Gay Pictures With Quotes

What would my first sergeant do if he came across me and another girl getting it on? He'd want pictures. He'd want to join in. He'd want me and this other girl to double-team him right then and there. On the other hand, since most heterosexual men are homophobic and sexist, most straight guys figure gay men will treat them the way they themselves treat women- that is, like sex objects. And this freaks them the fuck out.

Tate?" "What?" he barked at him. Logan couldn't help the way his dick reacted to it. "I can't even remember what he looks like because all I can picture is you.

Picture this, Olive. Early two thousands. Preppy, ridiculously expensive all-male DC school. Two gay students in grade twelve. Well, two of us that were out, anyway. Richie Muller and I date for the entirety of senior year - and then he dumps me three days before prom for some guy he’d been having a thing with for months.” “He was a prick,” Adam muttered. “I have three choices. Not go to the dance and mope at home. Go alone and mope at school. Or, have my best friend - who was planning on staying home and moping over gamma-aminobutyric acids - come as my date. Guess which?” Olive gasped. “How did you convince him?” “That’s the thing, I didn’t. When I told him about what Richie did, he offered!

Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests.

Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet. It was the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages. In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.

Picture if Zac Efron and Chris Hemsworth had a baby. I mean, don't picture the actual birth. Or the gay sex. Just picture the full-grown male result of their DNA combining.

Where do starfish come from?” asked Sam. “From the sky,” answered Stella. “Starfish are shooting stars that fell in love with the sea.” “Weren’t the stars afraid of drowning?” asked Sam. “No,” said Stella. “They all learned how to swim.

An eleven-year-old girl was raped by eighteen men. The suspects ranged in age from middle schoolers to a twenty-seven-year-old. There are pictures and videos. Her life will never be the same. The New York Times, however, would like you to worry about those boys, who will have to live with this for the rest of their lives, and the poor, poor town. That is not simply the careless language of sexual violence. It is the criminal language of sexual violence.

Unlike the millions who casually masturbate in solitude while looking at girlie pictures in Playboy and similar magazines, the massage man preferred an accomplice, an attendant lady of respectable appearance who would help him reduce the guilt and loneliness of this most lonely act of love.

Not all gay men send me penis pictures. But no straight men do. And to date, no woman has sent me a picture of her vaginal canal. 'I know it's a little stretched out, but I've had four kids. What do you expect? LOL.

You get a picture of things in your head and your picture is all you see. You don't know me. You don't even know yourself. All you know is your little picture of how things ought to be, and that's the way you think they are.

In the common walks of life, with what delightful emotions does the youthful mind look forward to some anticipated scene of festivity! Imagination is busy sketching rose-tinted pictures of joy. In fancy, the voluptuous votary of fashion sees herself amid the festive throng, 'the observed of all observers.' Her graceful form, arrayed in snowy robes, is whirling through the mazes of the joyous dance; her eye is brightest, her step is lightest in the gay assembly. "In such delicious fancies time quickly glides by, and the welcome hour arrives for her entrance into the Elysian world, of which she has had such bright dreams. How fairy-like does everything appear to her enchanted vision! Each new scene is more charming than the last. But after a while she finds that beneath this goodly exterior, all is vanity, the flattery which once charmed her soul, now grates harshly upon her ear; the ball-room has lost its charms; and with wasted health and imbittered heart, she turns away with the conviction that earthly pleasures cannot satisfy the longings of the soul!

Illusion works impenetrable, Weaving webs innumerable; Her gay pictures never fail, Crowd each other, veil on veil; Charmer who will be believed By man who thirsts to be deceived.

I'm taking a picture of a national gay landmark," Alex tells him. "And also a statue" page 289

Georgette was a hip queer. She (he) didn't try to disguise or conceal it with marriage and mans talk, satisfying her homosexuality with the keeping of a secret scrapbook of pictures of favorite male actors or athletes or by supervising activities of young boys or visiting turkish baths or mens locker rooms, leering sidely while seeking protection behind a carefully guarded guise of virility (fearing that moment at a cocktail party or in a bar when this front may start crumbling from alcohol and be completely disintegrated with an attempted kiss or groping of an attractive young man and being repelled with a punch and - rotten fairy - followed with hysteria and incoherent apologies and excuses and running from the room) but, took a pride in being a homosexual by feeling intellectually and esthetically superior to those (especially women) who weren't gay (look at all the great artists who were fairies!); and with the wearing of womens panties, lipstick, eye makeup (this including occasionally gold and silver - stardust - on the lids),long marcelled hair, manicured and polished fingernails, the wearing of womens clothes complete with a padded bra, high heels and wig (one of her biggest thrills was going to BOP CITY dressed as a tall stately blond ( she was 6'4 in heels) in the company of a negro (he was a big beautiful black bastard and when he floated in all the cats in the place jumped and the squares bugged. We were at crazy pad before going and were blasting like crazy, and were up so high that I just didnt give ashit for anyone honey, let me tell you!); and the occasional wearing of menstrual napkin.

We have to emphasize to the gay community that opposition to same-sex marriages is not about hate, but about debate. Opposition to what some of us see as a devastating move that will further weaken the family and harm children--such opposition is not hateful. Morality is not bigotry. In their book The Homosexual Agenda, authors Alan Sears and Craig Osten give this illustration, which I've summarized: Imagine that you are standing at the bottom of a cliff and you are watching as someone on the ledge above you is walking backwards, and in a few steps he will surely fall over the precipice. You shout, warning him to stop, and before you know it, a crowd gathers around you, snapping your picture and accusing you of "hate speech." You are being warned to keep your prejudices to yourself. After all, who are you to tell someone where they can and can't walk? Who are you to say that someone can't walk backwards? You are dumbfounded, but there you are, the object of everyone's wrath.

Well, fuck a duck,” comes Morris’s delighted voice. I jerk in surprise, then spin around to glare at him for sneaking up on me from behind. Judging by the amusement dancing in his eyes, it’s obvious he peeked over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of the photo I’d been drooling over. “I was wondering how he’d pull that one off,” Morris remarks, still grinning like a fool. “Shouldn’t have doubted him, though. That dude is an unstoppable force of nature.” I narrow my eyes. “He told you about the picture?” “About the whole list, actually. We hung out last night—Lorris is close to taking over Brooklyn, by the way—and he was moaning and groaning about not being able to track down a red velvet couch.” Morris shrugs. “I offered to throw a red blanket on the sofa in my common room and take some pictures, but he said you’d consider that cheating and deprive him of your love.” Stifling a sigh, I shove the phone in my purse, then walk over to the mini-fridge across the room and grab a bottle of water. I twist off the cap, doing my best to ignore the sheer enjoyment Morris is getting out of this. “I wish I was gay,” he says ruefully. A snicker pops out. “Uh-huh. Go on. I’m willing to follow you down this rabbit hole and see where it leads.” “Seriously, Gretch, I love him. I have a boner for him.” Morris sighs. “If I’d known he existed, I wouldn’t have asked you out in the first place.” “Gee, thanks.” “Oh, shut up. You’re awesome, and I’d tap that in a second. But I can’t compete with this guy. He’s operating on a whole other level when it comes to you.

