[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… - Michael Nava

[Donati] "You see why I don't advertise I'm gay?" "No, not exactly, Nick." "Because I don't want to be confused with people like Bob." He tossed back his drink. "Drag queens, leather queens, all those sick fucks who parade around and make it impossible for the rest of us to have normal lives."

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."

As destitute as it was, San Francisco Tlalco was not the worst of the barrios in Sarmiento's district. At the edges of San Antonio Abad were massive garbage heaps scavenged by entire families who lived on-site in huts constructed of plywood and tin. In other neighbourhoods, slop jars filled with human excrement were left on the roadways, where they were intermittently collected by the leaky night soil carts that rumbled through the dirt streets. One evening at dusk, he saw dozens of men, women, and children walk out of the city into the far distant fields, where, having nowhere else to sleep, they bedded down on the earth. He saw the decaying carcasses of burros, dogs, and cats left in streets where the city's garbage collectors refused to venture; fountains that gushed slime the people used for drinking, cooking, and cleaning; and malnourished infants at the breasts of skeletal mothers. Sarmiento had never systematically examined his attitudes toward the poor, but he did so now. He observed, as if recording the results of an experiment, his disgust as well as his pity, his superficial identification with the poor as a matter of their common humanity, and his profounder feeling of superiority to them. In the end, he felt anger. How, he wondered, could the poor persist in habits and customs that experience alone must have taught them were detrimental to their health and moral well-being? Why else, for example, would the men squander their pittances at filthy pulquerias while their women and children went ragged and hungry? But then rationality overcame emotion. Every human was born ignorant, he reasoned, and their habits and understanding were shaped by their environment. How could he reasonably expect those born into a cesspool from which there was no escape to acquire the habits of someone like him, born by comparison into a palace? He could not. Therefore, he concluded, his attitude toward the poor should be one of humility and understanding, not superiority or condemnation. He must meet the poor on their own ground.