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d2d86b7
|
We're happier when the assholes are villains.
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gay
villains
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
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037e821
|
People assume that artists must talk about art and beauty and the sublime whenever we get together, but no, we usually talk about money.
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Christopher Bram |
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7eb31c8
|
It has been a marvellous age of invention: radio, aeroplane, electric light, the telephone, and fellatio.
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Christopher Bram |
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a527361
|
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.
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|
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Christopher Bram |
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7a9ee34
|
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 in a newspaper is not always more important than a fictional one in a novel or play or poem.
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writers
|
Christopher Bram |
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d513134
|
Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.
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penicillin
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
1d7797f
|
Political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action.
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Christopher Bram |
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e707f06
|
If oppression produced saints, we'd want everyone to be oppressed.
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saints
|
Christopher Bram |
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9f9660c
|
Good prose is solitary work.
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|
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Christopher Bram |
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0d01fdb
|
Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.
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love
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
766d50a
|
Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in 'In Memory of WB Yeats': "You were silly like us."
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|
yeats
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
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37e600f
|
Death is almost never timely, even for the old.
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|
old
gay
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
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3ca0c81
|
Art is long and life is short.
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life
gay
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
1601d7d
|
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 own lives. (It's why you still see half-read copies of on the night tables of otherwise intelligent gay men.)
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|
gay
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
215e069
|
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 involved in other people's lives.
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|
success
gay
questions
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
03d7dca
|
If the achievement of so much in life could not make one happy, then why bother living?
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|
existentialism
|
Christopher Bram |
|
0d7e5d7
|
The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.
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|
literary
revolution
|
Christopher Bram |
|
2349be7
|
A career in the arts can make anyone crazy.
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|
career
crazy
|
Christopher Bram |
|
c3fbf36
|
A writer who can't use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand cliches.
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|
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
440d8ed
|
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.
|
|
gore-vidal
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
c93507f
|
A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having "such a representative life". And it's true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people."
|
|
edmund-white
gay
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
543a216
|
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.
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seventies-macho
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
cc5044d
|
Vidal himself joked that at a certain age lawsuits took the place of sex.
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|
|
Christopher Bram |
|
678ad7a
|
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 now, so banal.
|
|
gay
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
97b4447
|
Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.
|
|
winnie-the-pooh
gay
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
314cf90
|
Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.
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|
writers-life
|
Christopher Bram |
|
81b858f
|
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.
|
|
gay
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
3d7d90c
|
An obsessed reader figured that 'Armistead Maupin' was an anagram for 'is a man I dreamt up'.
|
|
gay
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
43daaf0
|
Trust the tale, not the teller.
|
|
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
099414d
|
There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.
|
|
second-rate
gay
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
b3fbdc1
|
It's often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they're going.
|
|
|
Christopher Bram |
|
68c5046
|
A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.
|
|
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
e7f1bcb
|
The closest he comes to explaining why he found it gay is to say that like "Virginia Woolf", it showed a woman defeating a man. Presumably a straight man could never imagine such a thing."
|
|
|
Christopher Bram |
|
a15b9cb
|
Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.
|
|
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
81b223f
|
A disproportionate number of stories are love stories - and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?
|
|
love-stories
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
8418eef
|
A writer's unconscious is difficult to read, but the imagination is rooted in the unconscious.
|
|
|
Christopher Bram |
|
e646337
|
The orgy room at Dave's Baths was democracy made flesh; race and social standing were checked at the door along with clothes.
|
|
|
Christopher Bram |
|
f9031f4
|
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.
|
|
writers
ginsberg
|
Christopher Bram |
|
4c01cd2
|
It made him feel like a mom, ineffectual and sexless.
|
|
|
Christopher Bram |
|
5d2d1b3
|
Isherwood received bags of fan mail, far more than Tennessee Williams had for . There was the sexual and jokey (a fifteen-year-old English schoolboy sent his photo and wrote on the back, "My tits are on fire")." --
|
|
|
Christopher Bram |
|
d7e1339
|
Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual.
|
|
gay-neoghbourhoods
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
0e2b81c
|
Everybody is Other in Maupin.
|
|
other
gay
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
db92f40
|
In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.
|
|
writers
|
Christopher Bram |
|
9ad87e1
|
Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).
|
|
writers
|
Christopher Bram |