The famous field altar came from the Jewish firm of Moritz Mahler in Vienna, which manufactured all kinds of accessories for mass as well as religious objects like rosaries and images of saints. The altar was made up of three parts, lberally provided with sham gilt like the whole glory of the Holy Church. It was not possible without considerable ingenuity to detect what the pictures painted on these three parts actually represented. What was certain was that it was an altar which could have been used equally well by heathens in Zambesi or by the Shamans of the Buriats and Mongols. Painted in screaming colors it appeared from a distance like a coloured chart intended for colour-blind railway workers. One figure stood out prominently - a naked man with a halo and a body which was turning green, like the parson's nose of a goose which has begun to rot and is already stinking. No one was doing anything to this saint. On the contrary, he had on both sides of him two winged creatures which were supposed to represent angels. But anyone looking at them had the impression that this holy naked man was shrieking with horror at the company around him, for the angels looked like fairy-tale monsters and were a cross between a winged wild cat and the beast of the apocalypse. Opposite this was a picture which was meant to represent the Holy Trinity. By and large the painter had been unable to ruin the dove. He had painted a kind of bird which could equally well have been a pigeon or a White Wyandotte. God the Father looked like a bandit from the Wild West served up to the public in an American film thriller. The Son of God on the other hand was a gay young man with a handsome stomach draped in something like bathing drawers. Altogether he looked a sporting type. The cross which he had in his hand he held as elegantly as if it had been a tennis racquet. Seen from afar however all these details ran into each other and gave the impression of a train going into a station.

I had a very clear vision, of Selina with her hair about her shoulders, a crimson hat upon her head, a velvet coat, ice-skates - I must have been remembering some picture. I imagined myself beside her, the air coming sharply into our mouths. I imagined how it would be if I took her, not to Italy, but only to Marishes, to my sister's house; if I sat with her at supper, and shared her room, and kissed her - I cannot say what would frighten them most - her being a spirit-medium, or a convict, or a girl.

These oldest pictures have been in the album so long that they are stuck to the pages. To try and remove the pictures would ruin them.

I’m taking a picture of a gay landmark, and also a statue.

At once I drink to the health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I love all that is "sublime and beautiful.

What are you doing? ' 'I'm taking a picture of a national gay landmark. ' Alex tells him 'and also a statue.

I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad.

Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy-opium tainted cigarette.

Glad you like my first tableau. Come and see number two. Hope it isn't spoilt; it was very pretty just now. This is 'Othello telling his adventures to Desdemona'." The second window framed a very picturesque group of three. Mr March in an armchair, with Bess on a cushion at his feed, was listening to Dan, who, leaning against a pillow, was talking with unusual animation. The old man was in shadow, but little Desdemona was looking up with the moonlight full upon her face, quite absorbed in the story he was telling so well. The gay drapery over Dan's shoulder, his dark colouring and the gesture of his arm made the picture very striking and both very striking, and both spectators enjoyed it with silent pleasure, till Mrs Jo said in a quick whisper: "I'm glad he's going away. He's too picturesque to have among so many romantic girls. Afraid his 'grand, gloomy and peculiar' style will be too much for our simple maids.

The picture is complicated further—AIS individuals raised female have higher-than-expected rates of being gay, and of having an other-than-female or neither-female-nor-male-sex/gender self-identification.

XXIV. And more than that - a furlong on - why, there! What bad use was that engine for, that wheel, Or brake, not wheel - that harrow fit to reel Men's bodies out like silk? With all the air Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel. XXV. Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood - Bog, clay and rubble, sand, and stark black dearth. XXVI. Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim, Now patches where some leanness of the soil's Broke into moss, or substances like boils; Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils. XXVII. And just as far as ever from the end! Naught in the distance but the evening, naught To point my footstep further! At the thought, A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom friend, Sailed past, not best his wide wing dragon-penned That brushed my cap - perchance the guide I sought. XXVIII. For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountains - with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. How thus they had surprised me - solve it, you! How to get from them was no clearer case. XXIX. Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick Of mischief happened to me, God knows when - In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then Progress this way. When, in the very nick Of giving up, one time more, came a click As when a trap shuts - you're inside the den. XXX. Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left a tall scalped mountain ... Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the sight! XXXI. What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf He strikes on, only when the timbers start. XXXII. Not see? because of night perhaps? - why day Came back again for that! before it left The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay, - Now stab and end the creature - to the heft!' XXXIII. Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears Of all the lost adventurers, my peers - How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years. XXXIV. There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! In a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, And blew. 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.

Reader, I did the stupid thing. I looked her up on Facebook. It didn't take more than forty minutes to filter this Katie Ingram from the other hundred or so. Her profile was unlocked, and contained the logo for the NHS. Her job description said: "Paramedic: Love My Job!!!" She had hair that could have been red or strawberry blond, it was hard to tell from the photographs, and she was possibly in her late twenties, pretty, with a snub nose. In the first thirty photographs she had posted she was laughing with friends, frozen in the middle of Good Times. She looked annoyingly good in a bikini (Skiathos 2014!! What a laugh!!!!!), she had a small, hairy dog, a penchant for vertiginously high heels, and a best friend with long, dark hair who was fond of kissing her cheek in pictures (I briefly entertained the hope that she was gay but she belonged to a Facebook group called: Hands up if you're secretly delighted that Brad Pitt is single again!!).

When I came at last to Rome, and saw with eyes the pictures, I found that genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and itself pierce directly to the simple and true; that it was familiar and sincere; that it was the old, eternal fact I had met already in so many forms, --- unto which I lived.

Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what it’s monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place.

And a new irony had entered the picture: I was now hearing about how irritating the Left had become from people on the Left. One evening over drinks someone sighed to me, “I don’t know how we got so annoying.” And at a dinner a middle-aged liberal scoffed, “Oh, I can’t deal with the Resistance anymore”—and this from a gay man who’d been a proud member of it.

I said, "Mary, tell me something. Why do you have that picture from The Wizard of Oz on your wall?" Mary chuckled at my question. "Oh, that's my favorite move. I saw it the first time when I was five. But it's more than that. The story is so relevant to my life. That big, wise Wizard, you know. He's nothing. You pull back the curtain, it's just a man. I went through my whole life looking at the men at church as the Wizard, practically as God. I believed every word they said, every way they interpreted the bible, every condemning judgment on my gay son. After Bobby died, I started to study on my own, and I see the Bible through my own eyes now, not through theirs. I pulled back the curtain, and it was not God, just men. The tin man, he had a heart all along. The lion had courage all along. I knew the truth about Bobby all along, but I didn't listen inside, I listened outside. Most of us go on dancing down that yellow brick road to find the izard and be told the secret. But the secret is, the kingdom of God is within, inside every one of us. That picture, I keep it there to remind me." (49)

This is one of mommy's friends, buddy," I told Gavin. (...) "You're Mommy's fwiend?" he questioned. Carter just nodded with his mouth open and no sound coming out. I’m pretty sure he didn’t even hear Gavin. Someone could have asked him if he liked to watch gay porn while painting pictures of kittens and he would have nodded his head. Before anyone could react, Gavin pulled back one of his little fists of fury and slammed it right into Carters manhood. He immediately bent over at the waist, clutching his hands between his legs and gasping for breath. "Oh my God! Gavin!" I yelled, as I scrambled over to him, bent down and turned him around to face me while my dad and Liz laughed like hyenas behind me. "What is wrong with you? We don't hit people. EVER," I scolded. While Carter tried to breathe again, my dad managed to stop laughing long enough to apologize. "Sorry, Claire, that's probably my fault. I let Gavin watch "Fight Club" with me last night." "Your fwiends got you sick the other night. You said he was your fwiend," Gavin explained, like it made all the sense in the world. This just made my dad laugh even louder. "Not helping, Dad," I growled through clenched teeth. "You don't make my mommy sick, dicky-punk!" Gavin yelled at Carter, putting his two little fingers up by his eyes, and then pointing them right at Carter just like Liz had done to him earlier. "Jesus Christ," Carter wheezed. "Did he just threaten me?" "Jesus Cwist!" Gavin repeated back.

