloud.

Mills was experienced enough to understand what gay men were often forced to be in this world: romantic opportunists.

Women had cup sizes to track their development. Men had a ruler and hope.

Paul needed to come out, not as gay or straight, but as human.

Maybe, in the end, a home is a place where you have no other choice but to stay.

Everyone loves a dead artist. It’s the living ones that people can’t tolerate.

All your convictions come back to mock you when you reach a certain age.

I’ve always looked like this—in between. Is there ever an age when a person looks exactly like themselves?

Now young people have the Internet and a zillion phone apps so you don’t need an actual place to congregate. You can be everywhere, nowhere, a floating message-spewing entity. We used to rely on drugs to get that sensation.

They were young and gay and the femininity of their teenage years had only recently hardened into the muscle of a competitive sexual economy. Their muscles met the demands of the city, and the city met the demands of their muscles.

To discover someone was ordinary always struck Mills as a kind of betrayal. Whenever a man Mills presumed was gay turned out to be straight, the aura about him crumbled, the clues reassembling into the most indistinctive brand of human being—normal, hiding nothing, a mind like a weather vane that moved with the prevailing winds.

Sometimes it seemed like the whole point of life was not to die the same death as your father.

The Greeks used to say that gods and animals were born whole. It is only humans who need to develop, that they become complete only with the help of a community. It’s the state of that community that can turn a human into a god or a beast.” She dropped the bee into the terrarium and returned it slowly to the table. “Maybe that’s bullshit. I happen to like the beasts.

If the Internet were planet Earth, the amount of space devoted to pregnancies, motherhood, infants, and toddlers would surely fill a continent. Of course, the Internet had an enormous investment in the subject: those future babies would be its next generation of users.

I’m not some outdated alarm company, like Muldoon Security, singular. I’m offering a whole new variety of services, plural—water testing, soil graphs, toxic air readings, the security of this century. The security that you aren’t being poisoned in your own home.