Michael Nava Quotes

The fact is that most gay men and women lead, or try to lead, ordinary lives indistinguishable from those of their neighbours.

He felt like Hercules at the Augean stables commissioned to clean out the accumulated filth of centuries.

... the usual hired guns who made up the expert witness circuit and would say basically what they were paid to say.

His eyes were judging me. It was as if I was the last of a long line of grown-ups who would fail him.

[Alicia Gavilán, to Miguel] "We are all birds in cages, but some of us find reason to sing."

[Henry Rios, with Elena] The heat had become a bit denser and the light a little dustier as the fragrant morning waned. Birds called from the surrounding trees and the low burble of water sounded from the stream that ran through Elena's property. "This is heaven," I said, opening the car door. She smiled, deepening the lines around her mouth. "Have you ever read Primo Levi?" "No." "He has a passage in his book about concentration camp survivors―to the effect that those who have once been tortured go on being tortured. Heaven's not possible for people like that."

[Irene Gentry] "We all love according to our natures."

I had loved so infrequently I felt a debt to those whom I had, for the reprieve from solitude.

[Grant Hancock, with Henry Rios] "As for me, when I die I'll direct my family to bury me without fanfare." I smiled. "When you die, Grant, the tailors and barbers will declare a day of national mourning."

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.

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.

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

[John, to Henry] "Here's your dog. Con todo, like you said. Mustard, relish, onion — you sure it's okay for you to eat this with your heart and all?"
"If it's not," I said, biting into the hot dog, "I'll die a happy man."

Since then, however, his city had disintegrated around him, shattered buildings and the glassy-eyed dead transforming familiar landscapes into a circle of hell. He had felt the fear of the adults whom he had once believed were impervious to fear and invincible in their certainties. The world had taught him there are no certainties and ultimately no safety. Terrible things happened without warning or explanation. He blinked back his tears. He was not yet a man, at least not like his father or Tió Damian, but he could no longer be a child. He felt the world's enmity and he responded not with a child's grief but a man's defiance, as if his blood were being infiltrated with threads of iron.

In my father's house are many dwellings. Is that what Jesus had meant? Was he speaking not only of heaven but of this life in which each person carved out of the vast, unified reality of existence the little houses of personality they inhabited? She had a vision of children making sand houses at the edge of the sea and of waves gently spilling over and eradicating them. The little sand houses were like the houses of self, and the waves were the fingers of God drawing the sand back into himself.