Quotes / Gayngst

"I think that the marked difference between my attitude toward sex and that of Tennessee made each of us somewhat startling to the other. I never had the slightest guilt or anxiety about what I always took to be a natural human appetite. He was—and is—guilt-ridden, and although he tells us that he believes in no afterlife, he is still too much the puritan not to believe in sin. At some deep level Tennessee truly believes that the homosexualist is wrong and that the heterosexualist is right. Given this all-pervading sense of guilt, he is drawn in both life and work to the idea of expiration, of death."

—Gore Vidal on Tennessee Williams

"I cannot remember how he introduced the subject when, after an interminably long pause during which each of us, it seemed, had become absorbed into his own thoughts, he spoke again. Probably there was no introduction. I remember that his breathing seemed strained and difficult. "I think I ought to tell you", he said, "that I am, to say the least of it, bisexual." I recall every syllable of that sentence, with its strange qualification "to say the least of it", because it took him an age to say it and the pauses, which were more or less as I have punctuated them, were painful. In each pause he breathed more deeply, to the bottom of his lungs, letting the air out with a punctured sigh, his shoulders sagging forward. When he had finished he stared at me, angrily, as if I had forced him to speak, as if I had taken advantage of his too trusting nature, and then came three huge, heaving sobs, "Aaaagh.... aaagh... aaagh", and then the dam burst and his grief and his rage came out in a great, terrrible, heaving cascade.

I had often seen my father cry. He cried freely, without any attempt at restraint, and I was always grateful to have learned from him that there is nothing wrong with crying; quite the contrary. But I had never seen him cry like this. It was beyond anything I had experienced, a grief so awful that it seemed to undo him. I sat on the arm of his armchair, folded my arms around his neck, and when eventually he quietened a little I said, "I know". He said, "Do you?". And that was all. The end of the conversation."

—Corin Redgrave on his father, Sir Michael Redgrave

"Davies is something of a bloodthirsty Doctor Who writer prone to whacking characters whenever things get a bit slow... The deaths of Owen and Tosh were damp squibs of desperation, and Ianto's death, while more successful, is still messy in some key ways.

And this gets at a paradox that's at the heart of almost everything Davies does, and not just on Doctor Who. He is, as a writer, obsessed with death. The idea of loss and mourning is one of his baseline, default themes. But his response to it is and always has been a sort of hedonism. Death, for Davies, is a fundamental reason to live... And so the one thing he can't successfully make a spectacle out of is death itself. Which means that Miracle Day is on the one hand an attempt at the most Davies story ever to exist, and on the other something that Davies is fundamentally ill-suited to writing. It's not, ultimately, that Miracle Day doesn't work because Davies didn't put enough time into it. It's that Miracle Day doesn't work because it's fundamentally not an idea Davies was ever going to succeed with. More than anything, including the problems of "The End of Time", this is the show that really demonstrates that Davies's approach to sci-fi television eventually hit its limit."

— El Sandifer on Russel T. Davies

"A few scientists have argued for a genetic link between homosexuality, a proposal that I not only find disturbing but also untenable. Others have suggested that those who expect their sexuality to prevent their having child might confront their morality earlier than straight people. A number of other theories have circulated, but the most obvious explanation for the high rates of gay depression is homophobia. Gay people are more likely than the general population to have been rejected by their families. They are more likely to have had social adjustment problems. Because of those problems, they are more likely to have dropped out of school. They have a higher rate of sexually transmitted diseases. They are less likely to be in stable couplings in their adult life. They are less likely to have committed caretakers in late life. They are more likely to be infected with HIV in the first place, and even those who are not, once they become depressed, are more likely to practice unsafe sex and contract the virus (which in turn exacerbates the depression). Most of all, they are more likely to have lived their lives furtively, and to have experienced intense segregation in consequence of this...These painful experiences can generate an almost intractable, global and tenacious self-hatred."

—Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

Fiction

Captain Maggie Sawyer: I've been where you are, Renée.
Detective Renee Montoya: You've been where I am? Are you sure? Because somehow I don't think you have. I just have a hard time picturing that. I have a hard time picturing you as a latina for instance. I have a hard time picturing your parents as immigrants from the D.R. who go to mass every Sunday. And I don't really see you having to explain every time you see them why they don't have any grand-children yet... or why it is that you're going to hell when you die."

— Gotham Central

"Katie, you know how Mom & Dad are: Not exactly... super open-minded. About things.
It feels like every minute I don't spend with Lonnie, I spend worrying about them finding out about us. And what would happen if they did...
You know dad's "joke" about "the nunnery" he'd tell whenever you brought boys around the old house? I wonder where he would want to send ME...."

—Gone Home

"I had an... interesting talk with mom and dad tonight. One YOU'RE never going to need to have.
I mean... you've known, right? Like... I'VE known. I've known since like, She-Ra.
Mom and dad didn't, I guess.
But they saw the zine, and the stuff on the locker, and they were like, "is there something we should know about you and Lonnie?"
And so here's the thing. I was prepared for them to be mad, or disappointed, or start crying or SOMETHING. But they were just in DENIAL. "You're too young to know what you want," "you and Lonnie are just GOOD FRIENDS," "you just haven't met the right BOY..." "It's a PHASE." That's what I didn't see coming. That they wouldn't even respect me enough... to BELIEVE me.
Well. Joke's on them. Because they are in for one VERY long phase."

—Gone Home

"You show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse."

— Michael, The Boys in the Band

"When we were alone, that was a different story. She was intoxicating. I could just lie with her forever, holding each other, sharing the most intimate of moments. It felt right. Pure. And I felt loved. But when it became public, I was back in high school . . . 'Wonder what her favorite flavor of carpet is' rose loud and clear when the head monkeys began to chatter. And I would feel the shame of it all over again."

— Sarah Beauhall, Black Blade Blues

"I'm a Jew, I'm small, I'm homosexual, and I live in Sheffield. I'm fucked."

— Posner, The History Boys

"After all of that, after getting caught shoplifting, and confiscated weed, and illegal tattoos, I've never seen her dad look as angry as he did this afternoon. Isn't that fucked up? We can destroy property, cost him thousands of dollars, get drunk on his alcohol, spend his money, and put ourselves in danger. But the fact that we love each other makes him the angriest?"

— Gay Straight Alliance

"Maybe I can finally have a proper gay storyline. I can be happy."
*Record Needle Scratch*
"Well, we can't have that."

— Dollshouse Downton

Shin Kuroi: ...I have always loved you. Maybe, ever since we were little. I've been hanging onto yearning and liking for you.
Hiroyuki Nishimura: Wha...
Shin: Holding those kinds of feelings for someone of the same sex one-sidedly is disgusting, isn't it.

— Morenatsu

"I didn't want you to know. I knew you would reject such inappropriate love. I knew it too..."

— Shizuru to Natsuki, My-HiME

Who knew that asking out a girl to the prom

Would go over just like an atom bomb

And make things much worse with your dad and mom

And who'd have ever thought

That could be possible?

— Emma, The Prom, "Just Breathe"

Cocaine and drinkin' with your friends
You live in the dark, boy, I cannot pretend
I'm not fazed, only here to sin
If Eve ain't in your garden, you know that you can...

—Lil Nas X, Montero (Call Me By Your Name)

I didn't want to touch you. I didn't know why. I thought there was something wrong with me. I loved you...

— Avigdor to Yentl/Anshel, Yentl

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