Jeremy Lin Quotes

On opening night, standing under the Rogers's marquee, [Lin] realized that if Eliza's struggle was the element of Hamilton's story that had inspired him the most, then the show itself was a part of her legacy.

The myth of 'You have to be a tortured artist' is a myth," says Lin. "You can have a happy, healthy life and still go to all these crazy dark places in your writing, and then go play with your child and hug your wife.

I found myself taking more risks, because failure had a second life — it could spin a yarn. There was an agency in the retelling, in the self-deprecation and of course self-mythologizing. Memoir is how you groom yourself. Memoir is drag.

Gay is the opium of the people.

The Hulk before intermission, Bruce Banner after it.

We go out to be gay. We crave this when once again growing bored with the straight world

There’s not just a gap, but a chasm between generations that AIDS create. Their absence is felt by those of us who are old enough to feel it. But the younger ones are never going to know about them unless we tell them.

It used to be: We are everywhere. Now it’s: We are everything.

Disassociation is a gay ritual as much as any other.

Just because I had a good game doesn't change who I am, my identity is in Christ and not in basketball, I love playing basketball and it's my job but at the same time I recognize that I'm a sinner and that's not gonna change regardless of how well I play on the court

I was under the impression I was always late to the party, but in fact I may not have been invited.

I am a participant in an archaeology of looking, of cruising.

We became a different kind of wallflower—not shrinking violets but judgmental pansies.

the queer archive is ‘fragile from fear and forgetting, too often written in whispers and saved in scraps.

...the true lessons of the American Revolution. The past places no absolute limit on the future. Even the unlikeliest changes can occur. But change requires hope-in the case of both of those unlikely victories, the hope that the American people could defy all expectation to overcome their differences and set each other free.

But I couldn't relate to this widely held notion of community. We hear the word community all the time. Often it sounds like wishful thinking. Queer community is just as vague - just piling a confusing identity onto an elusive concept. Maybe community, as Famous says, excludes inherently.

Lifestyle 'celebrates the narcissism of similarity,' and elevates provate concerns—namely, leisure and consumption—above the common good.

It suggests that however innovative Obama's speeches and Lin's show might seem, they are, in fact, traditional. They don't reinvent the American character, they renew it.

Hamlet' dwarfs 'Hamilton' - it dwarfs pretty much everything - but there's a revealing similarity between them. Shakespeare's longest play leaves its audience in the dark about some basic and seemingly crucial facts. It's not as if the Bard forgot, in the course of all those words, to tell us whether Hamlet was crazy or only pretending: He wanted us to wonder. He forces us to work on a puzzle that has no definite answer. And this mysteriousness is one reason why we find the play irresistible. 'Hamilton' is riddled with question marks. The first act begins with a question, and so does the second. The entire relationship between Hamilton and Burr is based on a mutual and explicit lack of comprehension: 'I will never understand you,' says Hamilton, and Burr wonders, 'What it is like in his shoes?' Again and again, Lin distinguishes characters by what they wish they knew. 'What'd I miss?' asks Jefferson in the song that introduces him. 'Would that be enough?' asks Eliza in the song that defines her. 'Why do you write like you're running out of time?' asks everybody in a song that marvels at Hamilton's drive, and all but declares that there's no way to explain it. 'Hamilton', like 'Hamlet', gives an audience the chance to watch a bunch of conspicuously intelligent and well-spoken characters fill the stage with 'words, words, words,' only to discover, again and again, the limits to what they can comprehend.

When people make judgments, they argued, they compare whatever they are judging to some model in their minds. How much do those clouds resemble my mental model of an approaching storm? How closely does this ulcer resemble my mental model of a malignant cancer? Does Jeremy Lin match my mental picture of a future NBA player? Does that belligerent German political leader resemble my idea of a man capable of orchestrating genocide? The world’s not just a stage. It’s a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity—or (strange new word!) representativeness. You have some notion of a parent population: “storm clouds” or “gastric ulcers” or “genocidal dictators” or “NBA players.” You compare the specific case to the parent population.

There is no particular way to describe what I was intuiting around me. Maybe there isn't a term for a sense of loss when you don't know what you're missing.

Rubin admits that bureaucracy lacks glamour and charisma, and that queers are prone to live for the moment. But: ‘momentary excitements are intrinsically fragile, evanescent, and unstable. Part of the reason for our impaired memory of the older strata of queer knowledges is that the institutions and organizations that produced them are gone. Queer life is full of examples of fabulous explosions that left little or no detectable trace.’ The question is whether the spark is extinguished when an official story is made of the blast.