You're gay!" she shrilled, and he pulled the phone away from his ear. "How in the hell do you know you're gay?" He smiled a little to himself. It was sort of private information, but he figured he owed her a little after the last four months. "Because when I look at pictures of naked men, my penis goes off like a roman candle," he said frankly, and that was when she hung up.

If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb. It would do the same damage to the Church’s operation,” Sipe said. “And it’s very much against the tradition of the Church. Many saints had a gay orientation. And many popes had gay orientations. Discriminating against orientation is not going to solve the problem.

People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly un-charted territory—whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the "fag hag" label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are -patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our-parents or schools or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends' tricks and tricks' bar friends and gal pals and companions "in the life," queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from many straight people. Who among us would give them up? Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room. (In some circles this is a common party sport already.) You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends.

Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation" As some fond virgin, whom her mother’s care Drags from the town to wholesome country air, Just when she learns to roll a melting eye, And hear a spark, yet think no danger nigh; From the dear man unwillingly she must sever, Yet takes one kiss before she parts for ever: Thus from the world fair Zephalinda flew, Saw others happy, and with sighs withdrew; Not that their pleasures caused her discontent, She sighed not that They stayed, but that She went. She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks, Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks, She went from Opera, park, assembly, play, To morning walks, and prayers three hours a day; To pass her time ‘twixt reading and Bohea, To muse, and spill her solitary tea, Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon, Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon; Divert her eyes with pictures in the fire, Hum half a tune, tell stories to the squire; Up to her godly garret after seven, There starve and pray, for that’s the way to heaven. Some Squire, perhaps, you take a delight to rack; Whose game is Whisk, whose treat a toast in sack, Who visits with a gun, presents you birds, Then gives a smacking buss, and cries – No words! Or with his hound comes hollowing from the stable, Makes love with nods, and knees beneath a table; Whose laughs are hearty, tho’ his jests are coarse, And loves you best of all things – but his horse. In some fair evening, on your elbow laid, Your dream of triumphs in the rural shade; In pensive thought recall the fancied scene, See Coronations rise on every green; Before you pass th’ imaginary sights Of Lords, and Earls, and Dukes, and gartered Knights; While the spread fan o’ershades your closing eyes; Then give one flirt, and all the vision flies. Thus vanish scepters, coronets, and balls, And leave you in lone woods, or empty walls. So when your slave, at some dear, idle time, (Not plagued with headaches, or the want of rhyme) Stands in the streets, abstracted from the crew, And while he seems to study, thinks of you: Just when his fancy points your sprightly eyes, Or sees the blush of soft Parthenia rise, Gay pats my shoulder, and you vanish quite; Streets, chairs, and coxcombs rush upon my sight; Vexed to be still in town, I knit my brow, Look sour, and hum a tune – as you may now.

Ladies, bonjour. My name’s Madame Fi-Fi.” Her French accent was thick, and I could hardly understand a word she was saying. “Welcome to the Gay Paris.” We both sniggered under our breaths, immature I know; Madame Fi-Fi gave us a stern look. “You are the new dancers?” she asked, sounding pretty disappointed. “You looked taller in your pictures” “Erm…” Fran smiled. “We were wearing high heels.” Fran got on her tiptoes and fell over and knocked over a coatrack. Great first impressions.

The received myth of the Pilgrims confuses these folk with the Massachusetts Bay Puritans who came to America about ten years later and settled about fifty miles to the north of Plymouth Plantation. So we tend to picture our band of Pilgrims dressed all in black, with high pointy hats. In reality, they were not at all enemies of ‘gay apparel’, and, except on Sundays when black dress was compulsory, mostly wore garments of russet or dark green, though the women sometimes wore quite handsome dresses of saffron or dark

Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa. I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.

I still carry the weight of being a rape survivor, and of the demand that I forgive and forget to uphold the myth of the perfect black family. I carry the weight handed to me by the Black moral majority, who ignored my father's crimes and who knows how many other men's, who tried to buy off a terrified thirteen year old with a one-day trip to an amusement park. They were so desperate to project the image of the respectable, righteous, picture-perfect Black family to the world that they were willing to let women and girls in the picture suffer.

Social media is a curious thing. On the one hand, it offers an endless parade of ephemera from the daily lives of friends, family, and strangers—discussions of a fondness for yogurt, a picture of a barista’s decoration in latte foam, descriptions of excellent meals, pictures of pets and small children or maybe an abandoned easy chair on a crowded street corner. There’s all manner of self-promotion and relentless affirmation. There are knee-jerk, ill-informed reactions to, well, everything. The abundance of triviality is as hypnotic as it is repulsive.

Poem for My Father You closed the door. I was on the other side, screaming. It was black in your mind. Blacker than burned-out fire. Blacker than poison. Outside everything looked the same. You looked the same. You walked in your body like a living man. But you were not. would you not speak to me for weeks would you hang your coat in the closet without saying hello would you find a shoe out of place and beat me would you come home late would i lose the key would you find my glasses in the garbage would you put me on your knee would you read the bible to me in your smoking jacket after your mother died would you come home drunk and snore would you beat me on the legs would you carry me up the stairs by my hair so that my feet never touch the bottom would you make everything worse to make everything better i believe in god, the father almighty, the maker of heaven, the maker of my heaven and my hell. would you beat my mother would you beat her till she cries like a rabbit would you beat her in a corner of the kitchen while i am in the bathroom trying to bury my head underwater would you carry her to the bed would you put cotton and alcohol on her swollen head would you make love to her hair would you caress her hair would you rub her breasts with ben gay until she stinks would you sleep in the other room in the bed next to me while she sleeps on the pull-out cot would you come on the sheet while i am sleeping. later i look for the spot would you go to embalming school with the last of my mother's money would i see your picture in the book with all the other black boys you were the handsomest would you make the dead look beautiful would the men at the elks club would the rich ladies at funerals would the ugly drunk winos on the street know ben pretty ben regular ben would your father leave you when you were three with a mother who threw butcher knives at you would he leave you with her screaming red hair would he leave you to be smothered by a pillow she put over your head would he send for you during the summer like a rich uncle would you come in pretty corduroys until you were nine and never heard from him again would you hate him would you hate him every time you dragged hundred pound cartons of soap down the stairs into white ladies' basements would you hate him for fucking the woman who gave birth to you hate him flying by her house in the red truck so that other father threw down his hat in the street and stomped on it angry like we never saw him (bye bye to the will of grandpa bye bye to the family fortune bye bye when he stompled that hat, to the gold watch, embalmer's palace, grandbaby's college) mother crying silently, making floating island sending it up to the old man's ulcer would grandmother's diamonds close their heartsparks in the corner of the closet yellow like the eyes of cockroaches? Old man whose sperm swims in my veins, come back in love, come back in pain.

