nathan’s Reviews > Queer > Status Update

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit. I walked on and shot some boys—young, alive, unconscious— playing baseball. They never glanced in my direction.

Something ugly and ignoble and subhuman is cooking in this mongrel
town of pimps and whores and recessive genes, this degraded leech on the Canal.

..he still felt the deep sadness of his dream.

An oil lamp lit a woman's body. Lee could feel desire for the woman through the other's body. "I'm not queer," he thought. "I'm disembodied."

He could feel himself in the body of the boy. Fragmentary memories . . . the smell of cocoa beans drying in the sun, bamboo tenements, the warm dirty river, the swamps and rubbish heaps on the outskirts of the town. He was with the other boys, sitting on the stone floor of a deserted house. The roof was gone. The stone walls were falling down. Weeds and vines grew over the walls and stretched across the floor.

He passed a group of boys on a corner. One of the boys was so
beautiful that the image cut Lee's senses like a wire whip. A slight involuntary sound of pain escaped from Lee's lips. He turned around, as though looking at the street name. The boy was laughing at some joke, a high-pitched laugh, happy and gay. Lee walked on.

What happens when there is no limit? What is the fate of The Land Where Anything Goes? Men changing into huge centipedes . . . centipedes besieging the houses ... a man tied to a couch and a centipede ten feet long rearing up over him. Is this literal? Did some hideous metamorphosis
occur? What is the meaning of the centipede symbol?

He dropped his own trousers and shorts and lay down beside him. Allerton responded without hostility or disgust, but in his eyes Lee saw a curious detachment, the impersonal calm of an animal or a child.

'No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.' The
difficulty is to convince someone else he is really part of you, so what the hell? Us parts ought to work together.'

I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love.
Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink. . . .