In reality, while the Sexual Offences Act represented certain progress, its language was cautionary. At the law’s passage, one of its proponents, the Earl of Arran, spoke: ‘I ask one thing and I ask it earnestly. I ask those who have, as it were, been in bondage and for whom the prison doors are now open to show their thanks by comporting themselves quietly and with dignity. This is no occasion for jubilation; certainly not for celebration. Any form of ostentatious behaviour; now or in the future, any form of public flaunting, would be utterly distasteful and would, I believe, make the sponsors of the Bill regret that they have done what they have done. Homosexuals must continue to remember that while there may be nothing bad in being a homosexual, there is certainly nothing good.

Wayne Koestenbaum writes, ‘Humiliation is always personal, even when it lands on an individual because of group characteristics.

We go out to be gay. We crave this when once again growing bored with the straight world. I will announce to Famous: I want to be gay this weekend. This carries an ineffable but precise connotation along the lines of white girl wasted. It means we don’t want to, for example, attend a recital of minimalist composition. That’s something we might otherwise do. But when we decide to be gay, we want to dance to ‘Starships’ by Nicki Minaj, and go downhill from there.

A gay bar can be a repository for all the extra that doesn’t fit into other spaces.

At the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, there are mirrors but, because of the tone of the place, they seem more flirty than licentious. An attractive man glanced at me with a smile and said cutely, Now I can’t go. Soon after, I saw him on the dance floor, whispering to his friend and nodding at me. We all knew he still had to pee. Fleeting, gently pervy interactions like that may be the closest I get to experiencing a sense of gay community. It was last call at the RVT. Famous stole away to the toilets. ‘Family Affair’ by Mary J. Blige began to play—a song meant for the start of the night. I danced on my own by the door, near the shelf of condoms and literature. I recalled another time I’d been there recently. I’d given my coat check ticket to the most boyish and poised of the bartenders, the one who moves with a distinct admixture of flirtatiousness and efficiency. He brought my jacket from the cloakroom, the blue nylon I wear when I predict I’ll end up going out, because it promises to wipe clean easily. About to hand it to me over the bar, he said, You know what…and brought himself around the hatch, with shoulders alert like a pantomime butler. He held up my jacket with alacrity to indicate I should turn around so he could slip me into it. I momentarily forgot that I don’t smile in gay bars. He both served and took the upper hand: to get into the jacket, I had to turn my back to him, and yet into the sleeves it was I who inserted. I submitted, but he received. On this night, I glanced over and saw that the bartender was busy, holding someone else’s attention in a brief exchange. He fetched them their extraneous last drink. Famous bounced forth. I caught his eye and pointed my index finger to the speakers. This song, I mouthed. Famous tilted his head. We pushed through the doors into the wind. I’d put my jacket on myself this time, without ceremony. But leaving on a good song also makes a fine exit. Mary J. Blige sang at our backs about starting the party as we took long strides down the street.

Into the day, slower, sometimes melancholic comedown tracks played—like ‘Close to Perfection’ by Miquel Brown or ‘Come to Me’ by France Joli—in the genre variously called morning music or, in something of a misnomer, sleaze.

all human categories, adult gay males were among the least familiar to me. Many of them were dead. In 1992, the year I moved to L.A., over four thousand new cases of AIDS were diagnosed in the county; the death toll there was nearing fourteen thousand in the ten years since reporting began. Men who slept with men constituted the vast majority of those cases. According to one study, gay men in Los Angeles knew an average of eighteen infected persons each. It was in 1992 that the disease was declared the nation’s leading cause of death for young men.

Gay history is a palimpsest of what ifs. Walking city streets in a detective mood—with Famous pointing out the clues I have missed—I’m especially delighted to discover the queer coincidences. But I can’t piece them together into a distinct linear meaning.

In her book Wide-Open Town, Nan Alamilla Boyd explains how queer-owned San Francisco bars in the postwar period constructed what she calls spatial defenses: back entrance, covered windows, dance floor sequestered in the rear, a discriminating hostess on the door.

The historian Allan Bérubé contended that sex in establishments that were separated from the general citizenry created ‘the first urban zone of privacy, as well as safety, for gay men.’ Assembly Bill 489, which permitted sodomy and oral sex between consenting adults in private, became California law at the start of 1976, and destabilized the legal ground on which the state could prosecute homosex on private property.

In 1985, a group of sociologists published the book Habits of the Heart, arguing that a real community must be a ‘community of memory,’ meaning one that remembers its past, including painful stories of shared suffering. Where history is forgotten, they wrote, community degenerates into lifestyle enclaves.

Bus Station John told a local paper: ‘There’s not just a gap, but a chasm between generations that AIDS created. Their absence is felt by those of us who are old enough to feel it. But the younger ones are never going to know about them unless we tell them.’ We went out to be told. We went out to feel it. We went out to experience how it used to be, and Bus Station John was happy to be our gay liberation daddy. A mature writer for a gay newspaper reported that the seventies bathhouse vibe at Tubesteak Connection was ‘so authentic, people were actually cruising!

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.

