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.

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

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.