the late twentieth century will go down in history, i'm sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery.
Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.
It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.
Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.
What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.
I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
That would be such a life-changing thing, for us all to know that there are other beings out there who we could potentially communicate with, or maybe we are listening to a signal that they transmitted hundreds of millennia ago.
Is it different to come out now than it was to come out thirty-five years ago? Sometimes. But if you come out now and you come from poverty and you come from racism, you come from the terror of communities that are immigrant communities or communities where you're already a moving target because of who you are, this is not a place where it's any easier to be LGBT even if there's a community center in every single borough.
We lived in a housing project graced by the architectural style of Early Chicken Coop.
If I swim in the ocean, I have a shark thought. Not a bad one, but just a little one