Quotes: Gay Americana

Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving & affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.
-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851), Ch. 4, "The Counterpane"

He seemed to take to me quite as naturally & unbiddenly as I to him; & when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, & said that henceforth we were married.
-ibid., Ch. 10, “Bosom Friends”


The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples & ribs.

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them.
They do not know who puffs & declines with pendant & bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.
-Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, from Leaves of Grass (1855)

I can’t make it on a couple high-altitude fucks once or twice a year! You are too much for me Ennis, you sonofawhoreson bitch! I wish I knew how to quit you.
-Jack Twist, from Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain (2005, dir. Ang Lee)