Eminent Outlaws Quotes

“We’re happier when the assholes are villains.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“The fact of the matter is that readers and audiences are never blank slates: individuals see in a work whatever they need to see at that moment.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’: “You were silly like us.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about in a newspaper is not always more important than a fictional one in a novel or play or poem.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“If oppression produced saints, we’d want everyone to be oppressed.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“A work of art doesn’t need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in other people’s lives.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“We all perform balancing acts between self and family, individual and community, private desire and group expectation. Gay people in particular must break with the groupthink of church and society in order to live their own lives. (It’s why you still see half-read copies of Atlas Shrugged on the night tables of otherwise intelligent gay men.)”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Art is long and life is short.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Death is almost never timely, even for the old.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Good prose is solitary work.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“A career in the arts can make anyone crazy.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“The orgy room at Dave's Baths was democracy made flesh; race and social standing were checked at the door along with clothes.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“The closest he comes to explaining why he found it gay is to say that like "Virginia Woolf", it showed a woman defeating a man. Presumably a straight man could never imagine such a thing.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“A writer’s unconscious is difficult to read, but the imagination is rooted in the unconscious.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“A disproportionate number of stories are love stories – and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Trust the tale, not the teller.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“An obsessed reader figured that ‘Armistead Maupin’ was an anagram for ‘is a man I dreamt up’.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn’t worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Seventies macho was both a look – moustache, jeans, leather jacket – and an attitude – cool, heartless, virile – that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emotion.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having “such a representative life”. And it’s true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America