What do you think?
Rate this book
304 pages, Paperback
First published June 22, 1992
Thus in my own crippled way I had no choice but to keep on looking in the wrong places for the thing I'd never even seen: two men in love and laughing. For that was the image in my head, though I'd never read it in any book or seen it in any movie. I'd fashioned it out of bits of dreams and the hurt that went with pining after straight men. Everything told me it couldn't exist, especially the media code of invisibility, where queers were spoken of only in the context of molesting Boy Scouts. Yet the vision of the laughing men dogged me and wouldn't be shaken, more insistent with every lonely month, every encounter that didn't quite happen. The searching became as compulsive as any insatiable need, till I sometimes thought I'd lost my mind--but I also think it kept me alive. (178)
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. (278)