What love gives you is the courage to face the secrets you’ve kept from yourself, a reason to open the rest of the doors.

And just getting into bed with somebody wasn’t the magic solution, because people could hide their terrors in pure technique – depersonalizing so completely the body embraced that they felt nothing at all.

I suppose we’d been waiting for each other all our lives.

If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks. The erotic can be a window into the deepest core of feeling, but more and more doesn’t get you there.

Yet I’ve come to learn that all our stories add up to the same imprisonment. The self-delusion of uniqueness. The festering pretense that we are the same as they are. The gutting of all our passions till we are a bunch of eunuchs, our zones of pleasure in enemy hands. Most of all, the ventriloquism, the learning how to pass for straight. Such obedient slaves we make, with such very tidy rooms.

Time to set forth alone and find out what sort of man I was, instead of being a mirror to somebody else. Swearing a blood oath, even as I clung to this ghost embrace, that I would never hold another man who wouldn’t hold me back.

If it’s true that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else, then I suppose a certain self-regard must’ve kept me above water during my decade of drowning alone. But I think that in my case it was the other way – that I learned to love myself because someone else finally loved me. Seeing myself whole in another man’s eyes, deeper than any mirror, and neither of us looking away because there’s so much lost time to make up for.

It was the first time I’d ever considered that gay might not just be about whom we slept with but a kind of sensibility, what survived of feeling after all the fears and evasions of the closet.

I knew we must stay in absolute sync, for the enemy had grown so subtle, its camouflage so chameleon, we had to be on constant watch.

When I bucked and shot myself, hearing him greedily drink and swallow, I knew I had tasted life at last – and wouldn’t end up sobbing in a wheelchair after all.