I've lost over twenty friends [to AIDS]. I've seen a world vanish-a culture that has been oppressed in one generation, liberated in the nest, and wip… - Edmund White

For these people religion is the only form of intellectuality.

I could certainly subscribe to the notion that life ends in old age, sickness, and death — but later, later.

Tommy started to play the guitar and sing. He and I had trekked more than once downtown to the Folk Center to hear a barefoot hillbilly woman in a long, faded skirt intone Elizabethan songs and pluck at a dulcimer or to listen, frightened and transported, to a big black Lesbian with a crew cut moan her way through the blues. The People — those brawny, smiling farmers, those plump, wholesome teens bursting out of bib overalls, those toothless ex-cons, those white-eyed dust bowel victims — the People, half-glimpsed in old photos, films and WPA murals, were about to reemerge, we trusted, into history and our lives.