In its inaugural edition (Winter 2017), the Long Island Literary Journal published two chapters from Mark Spano’s as-yet-unpublished memoir Kidding The Moon. “Falling in Love with Straight Guys” is the first.
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By virtue of his gaze, he has all hills, by virtue of his position, he has all valleys.— Fernando Pessoa from The Book of Disquiet
Sartre described a “poetic act” in his biography of Genet as “the systematic pursuit of the impossible.” Falling in love with a straight guy was for me a poetic act.
More than once as a young man I have fallen in love with another young man who was straight, who I knew to be straight. Then and since, I have heard the explanations of choosing what you cannot have as a manner of masochism, a form of self-sabotage. READ MORE…