Michael Nava Quotes

Larry was in his study, going through a pile of papers. Watching him, it occurred to me that I hardly knew him at all. It was as if all these years I'd been seeing him in profile and now that he turned his face to me, it was the face of a stranger.

Everywhere, he saw the symptoms of starvation as one economic crisis after another was balanced on the backs of the poor, while the city's anxious rich hoarded their wealth or sent it out of the country for safekeeping in foreign banks.

[Her elderly mother, to Alicia] "Except in the novels of the Brontës, marriage is a barter. You make the best bargain you can before I die."

What we do want is equal protection of the laws and all that implies, and we want our fellow citizens to acknowledge that our constitutionally protected choices about what is, after all, our own business should not disqualify us from equal membership in the multitude of American communities. We ask and deserve that our fellow citizens recognize our existence and accept us into the common life. This is neither begging for acceptance nor looking for approval. It is the corollary of the Bill of Rights that creates a nation of equals, equally free. The constitutional protections we are entitled to must go along with the effort to educate nongay Americans out of their hostile conditioning. Again, this is not to win approval, but to change perceptions enough to prevent majority prejudices from being acted out against us. In the end, acceptance does matter - acceptance not of the way other people live their lives, but of their right to live them. Stated generally, what gays and lesbians want is not very different from what most Americans want: to live as little disturbed by government as possible but secure in the knowledge that social institutions will serve them equally and that laws affecting them will be enforced fairly. We are demanding our basic rights, rights that Americans are not supposed to be deprived of without due process of law and that are nevertheless denied us, without due process, as a matter of routine. It would be nice if our families, friends, neighbours, leaders, and other fellow citizens could just get over their prejudices about us. It is really difficult sometimes to see what in the lives we lead should be a source of such interest to so many people. At the very least, public institutions should treat gay and lesbian Americans and their lives with the same respect they give heterosexual Americans. People's inclinations, orientation, preference, nature, and private lives should be respected, unless it can be shown that some harm to the public interest would result. This is the principle of equal protection under the law.

The rich are different, I thought: condemned to live their lives in public, they go through their paces at the edge of hysteria like show dogs from which every trait has been bred but anxiety.

He had the open, cheerful, rather self-satisfied countenance of someone upon whom life had made very few demands.

He hoisted himself up to the ledge of the pool, the water running streams down his thin, hard body. "I came out here from Tennessee to go to school, a long time ago. I was eighteen and pretty and there wasn't anything I wouldn't do in bed. I had a lot of friends." He pushed wet hair from his forehead. "Thing is, you don't stay young and pretty forever. It began to take more and more booze to keep up the illusion, not that anybody but me was fooled. The friends drifted off, the party moved on, and I woke up one morning and I was thirty-one, broke and a drunk."

We must also again emphasize that gays and lesbians do not seek the right to be homosexual. This "right" is not one within the authority of government to give. They are fighting for the right to secure the conditions under which they may lead ordinary, civilized lives.

[Asuras] "There are means people and there are ends people. The means people create distinctions among means and call it morality. The ends people understand that in this world, in this system we're born into, anything that gets you what you want is a good thing."

[His father, to Miguel] "I know that a man's honour means nothing to your generation, but it is all that a man possesses in this life."

"Come on, then," Gustavo said. "Let's get the circus started."

[Donati] "You couldn't have planned a worse place to put a city than LA."

It really was a brutal place, Los Angeles, less a city than a collection of hostile villages united only in their mutual suspicion of each other and a susceptibility to disasters, natural and otherwise. Fires, floods, riots and earthquakes; it was looking more and more like Armageddon-by-the-Pacific.

The defined categories of heterosexual and homosexual orientation were an invention of the late nineteenth century. The notion of the "homosexual" per se is comparatively recent, an invention of the nineteenth century; the word was coined by a Hungarian doctor named Karl Maria Kertbeny, in 1869. But the classification was not a neutral one; homosexuality was not just a phenomenon, it was a pathology. This view of homosexuality - congenital but pathological - laid the groundwork for homosexuality's subsequent psychiatrization. By [the mid-twentieth century] American culture had declared war on homosexuality as if it were an epedemic. The equation of homosexuality with sickness, and heterosexuality with health, persists in popular culture. Until 1974, when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its catalogue of mental illness, psychiatry played a long and dishonorable role in providing a basis for discrimination against gays and lesbians.

The common experience of being gay is deeply individual. You discover your sexual identity yourself, your closet is your own, your coming out is individual. Coming out represents a decision to transform one's life from the inside out, choosing the natural over the conventional at great personal cost. The process of coming out is harrowing, but it can leave in its wake an unshakable core of certainty of self. Coming out is more than an acknowledgement, acceptance, or even announcement of one's sexual identity. It represents a continuing process founded on an act of compassion towards oneself - a compassion, alas, seldom shown by one's own family or friends, let alone society. That act is the acceptance of one's fundamental worth, including, and not despite, one's homosexuality, in the face of social condemnation and likely persecution. Coming out is the process through which one arrives at one's values the hard way, testing them against what one knows to be true about oneself. Gay men and lesbians must think about family, morality, nature, choice, freedom, and responsibility in ways most people never have to. Truly to come out, a gay person must become one of those human beings who, as psychiatrist Alice Miller writes, "wants to be true to themselves". Each gay man and woman has to come to terms with his or her homosexuality, decide whether to accept it, deny it, or try to change it, and face the consequences of the choice.