Michael Nava Quotes

"You want me to stipulate that the cops violated her constitutional rights?"
"This is the LAPD we're talking about, Kim. It would be shocking if they hadn't violated her rights."

[Henry] Life is a kind of exile and we all long to go home. Who said that?

[Irene Gentry] "Some people are just so beautiful that life seems to speak to us through them - they're vital, radiant. It's more startling in men than women, I think, because we don't usually let ourselves think of men that way. But Shakespeare knew. Remember the sonnets? 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day,' was written to another man."

What is happening in contemporary American society is that people who prefer to be with members of their own sex no longer see this as a reason to be deprived of the rights to citizenship, family formation, and privacy.

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

[Henry Rios, with Kevin Reilly] "Sometimes I can't believe what people do to each other." "Believe it," he said. "There's nothing that hasn't been done by someone to someone. People settling scores is what keeps us in business."

The Abbey was on Robertson, just below Santa Monica, on the edge of Boys' Town. Low brick buildings housed cafes, clothing stores, coffee houses and watch repair shops that rubbed elbows with gay clubs and sex shops. These establishments catered to hordes of the beautiful young gay men who lived in the big apartment complexes that lined the side streets or who drove in from all over Southern California on weekend nights. I seldom ventured there, because it reminded me of San Francisco in the '70s, when I was a boy just coming out and how out of place I'd felt among the big-muscled boys who cruised each other with cold assessment. Twenty years later, only the faces and the clothes had changed; the air was still charged with the brutal calculation of lust. And beneath that was the claustrophobia of a ghetto, of fearful people looking out at the world from behind invisible fences.

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

[Henry Rios, to Paul Windsor] "Society is a conspiracy and everyone who's different is its target."

He was so arrogant that he spoke of himself in the plural.

[Jorge Luis, to young José's mother] "You must help him accept his nature," Luis replied forcefully. "Do not let him do as I did and stumble for years in the darkness trying to make sense of his feelings and his shame. Can you do that, Alicia?"

[Henry Rios] I said a prayer, always the same prayer. Two words. Help us.

"You're a fine one to talk about motherhood," Eulalia replied. "You expelled your children from your womb directly into Swiss boarding schools."

The campaign against gays is really a campaign against modern American society and against the freer women and men who populate and struggle in it. Gay rights attempts to structure that freedom with fairness so that we can get on with the business of building real and stable lives for all the different kinds of people and families inhabiting this country. Fairness is what this is about - not the sanctity of marriage or the "promotion" of homosexuality, but fairness.

It was one of those winter days in Los Angeles when the wind has swept away the smog and the air is clear and the light still and everything has the immediacy of a dream. I parked on a street called Overland in the Hollywood Hills. It was lined with white-skinned birch trees. Their nude branches shimmered against the sky. Tattered yellow leaves clogged the gutters and the air was scented with the rainy smell of eucalyptus. There were no cars on the street and the houses were barely visible behind walls and fences and sweeping lawns that had never been trod upon except by gardeners.