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For gay men this force of history has been made to come clean; it’s been stripped of its natural look. The very rapidity of change has laid bare the … - Edmund White
" "For gay men this force of history has been made to come clean; it’s been stripped of its natural look. The very rapidity of change has laid bare the clanking machinery of history. To have been oppressed in the 1950s, freed in the 1960s, exalted in the 1970s and wiped out in the 1980s is a quick itinerary for a whole culture to follow. For we are witnessing not just the death of individuals but a menace to an entire culture. All the more reason to bear witness to the cultural moment.
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About Edmund White
Edmund White (born January 13, 1940) is an American novelist, memoirist, and an essayist on literary and social topics. Much of his writing is on the theme of same-sex love. Probably his best-known books are The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) (written with Charles Silverstein) and his trio of autobiographic novels, A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997).
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Edmund Valentine White III
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Additional quotes by Edmund White
In return for the costliness and inconvenience, the squalor and discomfort of our lives, we get to participate in whatever is the latest. We are never left out of anything: we know what's happening, especially since so many of us practice what Paul Valéry called the "delirious professions." As Valéry wrote, "This is the name I give to all those trades whose main tool is one's opinion of oneself, and whose raw material is the opinion others have of you." Although Valéry was writing eighty years ago of Paris, he anticipated the excruciating position of those gay (and straight) New York "creative people" who must be perpetually original in a "population of uniques." The cruel contradiction of such a position is that the creative "live for nothing but to have, and make durable, the illusion of being the only one — for superiority is only a solitude situated at the present limits of a species." The exigencies of the drive to originality can, as Valéry understood, promote a deep uncertainty about one's personal value. If one is a product, is it new enough? Perfect? One of a kind?
Imprisoned under all our layers of long underwear, thick socks, shirts, vests, jackets, coats and hoods were these tropical bodies; the steam and hot water brought color back into the pallor, found the nacreous hollow in a hip, detected the subtly raised triceps, rinsed a sharp clavicle in a softening flood, swirled dull brown hair into a smooth black cap and pulled evening gloves of light over raw hands and skinny, blue-veined forearms.<p>Just as each shell held to the ears roars with a different ocean timbre, each of these bodies spoke to me with a different music, though all sounded to me unlike my own and only with the greatest effort could I remember I was longing after my own sex. Indeed, each of these beings seemed to possess his very own sex.
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