In the midst of so many brown heads her fairness alone was arresting. It was an autumn evening, misty and cold, and the room was not too well lighted. I had the impression that what light there was in the dining hall clustered around her, reviving and renewing itself as it played upon her fair hair. In looking back I think that she must have been beautiful; yet the detailed picture of her obstinately eludes me, I can recall only an impression of a face unique, neither gay nor melancholy, but endued with a peculiar quality of apartness, the look of a person dedicated to some accepted destiny.

He did not change the subject but developed it into another that had interested him recently, the precise influence of Desire upon our aesthetic judgements. Look at that picture, for instance. I love it because, like the painter himself, I love the subject. I don't judge it with eyes of the normal man. There seem two roads for arriving at Beauty—one is in common, and all the world has reached Michelangelo by it, but the other is private to me and a few more. We come to him by both roads. On the other hand Greuze —his subject matter repels me. I can only get to him down one road. The rest of the world finds two.

Right? Love those kids. There’s one hitch, though. Bill wants me to volunteer to talk to the staff about my experiences with homophobia. You know—because I’m such an expert.” I laugh just picturing it. “It’s going to be the shortest meeting ever.” “You want help?” I almost say no out of sheer habit. There’s that h-word again. But I stop myself just in time. “What do you mean?” I ask instead. “I could talk to them about what it was like being a gay hockey player when nobody knew. I spent my freshman year of college shitting bricks over what they might do to me if they knew. If it helps you and your boss, I’d show up and tell that story.

Who was the Ghost?" "Her cousin Freddy, He'd hung himself in the summer. He was fifteen. They were really close Freddy & Sheryll." "What did he want?" 'He said there was pictures in his family's barn of guys in their underwear. He told us right where to find them, hidden under a floorboard. He said he didn't want his parents to know he was gay and be anymore upset than they were. He said that's why he killed himself, because he didn't want to be gay anymore. Then he said, 'souls aren't boys and aren't girls. They're only souls. He said there is no gay and he had made is mama sorrowful for nothin'. I remember that exactly. That he used the word sorrowful.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

She had a collection of matchbooks from extravagant places, dropped here and there on tables in the dingy apartment she still shared with Gregg. They made it look as if she lived a gay, mad life. What a typical picture for anyone from out of New York: career girl's apartment, stockings drying over the shower rod, clothes flung helter-skelter in the rush to get to the office on time, to a date on time, a bottle of wine there too, wads of dust lying under the studio couch because you couldn't clean except weekends and sometimes not even then, and all those brightly colored matchbooks with names of well-known eating places, so that even if one managed only two good and sufficient meals a week one could still light one's cigarettes for the rest of the week with the memory.

The avenue seemed full of gay people these days, persons as happy as she. At intervals were stationed the mounted traffic police. Their splendid figures, their neat, well-fitting uniforms, their highly polished puttees protecting perfectly formed legs, the thigh outlined by pressure against the horse's side, all combined to make a picture which she found irresistibly appealing. She found herself looking for the mounted police. She formed preferences for one or the other. She thought of the Aztecs with their idea that men astride of horses were some kind of god,and she smiled to think that her poetic sense was interpreting these horsemen in the same light. She liked especially to view the officers from the back, the torso, the carriage, the outline of the leg all accentuated.

Picture to yourself all the kings’ palaces you ever saw, set side by side and piled on one another. That will be a little house, beside the House of the Ax. It was a palace within whose bounds you could have set a town. It crowned the ridge and clung to its downward slopes, terrace after terrace, tier after tier of painted columns, deep glowing red, tapering in toward the base, and ringed at head and foot with that dark brilliant blue the Cretans love. Behind them in the noonday shadow were porticoes and balconies gay with pictured walls, which glowed in the shade like beds of flowers. The tops of tall cypresses hardly showed above the roofs of the courts they grew in. Over the highest roof-edge, sharp-cut against the deep-blue Cretan sky, a mighty pair of horns reared toward heaven.

We’re halfway to the airport when my phone buzzes with a text. I have it set so that none of my texts (especially the photos) show up on the screen unless I’m logged in. It’s a pretty crucial precaution, and the text Jamie has just sent me proves why. When I authenticate my thumbprint, the screen fills with a picture that is not safe for work. It’s both dirty and hysterical all at once. Jamie’s very hard dick fills the shot. Only it’s angled toward the wall where the full, pink head leans against a flat nail that it’s presumably pounding. And Jamie has used some app to draw a happy face on his cockhead. The effect is startlingly transformative. His dick looks like…an expressive, alien creature performing some minor home repair. I give a snort of laughter. And here they thought my shirt was gay. I’ll show you gay…

It’s hard to keep harping on Liberty’s intolerance, though, because just as my aunts are nothing like the demonized stereotypes of gay people that are tossed around at Liberty (they’re both psychologically balanced, with stable jobs, healthy family lives, and a long-term, monogamous relationship), the majority of my friends at Liberty aren’t the intolerant demagogues Tina and Teresa picture when they think of Liberty students. In Tina’s latest e-mail, she mentioned that she and Teresa had run into a group of fundamentalist Christians at an equality rally in Spokane. She described them as “negative and hateful,” and reported that they were toting signs with messages like “You deserve Hell” and “God is angry with the wicked every day.” Maybe I’m deluded, but that just doesn’t sound like my hallmates. Most of them believe homosexuality is a sin, yes, but they’re not going to picket pride parades on the weekend.

I was walking home alone late one night, when out of nowhere, this rabid homosexual jumped me and bit me right on the ass. I tried to fight him off, but you know those homos have superhuman strength. Anyway, he bit me on my left cheek, then took off. The whole thing shook me up, but I thought I was gonna be okay. It took me a few weeks to notice the changes. At first the signs were subtle: the sudden urge to redecorate my room, the uncontrollable desire to do Megan's hair. Then, as the phases of the moon progressed, I noticed other things: the need to wear lace panties, the insane hope of one day owning my own flower shop. Before I knew it, I was jacking off six times a day to pictures of Brad Pitt and Russell Crowe. Of course, I won't be a full fledged gay boy until I bite someone else and pass on the 'dark gift. Hey, Rooster, you wanna be my first convert? If I turn just four people, I win like a toaster oven or something..

Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward! mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills me through! Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! 'tis in an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge, as wild, untutored things are forced to feed. Oh, life! 'tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee! but 'tis not me! that horror's out of me! and with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!

