Quotes from Paul Monette

I must've gone out for dinner with Al and Bernice, and I must've been full of reassurance and interstitial data. All the blood work was normal so far, but I don't recall if an actual T-cell test was taken, or if we knew the results before the verdict. The T cells are a subset of the white blood count. Infection with the

When you finally come out, there's a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.

I've never quite understood the double Janus face of bi – Janus, the Roman god of gates and doors, especially closets.

and the Nazis. A real piece of work, old number XII, who wouldn't intervene even so far as to tell his Polish cardinals to dampen the enthusiasm of the good Catholics running the camps and the

Poetry served as a sort of intellectual wallpaper to brighten up the closet.

Change me , I whispered, change me .

Love and fuck in the same breath, even if it's your last.

exactly half the phenomenal world is gone

Apparently long hair was enough to make you a faggot in Chicago in '68.

They looked at me, in my hippie garb, with horror and disgust, the Decline of Western Civilisation suddenly plopped in their midst.

And thus I wonder about so many gay men I've met since, pillars of the community, out to everyone else but Mom, who still refer to their lovers as something between a roommate and a valet. Just who is being protected here, and who thinks queer is wrong?

The first thing you see, directly in front of you, is a dim-lit tunnel receding deep under the island. The tunnel is paved with tiny glass beads of light, one for each of the two hundred thousand deportees. On the end wall of the tunnel is a bright light, almost a searchlight, which I've been told is intended to represent hope. But it

For it turned out there were closets within the closet, and a lingering self-hatred that even the joy of connection couldn't solve. What love gives you is the courage to face the secrets you've kept from yourself, a reason to open the rest of the doors.

How do you think poetry helps people? he'd ask, wanting the whole thing quantified so he could compare it to digging wells in the Peace Corps.

That is one of the shocking things about a hospital: its leveling of you to your body's weakest link. The Ph.D. in Comp Lit, the years in Paris, the wall of books—you do not wear these badges on your johnny gown. No wonder I was forever giving our resumes to doctors and nurses, as if to beg them to see us for real, see what happy lives we had left at the border, which waited still like a dog on the front stoop.

When you are gay and alone and want to be a poet, suicide crosses your mind at twenty-two like an impresario's cape.

that all there is is love. Pity us not. Los Angeles 29 June 1987

I could only dimly articulate it then, but I think I believed that Art would give me entry into a no-man's-land where the laws of straight no longer applied. And that once I touched the soul of another artist, a comrade in arms, the bodies would fall into place like folds of a garment, twining us in a passion of the flesh. Pretty high-falutin', and an awful lot of effort just to get a man to go to bed with you.

I kept my heart alive in the desert years by turning it into a valentine, holding on to the hope of every romantic cliché like wedding cake under a pillow. If you have to wait as long as I did, you either become an awful sentimentalist or die of disillusion.

That Socrates was unpretentious almost to a fault, never believing wisdom was his alone or made him superior, but that everyone possessed it if one could only talk it out.

All I would have to do was not exist below the waist, and the future was mine.

Yet that's how it felt for years and years -- that Andover ground me beneath the heel of its Bass Weejuns because it needed losers to make its golden Adonises shine even brighter. I wandered through so lost and sad, I can't believe nobody ever asked me what was wrong. Nothing, I would have said, by which I would have meant Everything .

A curious paradox here: hand in hand with the political rebellion of the age went a certain omnisexual freedom, but that meant you could sleep with anyone, not that you could be gay.

I want the two million—or the five million, depending on whose scenario piques your fancy—to have themselves tested and know, so I will have people to talk to. Because after midnight and during weekends