What are you into, anyway?” “Solitude.
I know I can’t tell you what it’s like to be gay. But I can tell you what it’s not. It’s not hiding behind words, Mama. Like family and decency and Christianity.
Solitude was no reason for sloppiness.
Don’t listen when they scoff That you are too old and I am young, For I am old enough to know better And you are young enough not to care.
But I’m acutely aware that the possibility of fraud is even more prevalent in today’s world because of the Internet and cell phones and the opportunity for instant communication with strangers.
My mother once told me that if a married couple puts a penny in a pot for every time they make love in the first year, and takes a penny out every time after that, they’ll never get all the pennies out of the pot.
I’m not sure I even need a lover, male or female. Sometimes I think I’d settle for five good friends.
I’ve always drawn on bits and pieces of my own life.
I tend to prefer the shelter of fiction.
I consider myself much better adjusted than Gabriel.
I’m the age now that Rock was when he picked me up, so I can understand how he felt – how his fame limited his freedom. You get kinder as you go along.
Sooner or later, though, no matter where in the world we live, we must join the diaspora, venturing beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us.
Needing and loving are two different things.
How could I possibly NOT be disappointed by what I would find? Nothing had ever met my expectation, since nothing could compete with my doctoring imagination, my pathetic compulsion to make the world quanter, funnier, kinder, and more mysterious than it actually was.
The bay was bright blue today, the hard fierce blue of a gas flame. If there was fog rolling in – and there must be, given the insistence of those horns – she couldn’t see it from here.
You cannot be loved by someone who doesn’t want to know you.
The worst of times in San Francisco was still better than the best of times anywhere else.
You don’t have to keep up, dear. You just have to keep open.
Over the next eight years, almost without noticing, I arrived at a quiet revelation. You could make a home by yourself. You could fill that home with friends and friendly strangers without someone sleeping next to you. You could tend your garden and cook your meals and find predictable pleasure in your own autonomy.
My youth would be like that, the slow decay of cherished myths – about politics and race, about love itself – until nothing was left but compost from which something authentic could finally begin to grow.