1
If the achievement of so much in life could not make one happy, then why bother living?Christopher Bram
2
We’re happier when the assholes are villains.Christopher Bram
3
Death is almost never timely, even for the old.Christopher Bram
4
Art is long and life is short.Christopher Bram
5
There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.Christopher Bram
6
Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.Christopher Bram
7
Trust the tale, not the teller.Christopher Bram
8
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.Christopher Bram
9
Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.Christopher Bram
10
Didn’t he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?Christopher Bram
11
Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn’t worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys.Christopher Bram
12
An obsessed reader figured that ‘Armistead Maupin’ was an anagram for ‘is a man I dreamt up’.Christopher Bram
13
Gay liberation did not create gay promiscuity. There was sex before there were marches, politics, or books — it was the best reason for being homosexual, it and love.Christopher Bram
14
Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).Christopher Bram
15
In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.Christopher Bram
16
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.Christopher Bram
17
Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.Christopher Bram
18
A disproportionate number of stories are love stories — and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?Christopher Bram
19
A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.Christopher Bram
20
Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal.Christopher Bram
21
Everybody is Other in Maupin.Christopher Bram
22
Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual.Christopher Bram
23
Seventies macho was both a look — moustache, jeans, leather jacket — and an attitude — cool, heartless, virile — that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emotion.Christopher Bram
24
The fact of the matter is that readers and audiences are never blank slates: individuals see in a work whatever they need to see at that moment.Christopher Bram
25
Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’: “You were silly like us.Christopher Bram
26
History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about in a newspaper is not always more important than a fictional one in a novel or play or poem.Christopher Bram
27
A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.Christopher Bram
28
It’s often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they’re going.Christopher Bram
29
Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.Christopher Bram
30
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.Christopher Bram
31
Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White’s strengths are sex, art and — sometimes — love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other’s domain.Christopher Bram
32
The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.Christopher Bram
33
It has been a marvellous age of invention: radio, aeroplane, electric light, the telephone, and fellatio.Christopher Bram
34
Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.Christopher Bram
35
A career in the arts can make anyone crazy.Christopher Bram
36
If oppression produced saints, we’d want everyone to be oppressed.Christopher Bram
37
Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.Christopher Bram