Bill Arning > Bill's Quotes

“At the height of his fame, he would reassure his audience: “You’re not alone—give me your hands” [61], and then stretch out his own emaciated arms toward them, coyly allowing the tips of his fingers to graze theirs for an instant, before he withdrew, keeping their tantalizing dream of contact alive while remaining ultimately aloof and alone.”
― Peter Doggett, The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s

“The beauty and magnitude of a diva's voice resides, so the iconography suggests, in her deformity. Her voice is beautiful because she herself is not-and her ugliness is interpreted as a sign of moral and social deviance. Reading biographies of divas, I can't ignore the repeated references to physical flaws-for example, Benedetta Pisaroni's "features horribly disfigured by small-pox," prompting spectators to shut their eyes "so as to hear without being condemned to see." Audiences speculated that Maria Malibran was not anatomically a woman, but an androgyne or hermaphrodite-an aberrant physique to match her voice's magic power.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality And The Mystery Of Desire

“Another term emerged in 1862, in the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. ‘Uranian’ or ‘urning’ was derived from Plato’s description of same-sex love in the Symposium as ‘ouranios’ or ‘heavenly’. (‘Ouranos’ literally means ‘the pisser’, opening up a further line of enquiry.) Whatever its celestial origins, the term did not quite catch on. Who would want to be called an ‘urning’? It sounds like some sort of gnome. An ‘urnind’ was a queer female, while ‘uranodionings’ were bisexual.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day