”In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have this.” The first step to eradicate what you don’t like to exist is to deny its existence altogether. For more background take a look at this:
You can also read Bollinger’s indictment here. Still, I have some mixed feelings about his invitation.
I’m envious, Love, I swear
(why hide it?) of the dead,
a panicky muddle-head,
my soul in terror of its sensual tie.
Lord, as the last hours fly,
stretch out in mercy your two arms; make me
less what I’ve been, more what you’d have me be.
Michelangelo
Peter Hujar Bearded Cockette, 1973According to Peter Hujar, New York City is one of the loneliest places in the world. People live there by the million, but those in Hujar’s photographs, at least – friends and acquaintances from the 1970s intelligentsia and gay bohemian sub-cultures – look mentally and emotionally alone, alert to the delicate sorrows of the human condition.
“When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending. I feel the warmth and texture and simultaneously I see the flesh unwrap from the layers of fat and disappear. I see the fat disappear from the muscle. I see the muscle disappearing from around the organs and detaching itself from the bones. I see the organs gradually fade into transparency leaving a gloaming skeleton gleaming like ivory that slowly revolves until it becomes dust. I am consumed in the sense of your weight the way your flesh occupies momentary space the fullness of it beneath my palms. I am amazed at how perfectly your body fits to the curves of my hands. If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time to me I would. If I could open up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would. It makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss. It makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my palms as you twist and turn over to one side to create a series of gestures to reach up around my neck to draw me nearer. All these memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain.”
David Wojnarowicz
.
It can’t come quickly enough
And now you’ve spent your life
Waiting for this moment
And when you finally saw it come
It passed you by and
Left you so defeated
ALEXANDER: He is Hephaistion… there are many differant ways to love. Roxane, come.
Tell you what, we coulda had a good life together! F-ckin’ real good life! Had us a place of our own. But you didn’t want it, Ennis! So what we got now is Brokeback Mountain! Everything’s built on that! That’s all we got, boy, f-ckin’ all. So I hope you know that, even if you don’t never know the rest! You count the damn few times we have been together in nearly twenty years and you measure the short f-cking leash you keep me on – and then you ask me about Mexico and tell me you’ll kill me for needing somethin’ I don’t hardly never get. You have no idea how bad it gets! I’m not you… I can’t make it on a coupla high-altitude f-cks once or twice a year! You are too much for me Ennis, you sonofawhoreson bitch! I wish I knew how to quit you.
.
JERRY SANDERS: “I want for them the same thing that we all want for our loved ones — for each of them to find a mate whom they love deeply and who loves them back; someone with whom they can grow old together and share life’s experiences.” (Sep. 19, 2007) Transcript
“Take a walk along any river in any country and you can see that the machine is almost defunct; God is rusting away leaving a fragile shell – factories – like the shell of an insect that has metamorphosed into an entirely different creature and flown away. So now if we take the Futurists’ idea of God and make it current I guess God has metamorphosed into the microchip of the computer. So, for me, the image of the gear or the defunct machine is the image of what history means reached through the compression of time. Scientists have discovered that if the head of a moth is cut off it can still continue to lay its eggs; somehow I don’t think civilization is all that different; we are fossilized before we can even make further gestures; society is almost dead and yet it continues reproducing its madness as if there were a real future at the end of its collective gestures. Until the rude shock becomes magnified enough to wake us from this sleep we will continue to have more tiresome dreams…”
