47 Quotes by Christopher Bram

Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’: “You were silly like us.

Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.

Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.

Art is long and life is short.

We all perform balancing acts between self and family, individual and community, private desire and group expectation. Gay people in particular must break with the groupthink of church and society in order to live their own lives. (It’s why you still see half-read copies of Atlas Shrugged on the night tables of otherwise intelligent gay men.)

A work of art doesn’t need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in other people’s lives.

A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.

Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out.

A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having “such a representative life”. And it’s true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.