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Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story QUOTES

Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

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

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

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

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

4 " 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. "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

5 " 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. "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

6 " Lust and the English make no sense to me. "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

7 " And thus I wonder about so many gay men I’ve met since, pillars of the community, out to everyone else but Mom, who still refer to their lovers as something between a roommate and a valet. Just who is being protected here, and who thinks queer is wrong? "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

8 " Being different was about something more than just our dicks. "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

9 " We are creatures of the cruelties we witness. "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

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

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

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

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

12 " For it turned out there were closets within the closet, and a lingering self-hatred that even the joy of connection couldn’t solve. What love gives you is the courage to face the secrets you’ve kept from yourself, a reason to open the rest of the doors. "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

13 " Secrets upon secrets. Thus by inexorable degrees does the love that dares not speak its name build walls instead, till a house is nothing but closets. "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

14 " Apparently long hair was enough to make you a faggot in Chicago in ’68. "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

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

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

16 " But the fevers are on me now, the virus mad to ravage my last fifty T cells. It's hard to keep the memory at full dazzle, with so much loss to mock it. Roger gone, Craig gone, Cesar gone, Stevie gone. And this feeling that I'm the last one left, in a world where only the ghosts still laugh. But at least they're the ghosts of full-grown men, proof that all of us got that far, free of the traps and the lies. And from that moment on the brink of summer's end, no one would ever tell me again that men like me couldn't love. "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

17 " In this Puritan sinkhole of a culture, we don't teach children the uses of pleasure, and so they decide we are fools and go their own way, blindly. If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks. "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

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

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

19 " The pain between them made me as envious as their laughter, because it was real and expressible, blood-red with passion, and not the invisible pain of a ghost like me. Sometimes my head filled with a scream that went on for hours but was silenced by the walls of the closet. My face still wearing its social smile fixed in place as if by a stroke. "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

20 " Time to set forth alone and find out what sort of man I was, instead of being a mirror to somebody else. Swearing a blood oath, even as I clung to this ghost embrace, that I would never hold another man who wouldn't hold me back. "

― Paul Monette , Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story