It really was a brutal place, Los Angeles, less a city than a collection of hostile villages united only in their mutual suspicion of each other and … - Michael Nava

[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 was sixteen." "Just this once," he said. "You could pull out before - you know." I squeezed his neck between my fingers. "No," I said softly. "There's AIDS, Josh. It's not worth the risk."

Greed had always seemed to me the most self-defeating of vices, because one cannot own anything permanently: we have, at most, a life tenancy in our possessions. But I suppose the fulfilment was in the acquisition and maybe, too, someone who'd been tossed around by life needed the cosseting that money and things provide.

They were empty gestures, the kind it was beginning to seem that these people were full of.