Paul Monette Quotes

Summer has always been good to me, even the bittersweet end, with the slant of yellow light.

Being different was about something more than just our dicks.

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.

Poetry served as a sort of intellectual wallpaper to brighten up the closet.

The better you get at being just a shoulder, the more unsexed you become.

Apparently long hair was enough to make you a faggot in Chicago in '68.

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.

The problem with secret crushes: in the absence of requital the love turns bitter.

A curious paradox here: hand in hand with the political rebellion of the age went a certain omnisexual freedom, but that meant you could sleep with anyone, not that you could be gay.

The first thing you see, directly in front of you, is a dim-lit tunnel receding deep under the island. The tunnel is paved with tiny glass beads of light, one for each of the two hundred thousand deportees. On the end wall of the tunnel is a bright light, almost a searchlight, which I've been told is intended to represent hope. But it

As an artist, you reach for the pen that's full of blood.

The struggle for true openness and intimacy is a lifelong struggle for all of us, gay and straight alike. And besides, a difficult life brings you to the core of yourself, where you learn what justice is and how it has to be fought for.

Good days are such a mysterious gift that you dare not question them much, and the only problem is they give you a false sense of security.

We queers of Revelation hill ... died of the greed of power, because we were expendable. If you mean to visit any of us, it had better be to make you strong to fight that power. Take your languor and easy tears somewhere else. Above all, don't pretty us up. Tell yourself: None of this ever had to happen. And then go make it stop, with whatever breath you have left. Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.

If the government was going to continue to act as if we didn't exist, if the medical establishment was prone to gridlock over funds, if the drug companies were waiting till the curve got high enough for profit, then we would find our own way.

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

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.

When you finally come out, there's a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.

Fate was the issue, if anything; not guilt.

They looked at me, in my hippie garb, with horror and disgust, the Decline of Western Civilisation suddenly plopped in their midst.

So I told myself I would give it up, even prayed at night for it to be taken away, not knowing that 'it' was love.

We were doing the best we could with what we had left, and more and more it was like Diogenes tossing away the tin cup because he could drink with his hands. It turns out there is no end to learning what you can do without.

That as long as I kept them apart, love would be sexless and sex loveless, endlessly repeating its cycle of self-denial and self-abuse.

Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.

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

It was the first time I'd ever considered that gay might not just be about whom we slept with but a kind of sensibility, what survived of feeling after all the fears and evasions of the closet.

Love and fuck in the same breath, even if it's your last.

Yet that's how it felt for years and years
that Andover ground me beneath the heel of its Bass Weejuns because it needed losers to make its golden Adonises shine even brighter. I wandered through so lost and sad, I can't believe nobody ever asked me what was wrong. Nothing, I would have said, by which I would have meant Everything.

I suppose we'd been waiting for each other all our lives.

Though gay men have begun to understand it is something in themselves these upright men so fear, too many of us have internalized their self-hatred as shame. That the flesh and the spirit are one in love is none of the business of the celibate men of God, especially those who believe they rule the province of love. But the mission of the homophobe is more pernicious even than his morality. He wants every one of us to be all alone, never to find the beloved friend.
A man ought to be free to find his reason. Not that freedom alone will serve it up: it requires the gods' own fury of luck to get two people to meet. But when it finally happens, two men in love can't rejoice out loud - joy of the very thing everyone burns for - without bracing for the rant of prophets, the schoolyard bully, and Rome's "intrinsic evil." I try to remember that we fight as a ragged people to outlast the calamity so that others can sleep as safe as my friend and I, like a raft in the tempest.

It was said that everyone appointed by the Reagan administration in a major public health capacity was either a Mormon or a fundamentalist. The chief spokesman for the administration now was the overripe and venomous Patrick Buchanan, one of whose major qualifications for the job was his widely quoted remark that nature was finally exacting her price on homosexuals for having spilled their seed against her.

Change me, I whispered, change me.

And if the government was stone-deaf, the press was mute. The media are convinced in 1987 that they're doing a great job reporting the AIDS story, and there's no denying they've grasped the horror. But for four years they let the bureaucracies get away with passive genocide,

Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world.

To experience love as claustrophobia. In such a twisted paradigm lies the sick legacy of a lifetime in the closet.

I've never quite understood the double Janus face of bi – Janus, the Roman god of gates and doors, especially closets.

That would be my theme, I thought: once I came out, the world was all windows.

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.

Unpossessive. Before his parents left, Al once again paid him the highest compliment about his relationship with me. "You boys are the best friends I've ever seen," he said. "You're like Damon and Pythias." It's a long way for a man to come who couldn't look me in the face for a year after Roger finally told him he was gay. A century

There is no God, I'm sure of that. But the more they've sought me out, the more I am convinced that there are holy men and women. So I send blessings, such as they are, to all my priests who constitute the Resistance. Down with the fur and the edicts. And if they like, they're welcome to include me in their prayers. Can't hurt. None of us will free the world of intolerance alone. We need people of God, especially if He isn't here.

I must've gone out for dinner with Al and Bernice, and I must've been full of reassurance and interstitial data. All the blood work was normal so far, but I don't recall if an actual T-cell test was taken, or if we knew the results before the verdict. The T cells are a subset of the white blood count. Infection with the

How do you think poetry helps people? he'd ask, wanting the whole thing quantified so he could compare it to digging wells in the Peace Corps.