The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out
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Read between July 14, 2019 - April 14, 2022
11%
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“La sicilia è piccola,”
15%
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snowstorm blew in. We heard crashing,
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The shallow roots that could not keep a hold of the earth. It sounded like thunder as the trees fell all around
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pain is weakness leaving the body, and you have so much weakness you need to be freed from.
30%
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Insanity is the inability to distinguish fantasy from reality.
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The shooting would not be charged as a hate crime, because Virginia statute did not include sexual orientation as a protected class. The shooter would say that being taunted about his last name made him want to “waste some gay people.”
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“Why do gay men have lesbian friends?” “I don’t know,” I replied, glancing at Sheila who was rolling her eyes. “Someone has to mow the yard,”
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Conversation therapy
Glenda
Conversation therapy??? Maybe conversion therapy?
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Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n als sei kein Unglück die Nacht gescheh’n. “Now the sun wants to rise as brightly as if nothing terrible had happened during the night.”
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Kindertotenlieder, three German words crashed together to form a single melancholy one—children, death, songs.
43%
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My father called every woman “sweetie,” the wives, the girlfriends, the waitresses, the woman with the too-blonde hair, husky cigarette voice, and fire-red nail polish. He did not want to call a girlfriend or wife by some other
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woman’s name.
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When he left my mother, I made a vow to stay married and never be like my father.
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“Ah, Billy, is there nothing you can do to work things out?” Sure, give me a pill that will make me straight, I thought,
54%
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inexplicably, he stated that he thought the house had a history. Katherine and I looked at each other quizzically, and when I prompted him for more information, he was evasive. “Water damage or something like that,” he replied.
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the liminal state of the house.
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The changing, transitional, in the process
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got the bullshit, Buddhist “Feel the loss, become one with the universe” reply.
63%
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Not into the gay scene: No one was into the gay scene. Not a one. Did gay scenes even exist anymore? They must have been replaced with straight-acting extras.
63%
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DDF, LTR, VGL, GWM, BDSM, Hung, Top, and Bottom—and
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like fashion, you never wanted to be too “matchy-matchy.”
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Jehovah’s Witnesses.
64%
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Hans was ex-communicated. “Oops,” Gavin said. Hans kept his job, but the employees were forbidden to speak to him.
65%
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He is my son.” The twist: the doctor was not his father. Many years ago, people would have been stumped if asked what relation the doctor was to the patient, as if a woman could never become a physician.
70%
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liminal
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Transitional space boundary
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By church law, they weren’t even supposed to speak with their father after he came out.
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We are not the first generation of queer people who have found ourselves trapped in a straight marriage, but please God, let us be the last. In a world filled with hate and lies propagated by the Trump administration, living the truth is a form of resistance and persistence.