A poem! It feels like it's been quite some time since I've seen one of these.
I'm struck by what seems to be the optimism at the start of a variation on Love. Except then, I'm overwhelmed by a feeling of doubt after reading the last stanza. Hm, am I misinterpreting?
Probably not. It reminds me of this paragraph I read on the show Looking the other day:
The effect of “Looking” is not, as the National Gay Task Force might have had it, to show straight audiences that gay people deserve to be citizens. It is to show that being a citizen only gets you so far when you have never thought of yourself as one. Plenty of people, straight and gay, are sexually immature and romantically inept; but Patrick seems as little ready to connect to another man, in any fashion and for any length of time, as when he was a closeted fifteen-year-old with no sense of being entitled to any rights, hiding what he had transformed into criminal urges under a blanket in the back of a bus.
Except replace being gay with being myself. Being ill at ease with myself on a fundamental level, at least when it comes to relationships.
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I'm struck by what seems to be the optimism at the start of a variation on Love. Except then, I'm overwhelmed by a feeling of doubt after reading the last stanza. Hm, am I misinterpreting?
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The effect of “Looking” is not, as the National Gay Task Force might have had it, to show straight audiences that gay people deserve to be citizens. It is to show that being a citizen only gets you so far when you have never thought of yourself as one. Plenty of people, straight and gay, are sexually immature and romantically inept; but Patrick seems as little ready to connect to another man, in any fashion and for any length of time, as when he was a closeted fifteen-year-old with no sense of being entitled to any rights, hiding what he had transformed into criminal urges under a blanket in the back of a bus.
Except replace being gay with being myself. Being ill at ease with myself on a fundamental level, at least when it comes to relationships.
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