Show Me Love’ would inevitably play. House-music tracks had become so pushy—they demanded rather than seduced. The songs were ‘A Deeper Love’ and ‘Deeper and Deeper’ and ‘Deep Inside.’ If I was with Xuan I’d be alert to how tacky it all was as she scrutinized the scene. But we danced like adorable cyborgs.

It used to be our home: the comment stayed with me. Was it my home --- did it used to be?

The historian Matt Houlbrook has proposed that ‘the operations of municipal power in redeveloping the modern city were predicated upon the coordinated exclusion of queer men.

Bill Eppridge’s photograph of the South of Market motorcycle bar the Tool Box was printed in Life magazine back in 1964, the opening spread of an article entitled ‘Homosexuality in America.’ (Subtitle: ‘A secret world grows open and bolder. Society is forced to look at it—and try to understand it.’)

Between 1977 and 1984, according to Milk’s protégé Cleve Jones, Coors saw its share of the giant California market drop from forty to fourteen percent.

A quintessential item was the foam-front, mesh-backed trucker cap, like the one on the head of the musician Arthur Russell, our fag patron saint. He couldn’t give a fuck about genre—experimental composition, country, disco—and was ahead of his time that way.

The majority of the Phone Booth clientele was probably straight, yet somehow the atmosphere was predominantly gay. This was an advantageous situation; the straight boys respectfully gave the impression they might capitulate. Ostensibly straight boys whom I kissed there included a construction site foreman, a professional skateboarder and an acrobat. Somebody would always put ‘Family Affair’ by Mary J. Blige on the jukebox, with its message about leaving one’s situations behind at the door.

An honest account of the gay bar must include bisexual, pansexual, confused, questioning, transitioning bars.

In David Diebold’s oral history of the Moby Dick label, one producer summed up the company culture: ‘Too many bosses, too many queens, a lot of jealousy.

Moby Dick was also briefly—for some four years from 1980—the primary disco label in San Francisco

(Guy Strait once described the conversion of a struggling venue into a gay bar by way of hiring the right staff as turning it on.)

It was 1992 and I was against gay visibility. The visible gays did not make life any easier for me. They gave corporeal form to the suspicions that followed me around high school. I didn’t want the public to be forced to think about gays. I certainly didn’t want my roommate to have to think about them. At the start of the school year, I arrived first. Our room was so small I could sit on my bed and put my feet on his.

But that prescribed social necessity began to give some gay men pause. A thirty-seven-year-old Studio One regular spoke with ambivalence to the Times in 1976. ‘Even the dances have a depersonalized quality to them. The Hustle and The Bus Stop, for instance. In both, you have 50 or 100 people lined up, dancing the same way, completely unattached to each other, simply doing the same movements, like robots. Like lemmings, they begin to form those lines.’ He went on to prognosticate a dystopian future, what he called the ultimate discotheque: ‘I can envision the day when we all just walk up to the entrance to a disco, put a bunch of quarters in a slot, enter and become immediately surrounded by music. Then each of us will go into a space the size of a telephone booth and dance by ourselves.

We were first invited to Tubesteak Connection by Spider, who manned the door. The DJ, Bus Station John, played ecstatic sets of arcane disco, hi-NRG, Italo and boogie. He was in his forties, and wore a thick mustache, muttonchops, flat cap. Bus Station John gave the appearance he might be prickly, but he called us child. He was there to bear witness, to testify, using rare tracks from what he called ‘the golden age of gay,’ the period between Stonewall and AIDS. The music was our time machine. We were conscious the discs he put on the turntable may have come from the collections of deceased gay men.

According to Time magazine, Moby Dick Records folded in 1984 when seven of its ten core employees died of AIDS.

The handsome Prince Nelly, new gay bar royalty, lip-synced along to his power ballad selections with a crooner’s passion, both his fists at his sternum. He announced the next song into a microphone, imparting copious factoids. In general, the music was eighties pop—Dead or Alive, Bananarama, Belinda Carlisle, the Human League—and stuff irresistible after imbibing cheap beer: ‘Fantasy’ by Mariah Carey. ‘9 to 5.’ Crystal Castles. CSS. Janet Jackson’s ‘When I Think of You.’ ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ by Depeche Mode. ‘That’s Not My Name.’ MGMT. ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ ‘Last Dance.’ I recognized the Lovely Jonjo from his appearance on the cover of Butt magazine.

