Michael Nava Quotes

A child's sexual innocence isn't moral, it's literal: he has no context for it. From the adult who uses him sexually, he learns a context

[Henry, to Tony Earl] "I'll argue self-defense."
"You do that," he said, "but last time I looked at the jury instructions on self-defense, if someone comes at you with fists you don't get to blow their brains out with a semiautomatic."
"You can if his fists can kill you," I said.

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

[Josh and Henry] "Do you want to?" he whispered. I raised myself on my elbow and said, "Of course I do, but I haven't carried rubbers with me since I was sixteen." "Just this once," he said. "You could pull out before - you know." I squeezed his neck between my fingers. "No," I said softly. "There's AIDS, Josh. It's not worth the risk."

The fighting had ended and his old routines had begun to be re-established ‑ even El Morito had reappeared, skinny and flea-ridden - but nothing was as it had been. He was like someone who had stepped into a long, dark, and frightening tunnel and, coming into the light, could not blink away the darkness that continued to cloud the periphery of his vision. The world was a more arbitrary and crueler place, and even though his family surrounded him, he knew now that he was essentially alone in it.

The emergence of an openly gay and lesbian population is simply the latest stage of the evolution of individual liberty, and a reaffirmation of American tradition. Gay men and women don't come out because it's fashionable, popular, easy, safe, mandatory, or conventional; they do it to be true to themselves.

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.

What gays and lesbians have to teach other Americans is that morality is how you live and how you conduct yourself, not what you happen to be.

It was the mystery of my sexual nature that a body which was the mirror image of mine could be so compelling and feel so unfamiliar. When I was younger, it had seemed urgent to unravel this mystery because I believed that if it could be explained, the haters would stop hating us. Now I believed that they had no more right to an explanation about me than I did about them and, in any case, they would find other reasons to hate. Now I was simply grateful for his body beside me, known and unknown.

Sarmiento waited for Luis at a sidewalk table at the Cafe Colón on the Reforma. Two sumptuous carriages filled with beautifully dressed women passed beneath Columbus's monument. They were the advance guard of the daily procession of the rich that wound its way up the boulevard and around Chapultepec in a stately and pointless show of opulence. Meanwhile, ragged Indian men swept the sidewalks with branch-and-twig brooms, bent over at their labour and ignored by the passers-by. The distance between the silk women and the pauper Indians was the true history of México, Sarmiento thought.

I didn't know what else to say. Moments like this brought home to me that no matter how well I thought I knew him, how much I loved him, we were on different sides of the fence that separated the infected from the uninfected. I could see a little way over to his side, but he lived there.

After talking to Mark, I'd spent much of the night in the kind of "what if" ruminations that served no particular purpose except to depress me.

This struggle is not about sex. It is about privacy, individuality, and civil equality and the right of all Americans, not just gay and lesbian Americans, to be free.

It was not quiet in my head.

[Henry] I shrugged. "Being born into my family was like being thrown into an accident."