Our Deep Gossip Quotes

“To me, “queerness” is an alienation from a heteronormative code that governs bodies, genders, and their processes — sexuality, birth, death, and inheritance — in order to preserve social, economic, and political power for those who have it [and] to continue it into future generations.”
― Kazim Ali, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“Where to now? Only the previously unknowable and unspoken will bring us there.”
― Kazim Ali, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“I am demonstrating to you how tasty I think words are. I’m having sex with words in front of you. I’m playing around with them. I’m getting off. I’m trying to titillate you. There’s this magical substance, language, that I’m laying out for you. Then you’re going to fondle it.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“Frankenstein is actually an equivalent of how a gay person feels growing up.”
― Edward Field, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“What I’m interested in is the exploration of the body and desire as a self-actualising or fulfilling component on the individual’s life journey instead of as a part of the social, political, or economic structure of a “society” or “civilization.” In this sense all desire is queer desire because it moves against these mechanisms of control. The hard part, the painful part, is for us ourselves to learn how to love one another, have affection for one another, support and be kind to one another. You can spend a life learning how to do it properly.”
― Kazim Ali, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“Yes to fingerfucking the dialectic! Or to using the dialectic as a method of fingerfucking the binary!”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“I thought you were supposed to destroy yourself for art.”
― Edward Field, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“Frankenstein as the underdog. Not the monster. The villagers pursuing him are the monster.”
― Edward Field, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“The whole world, as we’re coming to understand, is quivering in its place.”
― Kazim Ali, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“We have a fractured understanding of how the body exists in physical space and also a deeper internal sense of the body and its purposes. We are, in a way, disconnected from equations of reproduction, or our sexuality has evolutionarily been tilted in a different direction. It begs the scientific question: to what purpose? It doesn’t feel accidental to me that throughout history queer people have been magical, holy, and artistic.”
― Kazim Ali, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“Thank god I’m gay! It’s so liberating!”
― Edward Field, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“Having been fucked up by my family and community, I’ll never know where my gayness came from, and where it ends and “neurosis” begins. But as a gay person I know I’m a vital element in our civilization.”
― Edward Field, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“But even in extreme old age, especially in old age, one shouldn’t forget one’s dick.”
― Edward Field, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire