Scan barcode
giuliabrav_oh's review
4.0
4.5 / credits to Bledsoe for this AMAZING compilation. all the stories were unique and added something different, all while still falling under the umbrella of “traveling abroad as a homosexual”.
gaybf's review
4.0
There were some stories I didn't particularly like in this volume but overall I enjoyed reading to get a grasp on what it's like traveling abroad as an LGBT person (although I wish I could have found Lesbian Travels instead :( ) maybe even a Trans Travels??
favorite quotes again
Brian Bouldrey, "Pilgrim's Regress"
-What I want to say is that it seemed strangely easier to live when there was no life left. Manners seemed absurd. So did conserving, waiting, restraining myself."
Dariek Scott, "Ride of the Centaurs"
-(on his youth I think?) Naively I had believed that the phrase 'making love' simply meant that the two people ""fucking"" (this wording is why I like it!!) loved each other
Adam Klein, "A desert shade"
-I keep looking back; I keep stumbling at the start of the desert
Cary Alan Johnson, "Obi's Story"
-"I'm gay."
Obi laughed. "I, too, am sometimes very happy."
-He listened to the world as he walked to meet those who awaited him.
Andrew Holleran, "Sleepless in Mexico"
(on random memories attached to place)"-outside, a balcony and a lighted window make me think of a friend, now dead, who was obsessed for years with a Mexican painter not in love with him, and remember what another friend said years ago about hustlers here: 'In Mexico, they pay by the inch!'"
"We travel, after all, in various emotional states at different points in our lives; it's a wonder more tourists don't have nervous breakdowns abroad. Our suitcases are the only visible baggage we take with us on a trip; the rest becomes clear only once we're on our way."
Erasmo Guerra, "La plaça reial"
-I wanted to ask him why he had decided no to take me back to his place, but then I remembered how easily my mind changed at that age. I used to want them, whoever I'd meet, whoever I'd let buy me a drink, and then for one stupid reason or another, I didn't.
-At twenty, I'd had my first real kiss and instantly fell into a panic about whether I'd just kissed death itself. It wasn't right. It was no way to live."
James Baldwin, "Equal in Paris"
-I wondered how long it would take before anyone casually asked, "But where's Jimmy? He hasn't been around"- and realized, knowing the people I knew, that it would take several days
-I was, too, I imagine, also rather disappointed that my hair had not turned white, that my face was clearly not going to bear any marks of tragedy, disappointed at bottom, no doubt, to realize, facing him in that room, that far worse things had happened to most people and that, indeed, to paraphrase my mother, if this was the worst thing that ever happened to me I should consider myself among the luckiest people ever to be born.
-This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it anymore... when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled.
Paul Monette, "One Way Fare"
-We may make any number of silent vows to return, to relive the flash of sublime and maybe even the glint of a lost self. But it's like Frost's oath at the fork in the wood, swearing he'll keep the road not taken for another day- "Yet, knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back."
We are booked for a one-way passage, no return.
-We're told that Gertrude Stein always sat with her back to the view, so everyone else would have to face her. She also says somewhere that all views pale after fifteen minutes... (her) life was a sort of monumental site all itself.
-(about Noel Coward's 'Three plays', "Private Lives") There's always that chance that you've traveled across ten meridians, only to find a biscuit box
-(about going on a rant) and instantly I had to rein the poetry in!
-My fact-free cultural map is harmless enough, no threat to the vast theoretics of ethnographers and linguists, art scholars, all those patient diggers.
Achim Nowak, "Jungle Fever"
-The joy and terror of having traveled too far.
-My relief is that this is the end of the road. Because if it weren't, I know I would have to go on
Michael Nava, "Journey to 1971"
-Is the past a place? Can you really go back to visit? Or is it just a row of fading pictures in a dim gallery that has no power over us and no relevance to our present lives? Does the past exist at all, or do we just make it up to explain ourselves to ourselves, out of bits of what we remember but mostly of what we wish had been?
favorite quotes again
Brian Bouldrey, "Pilgrim's Regress"
-What I want to say is that it seemed strangely easier to live when there was no life left. Manners seemed absurd. So did conserving, waiting, restraining myself."
Dariek Scott, "Ride of the Centaurs"
-(on his youth I think?) Naively I had believed that the phrase 'making love' simply meant that the two people ""fucking"" (this wording is why I like it!!) loved each other
Adam Klein, "A desert shade"
-I keep looking back; I keep stumbling at the start of the desert
Cary Alan Johnson, "Obi's Story"
-"I'm gay."
Obi laughed. "I, too, am sometimes very happy."
-He listened to the world as he walked to meet those who awaited him.
Andrew Holleran, "Sleepless in Mexico"
(on random memories attached to place)"-outside, a balcony and a lighted window make me think of a friend, now dead, who was obsessed for years with a Mexican painter not in love with him, and remember what another friend said years ago about hustlers here: 'In Mexico, they pay by the inch!'"
"We travel, after all, in various emotional states at different points in our lives; it's a wonder more tourists don't have nervous breakdowns abroad. Our suitcases are the only visible baggage we take with us on a trip; the rest becomes clear only once we're on our way."
Erasmo Guerra, "La plaça reial"
-I wanted to ask him why he had decided no to take me back to his place, but then I remembered how easily my mind changed at that age. I used to want them, whoever I'd meet, whoever I'd let buy me a drink, and then for one stupid reason or another, I didn't.
-At twenty, I'd had my first real kiss and instantly fell into a panic about whether I'd just kissed death itself. It wasn't right. It was no way to live."
James Baldwin, "Equal in Paris"
-I wondered how long it would take before anyone casually asked, "But where's Jimmy? He hasn't been around"- and realized, knowing the people I knew, that it would take several days
-I was, too, I imagine, also rather disappointed that my hair had not turned white, that my face was clearly not going to bear any marks of tragedy, disappointed at bottom, no doubt, to realize, facing him in that room, that far worse things had happened to most people and that, indeed, to paraphrase my mother, if this was the worst thing that ever happened to me I should consider myself among the luckiest people ever to be born.
-This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it anymore... when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled.
Paul Monette, "One Way Fare"
-We may make any number of silent vows to return, to relive the flash of sublime and maybe even the glint of a lost self. But it's like Frost's oath at the fork in the wood, swearing he'll keep the road not taken for another day- "Yet, knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back."
We are booked for a one-way passage, no return.
-We're told that Gertrude Stein always sat with her back to the view, so everyone else would have to face her. She also says somewhere that all views pale after fifteen minutes... (her) life was a sort of monumental site all itself.
-(about Noel Coward's 'Three plays', "Private Lives") There's always that chance that you've traveled across ten meridians, only to find a biscuit box
-(about going on a rant) and instantly I had to rein the poetry in!
-My fact-free cultural map is harmless enough, no threat to the vast theoretics of ethnographers and linguists, art scholars, all those patient diggers.
Achim Nowak, "Jungle Fever"
-The joy and terror of having traveled too far.
-My relief is that this is the end of the road. Because if it weren't, I know I would have to go on
Michael Nava, "Journey to 1971"
-Is the past a place? Can you really go back to visit? Or is it just a row of fading pictures in a dim gallery that has no power over us and no relevance to our present lives? Does the past exist at all, or do we just make it up to explain ourselves to ourselves, out of bits of what we remember but mostly of what we wish had been?
More...