'This is the phenomenology of risk, and we are expert at it."

Queer Histories Reading log: 1/23/2011

Gay poet and writer George Whitmore as cited in Ian Young's The Stonewall Experiment:

It is 1981 and I am in the basement of the Mineshaft. Like most everyone else here, I have come to prove a point. The point is that we can do this without flinching. Oh, we might say we come here to have fun or let off steam, but there's an undercurrent here, a subtext. It is the element of risk. It is not just the risk of disease. It is that we have learned to witness certain acts with a jaded and sceptical eye…. It looks dangerous, but is it really? This is the phenomenology of risk, and we are expert at it.