Karl was the last to be with him. He found him calm and almost gay. After he had gone, Ludwig put his few things in order and wrote for some time. Then he drew a chair to the window and set a basin with warm water on the table beside him. He locked the door, sat himself on the settle and with his arm in the water, he cut the artery. The pain was slight. He saw the blood flowing, a scene he had often thought on—to let this hateful, poisoned blood pour out of his body. His room became very clear. He saw every hook, every nail, every glint of the quartzes, the iridescence, the colours; he absorbed it: his room. It gathered about him, it passed in with his breath and was one with his life. Then it receded, uncertain. His youth began, in pictures. Eichendorff, the woods, homesickness. Reconciled, without pain. Beyond the woods rose up barbed-wire entanglements, little white shrapnel clouds, the burst of heavier shells. But they alarmed him no longer. They were muffled, almost like bells. The bells became louder, but the woods were still there. The bells pealed in his head so loudly that he felt it must burst. Then it grew darker. The pealing sounded fainter, and the evening came in at the window, clouds floated up under his feet. He had wished once in his life to see flamingoes; now he knew; these were flamingoes, with broad, pinkish-grey wings, lots of them, a phalanx—Did wild ducks not once fly so toward the very red moon, red as poppies in Flanders? —The landscape receded farther and farther, the woods sank deeper, rivers rose up, gleaming, silver, and islands; the pinkish-grey wings flew ever higher and higher, and the horizon became ever brighter—Now, suddenly, a dark cry swelled in his throat, hot, insistent, a last thought spilled over out of the brain into the failing consciousness: fear, rescue, bind it up! —He tried to rise, staggering, to lift his hand; the body jerked, but already it was too weak. —It spun round and spun round, then it vanished; and the giant bird with dark pinions came very gently with slow sweeps and the wings closed noiselessly over him. A

My 1979 Top 40 In no particular order, this is the forty-track rotation I listened to when I was researching, prepping and writing 1979. They were all released in the late 1970s, though not all in 1979 itself. But then, like Allie, we all listen to tunes from our past . . . I hope it gets you in the mood for reading! ‘Picture This’ – Blondie ‘Lovely Day’ – Bill Withers ‘Automatic Lover’ – Dee D. Jackson ‘Brass in Pocket’ – The Pretenders ‘It’s a Heartache’ – Bonnie Tyler ‘Wild West Hero’ – Electric Light Orchestra ‘Because the Night’ – Patti Smith ‘Into the Valley’ – The Skids ‘YMCA’ – Village People ‘Like Clockwork’ – Boomtown Rats ‘Stayin’ Alive’ – Bee Gees ‘Uptown Top Ranking’ – Althea & Donna ‘No More Heroes’ – The Stranglers ‘Take a Chance on Me’ – Abba ‘Werewolves of London’ – Warren Zevon ‘Psycho Killer’ – Talking Heads ‘Kiss You All Over’ – Exile ‘Top of the Pops’ – Rezillos ‘Heroes’ – David Bowie ‘Don’t Hang Up’ – 10cc ‘English Civil War’ – The Clash ‘2-4-6-8-Motorway’ – Tom Robinson Band ‘Rebel Rebel’ – David Bowie ‘Glad to be Gay’ – Tom Robinson Band

It was so dark in the attic that at first the girls could see little by candlelight. As soon as Nancy’s eyes became accustomed to the dimness, she groped her way forward in the cluttered room. “The attic is really very interesting,” she said, surveying the assortment of boxes and trunks. She called her friends’ attention to a fine old table which stood in one corner. “I believe Mr. March could sell that,” she said. “And look at these old-fashioned hatboxes!” She picked up one of the round, cardboard boxes. On it was the picture of a gay rural scene of early American life. “Let me see that!” exclaimed Bess, blowing off the dust. “Mr. March certainly could get something for this. Only yesterday Mother told me about a hatbox like this which brought a good price at an auction sale.” “There are at least a dozen here!” George declared excitedly. “All in good condition, too!” They were decorated with pictures of eagles and flowers, as well as scenes of American history. Two of them contained velvet bonnets with feather ornaments. “Girls, this attic may be a valuable find!” Nancy exclaimed.

All at once the anger ran out of John Harkless; he was a hard man for anger to tarry with. And in place of it a strong sense of home-coming began to take possession of him. He was going home. “Back to Plattville, where I belong,” he had said; and he said it again without bitterness, for it was the truth. “Every man cometh to his own place in the end.” Yes, as one leaves a gay acquaintance of the playhouse lobby for some hard-handed, tried old friend, so he would wave the outer world God-speed and come back to the old ways of Carlow. What though the years were dusty, he had his friends and his memories and his old black brier pipe. He had a girl’s picture that he should carry in his heart till his last day; and if his life was sadder, it was infinitely richer for it. His winter fireside should be not so lonely for her sake; and losing her, he lost not everything, for he had the rare blessing of having known her. And what man could wish to be healed of such a hurt? Far better to have had it than to trot a smug pace unscathed. He had been a dullard; he had lain prostrate in the wretchedness of his loss. “A girl you could put in your hat — and there you have a strong man prone.” He had been a sluggard, weary of himself, unfit to fight, a failure in life and a failure in love. That was ended; he was tired of failing, and it was time to succeed for a while. To accept the worst that Fate can deal, and to wring courage from it instead of despair, that is success; and it was the success that he would have. He would take Fate by the neck. But had it done him unkindness? He looked out over the beautiful, “monotonous” landscape, and he answered heartily, “No!” There was ignorance in man, but no unkindness; were man utterly wise he were utterly kind.

As I sat down to dinner in the dining room in my accustomed place, with Maxim at the head of the table, I pictured Rebecca sitting in where I sat now, picking up her fork for the fish, and then the telephone ringing and Frith coming into the room and saying “Mr. Favell on the phone, Madam, wishing to speak to you,” and Rebecca would get up from her chair with a quick glance at Maxim, who would not say anything, who would go on eating his fish. And when she came back, having finished her conversation, and sat down in her place again, Rebecca would begin talking about something different, in a gay, careless way, to cover up the little cloud between them. At first Maxim would be glum, answering in monosyllables, but little by little she would win his humor back again, telling him some story of her day, about someone she had seen in Kerrith, and when they had finished the next course he would be laughing again, looking at her and smiling, putting out his hand to her across the table. “What the devil are you thinking about?” said Maxim. I started, the color flooding my face, for in that brief moment, sixty seconds in time perhaps, I had so identified myself with Rebecca that my own dull self did not exist, had never come to Manderley. I had gone back in thought and in person to the days that were gone. “Do you know you were going through the most extraordinary antics instead of eating your fish?” said Maxim. “First you listened, as though you heard the telephone, and then your lips moved, and you threw half a glance at me. And you shook your head, and smiled, and shrugged your shoulders. All in about a second. Are you practicing your appearance for the fancy dress ball?” He looked across at me, laughing, and I wondered what he would say if he really knew my thoughts, my heart, and my mind, and that for one second he had been the Maxim of another year, and I had been Rebecca. “You look like a little criminal,” he said, “what is it?” “Nothing,” I said quickly, “I wasn’t doing anything.” “Tell me what you were thinking?

