Kindle Notes & Highlights
The nameplate on her desk said Lurlene, but the beehive hairdo said the higher the hair, the closer to God.
The burgeoning White Citizens Councils springing up throughout the South, which acted as a kind of secret police by reporting violations to the authorities, were the enforcement vehicle for keeping the white population in line during this phase of “Massive Resistance” following the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling.
with the aim of starving the white beast.
1952
When the platform committee, with their plank on civil rights calling for direct Federal action to eliminate lynching,
The reason why Jim Crow existed in the South was because of the overwhelming power of the racists in control of the Southern Democratic Party.
Since then Carter had resigned himself to the fact that he would never find love. Sex, yes, but love with another man, the kind of love that made one’s heart want to pour out bad poetry onto paper or sing sappy lyrics when alone waiting for another moment together, that kind of beautiful life-affirming possibility of sharing daily the intimacies of one’s existence would not be possible for him. He no longer wondered what Alessandro was doing, if he thought also of Carter, or if they would ever meet again. He had let that part of himself scab up and scar over, and focused on working to bring
...more
“Margot, let me drop off this blanket back at my apartment, but don’t get any ideas. Nothing is going to happen.” “Oh, darling, nothing ever happens. But something always does.”
patois
how to get someone to think differently, to push themself to new goals, to be disciplined and to be audacious.”
Back alone at home Carter felt different, as if he was still seeing the world through the virgin eyes of Gabriel.
or
“...we might have lost the South.” — President Lyndon Johnson
“The virus” was their code for a Republican Party that had been overtaken by former Southern Democrat racists. The transformation was happening quicker than Carter had originally imagined. Each state in the former Confederacy was undergoing the convulsions of the civil rights fight to various degrees.
It was a revelation to him that one needed to have love and romance in one’s life, otherwise one wasn’t truly living,
I’ve often thought about that evening, how it is possible for us as humans to create so much beauty, to bring a theater full of people, who speak different languages and from different cultures, together through art, through the intricate hitting of notes from a variety of instruments. I don’t know, it just amazes me.”
laid
Lay
Carter left the conference even more certain that the party leaders were unable to put personality aside and coalesce around someone, anyone, despite the knowledge that Goldwater would doom them all.
“I’m an old shriveled shell
of a man, long past my expiration date, sexually speaking. When I see myself in the mirror, I don’t really see me anymore. I just see this decrepit, wrinkled sack. But on the inside, in my soul, I still feel young, and when I dream, I am still that kid who was playing water polo in school, that passionate young man swimming naked in the Mediterranean at Cap d’Antibes. When I see Andros, I see the endless promise of youth, or hints of former lovers, or forgotten traces of my life, and it brings me joy.”
“You know, we didn’t call ourselves homosexual back then, back in the 1950s. It was certainly something that we never talked about in the open, even amongst close friends really. It took me a long time for me to even contemplate it in my own life, I had tried so hard to repress it, to project this other image of myself. To act on it, to have sex, that was one thing. But to be truly free to be who I was, that was a difficult proposition.”
She sensed it in me, that I was gay, that I was different, almost immediately. So, yes, she knew about me. I wouldn’t say that she approved, she just accepted that it was a part of who I was, that it could be put away like some sort of recessive trait.”
Aviation cocktail.
“But the pull of love is even stronger. It can’t compare.”
wrecked
Wreaked
“I can’t seem to get this knot undone,” Carter murmured. Gabriel wrapped his arms around him, burying his face into his back shoulder, and then said, “Let me get that for you.” Carter chuckled, watching as Gabriel got on his knees next to Carter and worked on loosening the shoelace. He put his wrinkled hand onto Gabriel’s cheek and peered into his green eyes. A tear formed in his eye, and he said to
Gabriel, “This is what life is all about someone I loved once told me.” Gabriel kissed him on his lips, and as he felt his own tear wind down his time-worn face, said, “I remember. Geraldine.”
Senator Strom Thurmond who ran what is arguably the last overtly racist political campaign in South Carolina history.
