Christopher Bram

“Didn’t he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?”

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

“It’s often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they’re going.”

“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.”

“Death is almost never timely, even for the old.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.”

“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.”

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

“Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).”

“Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual.”

“There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.”

“If the achievement of so much in life could not make one happy, then why bother living?”

“We’re happier when the assholes are villains.”

“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.”

“Art is long and life is short.”

“In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.”

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

“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.”