Paul Monette Quotes & Sayings

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

Grief is a sword, or it is nothing. — Paul Monette

So I told myself I would give it up, even prayed at night for it to be taken away, not knowing that 'it' was love. — Paul Monette

As an artist, you reach for the pen that's full of blood. — Paul Monette

Good days are such a mysterious gift that you dare not question them much, and the only problem is they give you a false sense of security. — Paul Monette

Time to set forth alone and find out what sort of man I was, instead of being a mirror to somebody else. Swearing a blood oath, even as I clung to this ghost embrace, that I would never hold another man who wouldn't hold me back. — Paul Monette

Change me, I whispered, change me. — Paul Monette

Perhaps we were atheists by default, but the matter of God did not come into the equation of our love. — Paul Monette

It was the first time I'd ever considered that gay might not just be about whom we slept with but a kind of sensibility, what survived of feeling after all the fears and evasions of the closet. — Paul Monette

The problem with secret crushes: in the absence of requital the love turns bitter. — Paul Monette

There is no God, I'm sure of that. But the more they've sought me out, the more I am convinced that there are holy men and women. So I send blessings, such as they are, to all my priests who constitute the Resistance. Down with the fur and the edicts. And if they like, they're welcome to include me in their prayers. Can't hurt. None of us will free the world of intolerance alone. We need people of God, especially if He isn't here. — Paul Monette

Yet I've come to learn that all our stories add up to the same imprisonment. The self-delusion of uniqueness. The festering pretense that we are the same as they are. The gutting of all our passions till we are a bunch of eunuchs, our zones of pleasure in enemy hands. Most of all, the ventriloquism, the learning how to pass for straight. Such obedient slaves we make, with such very tidy rooms. — Paul Monette

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. — Paul Monette

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 — Paul Monette

Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you're hurting. — Paul Monette

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 — Paul Monette

The Bible is still the only dirty book I've ever read, at least in its current incarnation as a weapon of the homophobes. Bible scholarship keeps trying to catch up, proving that all the hatred of gay is just stupid translation, though the snake-oil preachers don't want to hear it. — Paul Monette

And if the government was stone-deaf, the press was mute. The media are convinced in 1987 that they're doing a great job reporting the AIDS story, and there's no denying they've grasped the horror. But for four years they let the bureaucracies get away with passive genocide, — Paul Monette

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. — Paul Monette

If it's true that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else, then I suppose a certain self-regard must've kept me above water during my decade of drowning alone. But I think that in my case it was the other way - that I learned to love myself because someone else finally loved me. Seeing myself whole in another man's eyes, deeper than any mirror, and neither of us looking away because there's so much lost time to make up for. — Paul Monette

To experience love as claustrophobia. In such a twisted paradigm lies the sick legacy of a lifetime in the closet. — Paul Monette

If the government was going to continue to act as if we didn't exist, if the medical establishment was prone to gridlock over funds, if the drug companies were waiting till the curve got high enough for profit, then we would find our own way. — Paul Monette

And just getting into bed with somebody wasn't the magic solution, because people could hide their terrors in pure technique - depersonalizing so completely the body embraced that they felt nothing at all. — Paul Monette

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

Being different was about something more than just our dicks. — Paul Monette

When I bucked and shot myself, hearing him greedily drink and swallow, I knew I had tasted life at last - and wouldn't end up sobbing in a wheelchair after all. — Paul Monette

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. — Paul Monette

Organized religion is the school of hate, and never more exultant in its righteous indignation than when it talks about gay and lesbian. In America the unholy alliance between the know-nothing fundamentalists and the Catholic hierarchy keeps the faithful whipped up to a frenzy of witch-hunting and fag-bashing. — 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 — Paul Monette

The better you get at being just a shoulder, the more unsexed you become. — Paul Monette

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

I was out of the war because men like this were too scared to talk about dick. — Paul Monette

I liked being adrift in symbols, beauty for beauty's sake. — Paul Monette

It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference. — Paul Monette

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? — Paul Monette

The imagination was the only country where a man could truly breathe free. — Paul Monette

It would take me the better part of growing up to understand that intimacy, more than sex or even sexual orientation, was the universal battleground, and no easier for straight than gay. — Paul Monette

But the fevers are on me now, the virus mad to ravage my last fifty T cells. It's hard to keep the memory at full dazzle, with so much loss to mock it. Roger gone, Craig gone, Cesar gone, Stevie gone. And this feeling that I'm the last one left, in a world where only the ghosts still laugh. But at least they're the ghosts of full-grown men, proof that all of us got that far, free of the traps and the lies. And from that moment on the brink of summer's end, no one would ever tell me again that men like me couldn't love. — Paul Monette

You need only to have glimpsed it once to know there's a window out of all this black and sleepless night. Then you must use it to hope on. Key to the dream country where all your people are whole again, and the gunboats can't reach you, and the Empire of Hate is rubble. You and your secret dream of freedom are the tidal wave. Keep watch, every night if you have to. As for sleeping, you can sleep when you're dead. — Paul Monette

It was said that everyone appointed by the Reagan administration in a major public health capacity was either a Mormon or a fundamentalist. The chief spokesman for the administration now was the overripe and venomous Patrick Buchanan, one of whose major qualifications for the job was his widely quoted remark that nature was finally exacting her price on homosexuals for having spilled their seed against her. — Paul Monette

I suppose we'd been waiting for each other all our lives. — Paul Monette

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. — Paul Monette

The struggle for true openness and intimacy is a lifelong struggle for all of us, gay and straight alike. And besides, a difficult life brings you to the core of yourself, where you learn what justice is and how it has to be fought for. — Paul Monette

That would be my theme, I thought: once I came out, the world was all windows. — Paul Monette

Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world. — Paul Monette

Unpossessive. Before his parents left, Al once again paid him the highest compliment about his relationship with me. "You boys are the best friends I've ever seen," he said. "You're like Damon and Pythias." It's a long way for a man to come who couldn't look me in the face for a year after Roger finally told him he was gay. A century — Paul Monette

In this Puritan sinkhole of a culture, we don't teach children the uses of pleasure, and so they decide we are fools and go their own way, blindly. If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks. — Paul Monette

Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient's bed. You don't care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one's previous citizenship at the border. — Paul Monette

Don't let anyone tell you that the truth can't disappear. If I believe in anything, rather than God, is that I am part of something that goes all the way back to Antigone, and that whatever speaks the truth of our hearts can only make us stronger. Can only give us the power to counter the hate and bigotry and heal this addled world.
Just remember: You are not alone. — Paul Monette

The pain between them made me as envious as their laughter, because it was real and expressible, blood-red with passion, and not the invisible pain of a ghost like me. Sometimes my head filled with a scream that went on for hours but was silenced by the walls of the closet. My face still wearing its social smile fixed in place as if by a stroke. — Paul Monette

Lust and the English make no sense to me. — Paul Monette

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. — Paul Monette

That as long as I kept them apart, love would be sexless and sex loveless, endlessly repeating its cycle of self-denial and self-abuse. — Paul Monette

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

We queers of Revelation hill ... died of the greed of power, because we were expendable. If you mean to visit any of us, it had better be to make you strong to fight that power. Take your languor and easy tears somewhere else. Above all, don't pretty us up. Tell yourself: None of this ever had to happen. And then go make it stop, with whatever breath you have left. Grief is a sword, or it is nothing. — Paul Monette