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Quote by Emma Cline

“Younger men had to make everything mean something, had to turn every choice and preference into a referendum on their personality.”

Quote by Emma Cline

Book:The Guest
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The Guest

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Emma Cline

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“There is no great dark man. Even under an exterior as rugged as a mountain range, there lurks the same wounded, wincing psyche that cripples the rest of us. Where we are led to think we will find strength, we shall discover force; where we hope for ruthlessness, we shall unearth spite; and when we think we are clinging desperately to a rock, it is falling upon us. Even with a man whose neck is thicker than his head, if we are not careful, we shall be involved in an argument about who most loves whom. The trouble is that, if you find that by mistake you have bitten into a soft centre, you can't very well put it back in the box.”

MenHomosexualityMasculinity
Book:The Naked Civil Servant
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“Men appeared to go along with this idea but it was noticeable that, whenever pansies were in bloom, they couldn't resist doing a little window shopping. They must never admit to themselves or to God or to one another that they even liked the company of homosexuals—let alone that 'trade' with them was a pleasurable pastime. Any attention that they paid to us had to be put in the form of an infliction. Such gestures as running their fingers through our hair were accompanied by insults about what a bloody awful mop it was. If they wished to make any more definitely sexual advances, these must be ruthlessly stripped of any quality of indulgence. I have known at least one heterosexual man who told me that, to be really satisfactory, all sexual intercourse must preserve the illusion of rape, so I was never able to decide how much of the inordinate interest taken in me by the Clerkenwell boys was due to sexual curiosity and how much was what it seemed—hatred.”

MenSexSexualityHomosexualityMasculinity
Book:The Naked Civil Servant
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“A large part of their motive for attacking me was to release their sexual curiosity in a manner consistent with their heavily guarded idea of manliness. They were only slightly concerned with forcing me to accept their superiority. If this latter was their whole aim, then all those street brawls were a waste of time. I regarded all heterosexuals, however low, as superior to any homosexual, however noble.”

MenSexSexualityHomosexualityMasculinityHeterosexuality
Author:Quentin Crisp
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