Discards from A Preface

from sometime in the mid 90s


A gay man asking "why make babies" risks being unheard. Gay people pretend he is addressing straights. His question is aimed at closet cases so claim straight folk. The sophisticated lesbians have him talking to himself. So do the unsophisticated.

A gay man is always overheard. His questions sound like baby talk. His gestures resemble so many abstractions swirling round the asking, how he has been made, how he made it, so narcissistic. Knowing he is overheard he turns the made into a making like turning a trick, forever a boy.

None can ever quite reproduce his productions, unless they listen for the unhurriedness of the unheard at play and then they know the risking at work.


I was thinking a lot about reproduction in its social and biological aspects at the time. I like the lapidary sassiness of this prose.

And so for day 645
18.09.2008