The pamphlet compiled essays from those who work in queer spaces or study them academically, or both. One contributor, Joe Parslow, wrote an essay that refers to the critic José Esteban Muñoz’s paralleling of the word stage in the sense of a platform for performance with stage as a phase that queers are told to get over—as when parents contend it’s just a blip. In 2009, Muñoz wrote, ‘Today I write back from that stage that my mother and father hoped I would quickly vacate. Instead, I dwell on and in this stage.’ Parslow explains how he was inspired to think from the stage outward when he designed his own venue, Her Upstairs, one of those few places that opened against the wave of bar closures; it shut down after only a short spell. In his listing application for the RVT, Ben Walters offered another symbolic interpretation of the stage. When Pat and Breda McConnon took over the tavern in 1979, they made the decision to put an end to the messy tradition of bartenders serving drinks between the legs of the drag queens atop the curving bar. But rather than cancel the entertainment, they renovated the interior, removing that bar and installing a bespoke stage. Walters points out the meaningfulness of this move. Performing on the bar had meant that a drag queen could be swiftly cleared away and the performance denied at the sign of a police raid. The McConnons permanently ensconced queer performance in the materiality of the building. Their stage was not a phase.

Other skaters came to our dorm room to suck balloons inflated from his nitrous tank or sit on the floor clipping their toenails while a skate VHS with a Dinosaur Jr. soundtrack juddered away. Tim was kind to everyone and unimpressed by the university. He never washed his bedsheets. I took to Scotch-taping a sheet of Bounce to an electric fan to deodorize the room. We listened to the Pharcyde and mix tapes from Beat Non Stop, the DJ shop on Melrose Avenue. When Tim went home for the weekend or stayed out late with a girl, I lay in the dark and played Barbra Streisand’s cover of ‘Somewhere,’ in which astral synthesizers evoke outer space. Alone in the dark, I felt comforted, embarrassed and duplicitous.

The critic Michael Warner points out that in the lesbian and gay movement, ‘the institutions of culture-building have been market-mediated: bars, discos, special services, newspapers, magazines, phone lines, resorts, urban commercial districts

Matias was chubby with baby skin and eyes that sparkled like diabolical gems. He wore a male symbol earring in his right ear. He was gay in a way not fathomable in my Silicon Valley high school. It was as if, I thought, he got to be gay the way black kids got to be black: with an attitude that made others want in. He’d shift his head from side to side like a sassy dashboard ornament. He agreed to drive me to the boulevard, if only to placate my newfound champions.

Forbes qualified to the Los Angeles Times: ‘Disco to a gay person is very much a social necessity. To a straight person it’s more like a trendy thing.

In 1964, the best-named gay activist of the era, Guy Strait, self-published an article entitled ‘What Is a Gay Bar’ (and laid out with the headline in French—‘Qu’est-ce Que C’est? Gay Bar’). According to Strait, while homosexual men had long sniffed out hotel lobbies, public squares, dive bars and gentleman’s clubs with a tacit reputation, a true gay bar was something different. His first rule for a gay bar was its ‘freedom of speech’—the use of idioms and unguarded sex talk. (Anyone who wanted to be schooled could order Strait’s own Lavender Lexicon: A Dictionary of Gay Terms and Phrases for two dollars.) Strait contended that while a cruisy hangout could fly under the radar, a gay bar might be forced to shut down based on the conversations. ‘Gay bars are not the best pickup spots,’ he wrote, ‘but they are the safest; they are not the worst thing that has happened to society and may well be one of the best.

We danced to whatever—Rihanna, Lady Gaga, ‘Finally’ by CeCe Peniston. On Thursdays, a DJ collective played esoteric house, which Famous complained was too serious. Our ongoing joke was how miserable it would be if we ended up dying there: the Joiners Harms, we called it, as Robbie passed around shots of sambuca, the syrup coating my tobacco-stained fingertips.

On weekdays, everyone would read Armistead Maupan's "Tales of the City," published as a novel in 1978. His leading character Michael "Mouse" Toliver, a clone-ish softie himself, laments the experience of meeting men– nice mustache, Levis, a starched khaki army shirt, strong– and trying to resist visiting the bathrooms, lest he encounter the giveaway, the fantasy-killer: face creams and shampoos for days." Mouse was only being wistful, but the underlying efemmophobia was pernicious on the scene. Masculinity can be something that gay men project onto one another, only to snatch it away at the first sign of inauthenticity. That they hadn't rolled out of bed looking ruggedly handsome, but required a beauty routine to get that way.

Dream big dreams, risk big heartache.

Love brings loss to mind.

But it struck me that people may be deeply uncomfortable with two lovers’ attendant vulnerability. Love brings loss to mind.

I never felt as much a citizen as I did when we became outlaws.

I understood clearly through those days that I was living a feeling. And when I remember now, I am still living that; it has been folded into me and continues to resonate. On some level, we knew then that we were creating this feeling to be taken along from then on.

I understood clearly through those days that I was living a feeling. And when I remember now, I am still living that; it has been folded into me and continues to resonate. On some level, we knew then that we were creating this feeling to be taken along from then on.

...I never felt as much a citizen as I did when we became outlaws.

I don't necessarily find such pragmatism unromantic. It's rather lovely to think of someone willing to do the admin with you.