About Christopher Bram: Christopher Bram is an American author.
Art is long and life is short.
There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.
A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.
A career in the arts can make anyone crazy.
A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.
A disproportionate number of stories are love stories – and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?
Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.
We’re happier when the assholes are villains.
Death is almost never timely, even for the old.
Didn’t he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?
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.
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.
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.
Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual.
Everybody is Other in Maupin.
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.
In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.
Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).
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.
Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.
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.
