Ben Valentine

“For folks who have that casual-dude energy coursing through their bloodstream, that's great. But gays should not grow up alienated just for us to alienate each other. It's too predictable, like any other cycle of abuse. Plus, the conformist, competitive notion that by "toning down" we are "growing up" ultimately blunts the radical edge of what it is to be queer; it truncates our colorful journey of identity.

Said another way, it's like living in West Hollywood and working a gay job by day and working it in the gay nightlife, wearing delicate shiny shirts picked from up the gay dry cleaners, yet coquettishly left unbuttoned to reveal the pec implants purchased from a gay surgeon and shown off by prancing around the gay-owned-and-operated theater hopped up on gay health clinic steroids and wheat grass purchased from the friendly gay boy who's new to the city, and impressed by the monstrous SUV purchased from a gay car dealership with its rainbow-striped bumper sticker that says "Celebrate Diversity." Then logging on to the local Gay.com listings and describing yourself as "straight-acting."

Let me make myself clear. This is not a campaign for everyone to be like me. That'd be a total yawn. Instead, this narrative is about praise for the prancy boys. Granted, there's undecided gender-fucks, dagger dykes, faux-mos, po-mos, FTMs, fisting-top daddies, and lezzie looners who also need props for broadening the sexual spectrum, but they're telling their own stories.

The Cliff's Notes of me and mine are this: the only moments I feel alive are when I'm just being myself - not some stiff-necked temp masquerading as normal in the workplace, not some insecure gay boy aspiring to be an overpumped circuit queen, not some comic book version of swank WeHo living. If that's considered a political act in the homogenized world of twenty-first century homosexuals, then so be it.

— excerpt of "Praise For The Prancy Boys," by Clint Catalyst

appears in first edition (ISBN # 1-932360-56-5)”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation

“Bullshit is as common as lame poetry and more unavoidable than
those armed men who are there to protect you from
Bullshit like this is straight from the lab and god loves you and
the government doesn't want war and it's the best movie since
Repo Man and if i stopped drinking the world might end anyway
and breathanarianism and immortality for anything besides

Bullshit that's as common as murder and jailhouse tattoos selling
bunk drugs in paint chip hotels where a cigarette burn on
the mattress tells you more about death than a splatter movie
festival.”
― Sparrow 13 Laughingwand, Hell Soup: The Collected Writings of

“There's so much I should say, so many things I should tell him, but in the end I tell him nothing.

I cut a line and my losses, and I light a cigarette.”
― Clint Catalyst, Cottonmouth Kisses

“It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house ; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House