It would take me the better part of growing up to understand that intimacy, more than sex or even sexual orientation, was the universal battleground, and no easier for straight than gay.

Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient's bed. You don't care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one's previous citizenship at the border.

The imagination was the only country where a man could truly breathe free.

I was out of the war because men like this were too scared to talk about dick.

Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you're hurting.

The Bible is still the only dirty book I've ever read, at least in its current incarnation as a weapon of the homophobes. Bible scholarship keeps trying to catch up, proving that all the hatred of gay is just stupid translation, though the snake-oil preachers don't want to hear it.

Organized religion is the school of hate, and never more exultant in its righteous indignation than when it talks about gay and lesbian. In America the unholy alliance between the know-nothing fundamentalists and the Catholic hierarchy keeps the faithful whipped up to a frenzy of witch-hunting and fag-bashing.

Lust and the English make no sense to me.

And thus I wonder about so many gay men I’ve met since, pillars of the community, out to everyone else but Mom, who still refer to their lovers as something between a roommate and a valet. Just who is being protected here, and who thinks queer is wrong?

Being different was about something more than just our dicks.