So who else?” “Who else what?” With his mouth full, he says, “Who else got letters?” “Um, that’s really private.” I shake my head at him, like Wow, how rude. “What? I’m just curious.” Peter dips another fry into my little ramekin of ketchup. Smirking, he says, “Come on, don’t be shy. You can tell me. I know I’m number one, obviously. But I want to hear who else made the cut.” He’s practically flexing, he’s so sure of himself. Fine, if he wants to know so bad, I’ll tell him. “Josh, you--” “Obviously.” “Kenny.” Peter snorts. “Kenny? Who’s he?” I prop my elbows up on the table and rest my chin on my hands. “A boy I met at church camp. He was the best swimmer of the whole boys’ side. He saved a drowning kid once. He swam out to the middle of the lake before the lifeguards even noticed anything was wrong.” “So what’d he say when he got the letter?” “Nothing. It was sent back return to sender.” “Okay, who’s next?” I take a bite of sandwich. “Lucas Krapf.” “He’s gay,” Peter says. “He’s not gay!” “Dude, quit dreaming. The kid is gay. He wore an ascot to school yesterday.” “I’m sure he was wearing it ironically. Besides, wearing an ascot doesn’t make someone gay.” I give him a look like Wow, so homophobic. “Hey, don’t give me that look,” he objects. “My favorite uncle’s gay as hell. I bet you fifty bucks that if I showed my uncle Eddie a picture of Lucas, he’d confirm it in half a second.” “Just because Lucas appreciates fashion, that doesn’t make him gay.” Peter opens his mouth to argue but I lift up a hand to quiet him. “All it means is he’s more of a city guy in the midst of all this…this boring suburbia. I bet you he ends up going to NYU or some other place in New York. He could be a TV actor. He’s got that look, you know. Svelte with fine-boned features. Very sensitive features. He looks like…like an angel.” “So what did Angel Boy say about the letter, then?” “Nothing…I’m sure because he’s a gentleman and didn’t want to embarrass me by bringing it up.” I give him a meaningful look. Unlike some people is what I’m saying with my eyes. Peter rolls his eyes. “All right, all right. Whatever, I don’t care.

Todd closed his eyes, then, and found himself picturing the other boy involuntarily—surprising himself with the intrusiveness of the thought. It was that fucking smile: there was something about the way the corners of Zack’s eyes had crinkled—the sincerity of it. Todd had felt that smile like it hurt. That smile was sparks. That smile was fireworks. That smile sizzled across the dark landscape of his soul, racing toward the shadows and lighting them up in brief eruptions of pure electric intensity, banishing the corruption in moments of flickering respite. Todd felt them coursing through him like thousands of tiny explosions. Like a squadron of gemstones erupting all at once into an armageddon of prismatic color. Like all that energy was going to carry him to some unknown destination where he could be weightless: wrapped in all its warmth and light and certainty forever and ever. And while he might not know where that place was he desperately needed to go there. To be there, always. Even if the process consumed him entirely. Even if it unmade him. Todd felt as though a sun erupted to life inside of him, then. He felt awake. Alive. And for the first time in so very long he felt the fullness of warmth filling him to the very boundaries of every expanse of himself—defiantly radiating against the cold and dark and shadow that had made it’s home across so much of him for so much of his life. And then—just like that—just as he’d arrived in Todd’s life: Zack was gone. And there was an emptiness that followed in the vacuum of the next few moments. A dark. And Todd felt it—deeply—as all those fireworks and all those sparks and all that color that had momentarily lit up so brilliantly across the insides of him lost the gravity that had once possessed it. The sparkle. And then it was just him there: Todd. Alone. But not entirely. Not ever. Because there was always that other thing. The shadowy thing. The one that he did his very best not to think about at all. It lived out along the wildest fringes of his mind—dancing along the tattered edges of the real—onyx eyes glittering, always. And it was hungry, too.

Some raised a more practical concern, arguing that if Rome really wanted to empty seminaries of gay men—a proposal under consideration at the Vatican—it would face more empty rectories and more barren altars. Some Church experts estimate that from 30 percent to fully one half of the forty-five thousand U.S. priests are gay. “If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb. It would do the same damage to the Church’s operation,” Sipe said. “And it’s very much against the tradition of the Church. Many saints had a gay orientation. And many popes had gay orientations. Discriminating against orientation is not going to solve the problem.” But the issue was now on the table. At the Vatican meeting, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told reporters that he was concerned about the increasing number of gays in the priesthood. “One of the difficulties we do face in seminary life or recruitment is when there does exist a homosexual atmosphere or dynamic that makes heterosexual men think twice” about joining the priesthood for fear that they’ll be harassed. “It is an ongoing struggle. It is most importantly a struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men [and] that the candidates that we receive are healthy in every possible way—psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.” And Cardinal Adam J. Maida of Detroit argued that clergy sexual abuse is “not truly a pedophilia-type problem but a homosexual-type problem.… We have to look at this homosexual element as it exists, to what extent it is operative in our seminaries and our priesthood and how to address it.” Bishops need to “cope with and address” the extent of a homosexual presence in Catholic seminaries, he said. Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua of Philadelphia said he wouldn’t let gay men become priests. “We feel that a person who is homosexually oriented is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood even if he has never committed any homosexual act,” he said.

The kingdom of poetry" This is like light. This is light, Useful as light, as charming And enchanting… …Poetry is certainly More interesting, more valuable, and certainly more charming Than Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, the Atlantic Ocean And other much admired natural phenomena. It is useful as light, and as beautiful It is preposterous Precisely, making it possible to say One cannot carry a mountain, but a poem can be carried all over. It is monstrous. Pleasantly, for poetry can say, seriously or in play: “Poetry is better than hope, “For poetry is patience of hope, and all hope’s vivid pictures, “Poetry is better than excitement, it is far more delightful, “Poetry is superior to success, and victory, it endures in serene blessedness “Long after the most fabulous feat like fireworks has mounted and fallen. “Poetry is far more powerful and far more enchanting animal “Than any wood, jungle, ark, circus or zoo possesses.” For poetry magnifies and heighten reality: Poetry says of reality that if it is magnificent, it is also stupid: For poetry is, in a way, omnipotent; For reality is various and rich, powerful and vivid, but it is not enough Because it is disorderly and stupid or only at times, and erratically, intelligent: For without poetry, reality is speechless or incoherent: It is inchoate, like the pomp and the bombast of thunder: Its peroration verge upon the ceaseless oration of the ocean: For reality glows and glory, without poetry, Fake, like the red operas of sunset The blue rivers and the windows of morning. The arts of poetry makes it possible to say: Pandemonium. For poetry is gay and exact. It says: “The sunset resembles a bull-fight. “A sleeping arm feels like soda, fizzing.” Poetry resurrect the past from the sepulchre, like Lazarus. It transforms a lion into a sphinx and a girl. It gives a girl the splendor of Latin. It transforms the water into wine at each marriage in Cana of Galilee. For it is true that poetry invented the unicorn, the centaur and the phoenix. Hence it is true that poetry is an everlasting Ark. An omnibus containing, bearing and begetting all the mind’s animals. Whence it is that poetry gave and gives tongue to forgiveness Therefore a history of poetry would be a history of joy, and a history of the mystery of love For poetry provides spontaneously, abundantly and freely The petnames and the diminutives which love requires and without which the mystery of love cannot be mastered. For poetry is like light, and it is light. It shines over all, like the blue sky, with the same blue justice. For poetry is the sunlight of consciousness: It is also the soil of the fruits of knowledge In the orchards of being: It shows us the pleasures of the city. It lights up the structures of reality. It is a cause of knowledge and laughter: It sharpens the whistles of the witty: It is like morning and the flutes of morning, chanting and enchanted. It is the birth and the rebirth of the first morning forever. Poetry is quick as tigers, clever as cats, vivid as oranges, Nevertheless, it is deathless: it is evergreen and in blossom; long after the Pharaohs and the Caesars have fallen, It shines and endures more than diamonds, It is because poetry is the actuality of possibility, it is The reality of the imagination, The throat of exaltation, The processions of possessions, The motion of meaning and The meaning of morning and The mastery of meaning. The praise of poetry is like the clarity of the heights of the mountains. The heights of poetry are like the exaltation of the mountains. It is the consummation of consciousness in the country of the morning!

