51 Quotes by Paul Monette

The Bible is still the only dirty book I’ve ever read, at least in its current incarnation as a weapon of the homophobes. Bible scholarship keeps trying to catch up, proving that all the hatred of gay is just stupid translation, though the snake-oil preachers don’t want to hear it.

As an artist, you reach for the pen that’s full of blood.

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

When Larry Kramer tells Mathilde Krim in Interview about the closeted gay man at the National Institutes of Health who buried the AIDS data for two years, that’s when I understand how doomed we were before we ever knew. It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.

If later on, as we read this, we might think “How happy we were then!” at least we’ll have that. That as we lived them, these moments, we knew they were important, and that’s all there is.

Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient’s bed. You don’t care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one’s previous citizenship at the border.

Good days are such a mysterious gift that you dare not question them much, and the only problem is they give you a false sense of security.

It was said that everyone appointed by the Reagan administration in a major public health capacity was either a Mormon or a fundamentalist. The chief spokesman for the administration now was the overripe and venomous Patrick Buchanan, one of whose major qualifications for the job was his widely quoted remark that nature was finally exacting her price on homosexuals for having spilled their seed against her.

Fate was the issue, if anything; not guilt.