At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, “Mythology and Archetypal Experience,” confounded me. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

Gatsby’s self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is many ways identical to my father’s. Like Gatsby, my father fueled this transformation with the “colossal vitality of his illusion”. Unlike Gatsby he did this on...

Psychoanalytic insight, Miller seems to suggest, is itself a pathological symptom.

I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one’s erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.

It’s our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?

Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.

On our second date, she kissed me in a bar. I invited her home. We just caught the F train, which seemed like a good omen.

If it weren’t for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

Four years after my father’s death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief...

It’s imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

She has given me a way out.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.

How Horrid” has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror–puberty, public disgrace–then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.