That “sublime and beautiful” weighs heavily on my mind at forty. But that is at forty; then—oh, then it would have been different! I should have found for myself a form of activity in keeping with it, to be precise, drinking to the health of everything “sublime and beautiful.” I should have snatched at every opportunity to drop a tear into my glass and then to drain it to all that is “sublime and beautiful.” I should then have turned everything into the sublime and the beautiful; in the nastiest, unquestionable trash, I should have sought out the sublime and the beautiful. I should have exuded tears like a wet sponge. An artist, for instance, paints a picture worthy of Gay. At once I drink to the health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I love all that is “sublime and beautiful.” An author has written as you will: at once I drink to the health of “anyone you will” because I love all that is “sublime and beautiful.” I should claim respect for doing so. I should persecute anyone who would not show me respect. I should live at ease, I should die with dignity, why, it is charming, perfectly charming! And what a good round belly I should have grown, what a treble chin I should have established, what a ruby nose I should have colored for myself, so that everyone would have said, looking at me: “Here is an asset! Here is something real and solid!” And, say what you like, it is very agreeable to hear such remarks about oneself in this negative age.

These pictures from the photo albums of my childhood are artifacts of a time when I was happy and whole. They are evidence that, once, I was pretty and sometimes sweet.

Every picture of me as an infant with my parents reveals them smiling at me like I am the centre of their world. I was. I am. This is part of my truth I know with real clarity—everything good and strong about me starts with my parents, absolutely everything. Almost every picture of me as an infant shows me smiling a smile so infectious that when I look at them I cannot help but smile too. There are happy babies and there are happy babies. I was a happy baby. This is indisputable.

Seurat took to heart the color theorists' notion of a scientific approach to painting. He believed that a painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses counterpoint and variation to create harmony in music. He theorized that the scientific application of color was like any other natural law, and he was driven to prove this conjecture. He thought that the knowledge of perception and optical laws could be used to create a new language of art based on its own set of heuristics and he set out to show this language using lines, color intensity and color schema. Seurat called this language Chromoluminarism.[27] In a letter to the writer Maurice Beaubourg in 1890 he wrote: "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of the contrary and of similar elements of tone, of colour and of line. In tone, lighter against darker. In colour, the complementary, red-green, orange-blue, yellow-violet. In line, those that form a right-angle. The frame is in a harmony that opposes those of the tones, colours and lines of the picture, these aspects are considered according to their dominance and under the influence of light, in gay, calm or sad combinations".[29][30] Seurat's theories can be summarized as follows: The emotion of gaiety can be achieved by the domination of luminous hues, by the predominance of warm colors, and by the use of lines directed upward. Calm is achieved through an equivalence/balance of the use of the light and the dark, by the balance of warm and cold colors, and by lines that are horizontal. Sadness is achieved by using dark and cold colors and by lines pointing downward

Martin Gore: I honestly don’t know what was going through my head when I was doing that. There was some kind of sexuality to it that I liked and enjoyed, but I look back now and see a lot of the pictures and I’m embarrassed. But it never crossed my mind that I might be gay. I always knew I was heterosexual. Over the years I’ve met so many people that have naturally assumed I’m gay. I don’t have a problem with that. The fact that I’m not is neither here nor there.

Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the hypnotic landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically. Time had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched only the flowering waves of faery and the recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries—the hoary groves, the untainted pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass. Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades. We were now burrowing bodily through the midst of the picture, and I seemed to find in its necromancy a thing I had innately known or inherited, and for which I had always been vainly searching.

A truly cheerless place,” Kira said, making a face. “Well, with only 15,000, we can’t have to stay long.” She strummed a gay tune to counteract the morbid pictures.

Of course I could never let you know anything about this. It would have been impossible. You would not have understood it. I hardly understood it myself. I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes— too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them.

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Some Church experts estimate that from 30 percent to fully one half of the forty-five thousand U.S. priests are gay.

I hate men. I hate their sexuality unless they are gay or asexual or somehow different from the men I've known. I hate men but I fuck them hard hard hard and thoughtlessly because I hate them so much. At least when they're fucking me, they're not looking at me. At least I can close my eyes and just hate them. It's so difficult to explain.

Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has always been the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest medieval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet...In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky.

1973 was the year when the United Kingdom entered the European Economic Union, the year when Watergate helped us with a name for all future scandals, Carly Simon began the year at number one with ‘You’re So Vain’, John Tavener premiered his Variations on ‘Three Blind Mice’ for orchestra, the year when The Godfather won Best Picture Oscar, when the Bond film was Live and Let Die, when Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff, opened, when Sofia Gubaidulina’s Roses for piano and soprano premiered in Moscow, when David Bowie was Aladdin Sane, Lou Reed walked on the wild side and made up a ‘Berlin’, Slade were feeling the noize, Dobie Gray was drifting away, Bruce Springsteen was ‘Blinded by the Light’, Tom Waits was calling ‘Closing Time’, Bob Dylan was ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, Sly and the Family Stone were ‘Fresh’, Queen recorded their first radio session for John Peel, when Marvin Gaye sang ‘What’s Going On’ and Ann Peebles’s ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’, when Morton Feldman’s Voices and Instruments II for three female voices, flute, two cellos and bass, Alfred Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style for violin and piano and Iannis Xenakis’s Eridanos for brass and strings premiered, when Ian Carr’s Nucleus released two albums refining their tangy English survey of the current jazz-rock mind of Miles Davis, when Ornette Coleman started recording again after a five-year pause, making a field recording in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, when Stevie Wonder reached No. 1 with ‘Superstition’ and ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’, when Free, Family and the Byrds played their last show, 10cc played their first, the Everly Brothers split up, Gram Parsons died, and DJ Kool Herc DJed his first block party for his sister’s birthday in the Bronx, New York, where he mixed instrumental sections of two copies of the same record using two turntables.

Note: I am sure that now they will approach Medium to stop me from writing. Let’s see what happens. “A genuine person or celebrity doesn’t need a certificate or blue tick. Such ways are blackmailing your passion, emotion, or willingness. Criminals and money-mongers misuse and try to earn in an ugly and easy way. This trend also discriminates against others who cannot afford such an awkward notion.” Istay determined every day. I cannot tolerate liars and those who misuse their authority and attempt to victimize the righteous for their will and purpose in an illegitimate way to please their godfathers of the mafia and international criminal intelligence agencies. I am pretty sure, after reviewing again the replies from the Twitter team that mirror and endorse the Twitter team, that someone works for intelligence agencies or criminal and mafia groups. Since the beginning months of this year, I have been continuously victimized without specifying why I was posting the wrong things. I am going to publish a few emails that will exhibit the picture of how I was being victimized, harassed, and even threatened about things that I was neither aware of nor that the team explained. I was already under the attacks of criminals and even the gang of filthy-minded gays who were suffering from mental issues and sexual frustration; knowing it, I am not gay. In the Twitter team, the presence of such ones is not excluded since I felt a similar style of victimization. How do they dare to adopt such mean tactics to gain their will and desire? This reply email shows that a screenshot article has been displayed since 2020. After four years, it became an issue for someone in the Twitter team who continued to lock my account and tag the restriction flag. Text of my emails; “I am still uncertain about what to post and what not to post. You didn’t specify why my account was locked, whether it was because of the content I removed or something else. Is it permissible for me to share media and social media links in which my quotes are mentioned? My writings do not contain any personal attacks; nonetheless, thank you.” “You locked my Twitter, @EhsanSehgal, again; you know why you are doing it. Now, I can say only goodbye to my locked account and enjoy your terror. It is not a protection of my account; it is victimization. No more requests to unlock my account. Someone of angelic character will do it without my request. Shame on you all, involved ones.” Team replied; Hello, “We had a look at your account, and it appears that everything is now resolved! If that’s not the case, please reply to this message, and we’ll continue to help. Thanks,” X Support This was a screenshot article from Wikipedia about me on my profile that was illegitimately removed by such people as the Twitter team forced me to remove. Despite that, they continued locking my account to identify and provide an ID or passport. I did that twice and identified several times, but the team seemed not satisfied since their goal was something else; they would not approach nor be able to do it. To stop such criminal torture, I deactivated my account and decided never to come back there again.

