Cockettes.B&W.Group2
Heterosexual masculinity has often seemed to me a great renunciation, a repudiation not only of the myriad things that men are not supposed to like, but even a plethora of things that they are not supposed even to notice. Many of the gay men I knew noticed, and one of the pleasures of conversation with gay friends was an acute awareness of emotional, aesthetic, and political phenomena, an ability to weigh minute things and evaluate nuances and fine degrees of differentiation.
These men knew that words could be festive, recreational, medicinal, that banter and flirtation and extravagance, that humor and wryness and anecdotes of the absurd were pleasures worth pursuing. They knew that talk wasn’t, as many straight men seemed to assume, just transactional, a way to dump or extract information or instructions. It could be play, riffing on ideas and tones; it could give encouragement and affection; and it could invite people to be themselves and to know themselves in order to be known. There were so many kinds of love at work: the love of vivid and exact description, which was sometimes poetic, sometimes skewering wit, sometimes deep insight, and of exchanges that wove connections between speakers and ideas.
Recollections of My Nonexistence :: by Rebecca Solnit
Cockettes.B&W.Group2
Heterosexual masculinity has often seemed to me a great renunciation, a repudiation not only of the myriad things that men are not supposed to like, but even a plethora of things that they are not supposed even to notice. Many of the gay men I knew noticed, and one of the pleasures of conversation with gay friends was an acute awareness of emotional, aesthetic, and political phenomena, an ability to weigh minute things and evaluate nuances and fine degrees of differentiation.
These men knew that words could be festive, recreational, medicinal, that banter and flirtation and extravagance, that humor and wryness and anecdotes of the absurd were pleasures worth pursuing. They knew that talk wasn’t, as many straight men seemed to assume, just transactional, a way to dump or extract information or instructions. It could be play, riffing on ideas and tones; it could give encouragement and affection; and it could invite people to be themselves and to know themselves in order to be known. There were so many kinds of love at work: the love of vivid and exact description, which was sometimes poetic, sometimes skewering wit, sometimes deep insight, and of exchanges that wove connections between speakers and ideas.
Recollections of My Nonexistence :: by Rebecca Solnit