A work of art doesn’t need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become...

You were silly like us.

Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.

The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.

Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out.

Gay liberation did not create gay promiscuity. There was sex before there were marches, politics, or books – it was the best reason for being homosexual, it and love.

There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.

Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.

Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White’s strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other’s domain.

Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.

Cunningham himself said in an interview in Poz that he couldn’t help noticing that as soon as he wrote a novel without a blowjob, they gave him the Pulitzer Prize.

If oppression produced saints, we’d want everyone to be oppressed.

such a representative life”. And it’s true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.

History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about...

A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.

A career in the arts can make anyone crazy.

Seventies macho was both a look – moustache, jeans, leather jacket – and an attitude – cool, heartless, virile – that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emotion.

A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.

A disproportionate number of stories are love stories – and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?

It has been a marvellous age of invention: radio, aeroplane, electric light, the telephone, and fellatio.

Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual.

Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn’t worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys.

Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.

Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.

Everybody is Other in Maupin.

An obsessed reader figured that ‘Armistead Maupin’ was an anagram for ‘is a man I dreamt up’.

We’re happier when the assholes are villains.

Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious...

Trust the tale, not the teller.

The fact of the matter is that readers and audiences are never blank slates: individuals see in a work whatever they need to see at that moment.

Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.

It’s often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they’re going.

Death is almost never timely, even for the old.

Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).

We all perform balancing acts between self and family, individual and community, private desire and group expectation. Gay people in particular must break with the groupthink of church and society in order to live their...

In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.

Didn’t he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?