The band Erase Errata recorded an eighty-second song about it: ‘The White Horse is bucking. It smashes you with its hoof. It wants you to go for a night of gay dancing. So picture yourself at the White Horse. And picture yourself among the beautiful. And picture yourself alive.’ The lyrics may be ironic, but they assert something many queer people know well: an unshakable fondness for the only gay bar in town. It’s not about holding out for a good night, but rather a letting go—accepting the gay bar’s unconvincing promise of escape.

If only people would realize that light-hearted and gay things were not any less significant than the violent and brutish, what a step forward it would be. Because a song, a book, a play, a picture or anything created was gay it did not necessarily follow that it was trivial. It might well be... a finer thing, because it had been fashioned with greater care and artifice; emotion remembered and translated to give pleasure, rather than emotion remembered and evincing only an involuntary and quite hideous howl.

We also cannot know whether Frank’s closeness to Archie Butt ever extended beyond the bounds of mere friendship. Archie was far too careful to ever pen anything as indiscreet as Millet’s correspondence with Stoddard. Yet within Archie’s letters there are enough clues to picture him as a Ragtime-era gay man hiding in plain sight. Archie had the same gift for observation and waspish wit found in gay diarists from Horace Walpole and Henry “Chips” Channon to Cecil Beaton and Andy Warhol. He also had a remarkable eye for the details of women’s clothes and jewelry and could, for example, describe from memory a selection of First Lady Edith Roosevelt’s gowns and include such details as “black velvet with passementerie down the front.

Sight brings us half our joy. The faces of our friends, gay sunshine, flowers and green grass, and the flickering of the leaves, pretty clothes and little treasures and pictures, mountains and rivers, and the great sea––where would our joy in all these be if we could not see them?

But a child is entitled to quit piano without the entire world asking why she doesn’t practice anymore. She’s also entitled to nurse a passing crush that may end badly and take it all back without ceremony or official decree. This is obviously true for announcements of sexual identity as well—gay, straight, trans, whatever. A teenager may believe she is merely announcing herself an adult, but she’s also sending up a flare to actual adults who will immediately contact her and offer “support,” primed to take advantage. Send prom pictures in an email if you must, but don’t post them for the content-hungry eyes of internet strangers. Find some other way to stay connected with those you care about.

Look, Belove—I mean, Sensei! It’s Natsumo and Satsuki! We have to get a picture with them!” Kevin looked at where Lilian was pointing. Indeed, standing not several feet away were the two titular characters of the Natsumo Shinobi series. If the obnoxious orange jumpsuit that Natsumo wore so often wasn’t enough to confirm this, then the hair-style shaped like a duck’s rear end that Satsuki was known for having did. “Yosh!” Kevin, still in the character of Mito Gay, the flamboyant martial arts master, grinned at his mate, who was currently dressed as his apprentice, Mook Lee. “Come, Lee, let us ask that youthful couple if they would like to take a picture with us.

A letter from Hogwarts? For me?” Hansel said. “It’s got your name on it.” “Did, like, an owl bring it to our window?” “Yup.” “Stop yankin’ my chain, dude.” “I thought you might say that, so I took a picture of the owl!” Tobin reached under his pillow again and pulled out a Polaroid picture. “Here.” Hansel took the photograph and letter from Tobin. He examined the photograph first. It showed a chicken perched on their bedroom windowsill, a chicken with a small warthog head instead of a chicken head.

I was about four in the picture, so Kyle was seven. We both had more sunburn than freckles, and more gums than teeth in our goofy smiles. I wore a highlighter yellow pool noodle like a boa around my shoulders; I must have been gay even earlier than I thought.

The only sounds at the late hour were the faint jingle of a phone ringing in the nurses’ station, the ping of an elevator, the faraway sound of the wheels of a cart, and the gentle beep of Brandon’s vital signs monitor. They wouldn’t allow any flowers or personal items in the ICU, but Sloan had snuck in an engagement photo. It sat on the table next to the bed. Her and Brandon on the beach, the surf crashing around their feet, her tattooed arm over his shoulder, them looking at each other. Both of them laughing. I looked back at him and sighed. “You’re going to have some gnarly scars, buddy.” They’d started the skin grafts for the road rash on his arm. “But you’ll get to do everything you planned to do with your life. One of us is going to get the girl. I’ll help you any way I can. Even if I have to wheel your ass to the altar.” I could picture his smile. With any luck I’d see it in a few hours. A knock on the door frame turned me around in my chair. “Hey, cutie.” Valerie came into the room for her vitals check. She turned the lights up, and I stood and stretched. As if sleeping in a chair wasn’t hard enough, the activity every two hours was the final kicker. I wouldn’t call anything I did on these overnight shifts sleeping. Maybe napping, but not sleeping. Every two hours Brandon was moved. They checked his airways, changed out bags, looked at his vitals. I don’t know how Sloan was handling doing this almost nightly for the last three weeks. Sloan was a good woman. I’d always liked her, but now she’d earned my respect, and I was grateful Brandon and Kristen had her. “Did you decide what day you want to bring the kids to the station?” I asked Valerie, yawning. She cycled the blood pressure cuff on Brandon’s arm and smiled. “I’m thinking Tuesday. You on shift Tuesday?” “Yup.” She wrote down some notes on Brandon’s chart and then gave me a raised eyebrow. “Any updates with your lady friend?” I laughed a little. “No.” The whole nursing staff knew about my depressing love life. I’d gotten hit on a few too many times by some of the younger nurses. I couldn’t claim to have a girlfriend, and I wasn’t married, so it was either “I’m gay” or “I’m in love with that girl over there.” I’d gone with the latter, and now I wished I’d said I was gay. They didn’t know why Kristen wouldn’t date me, just that she wouldn’t. It had turned into the favorite topic of the ICU. A real-life episode of Grey’s Anatomy. I rarely got through a Brandon visit without it coming up. The drama escalated when Kristen had been hit on by the nurses’ favorite single orthopedic surgeon. According to the nurses’ gossip circuit, Kristen told him to go fuck himself. And apparently she’d actually said, “Go fuck yourself.” After that everyone was sure she was holding out for me. Only I knew better.

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