"We have to go home."
"I'm already home. I'm with you."

"But in this house, Ari, there is only belonging. You belong to us. And we belong to you."
"But isn't it wrong to be gay? Everybody seems to think so."
"Not everybody. That's a cheap and mean morality. Your aunt Ophelia took the words I don't belong and wrote them on her heart. It took her a long time to take those words and throw them out of her body. She threw out those words one letter at a time."

"Mom, why didn't anybody tell me that love hurts so much?"
"If I had told you, would it have changed anything?"

Dante slipped off his tennis shoes, and he said, "I've been writing a poem for you. I haven't finished it yet—but I have the ending. 'You're every street I've ever walked. You're the tree outside my window, you're a sparrow as he flies. You're the book that I am reading. You're every poem I've ever loved.'"

"Just because you don't think that you're anything special doesn't mean I agree with you."

It was so easy just to be with Dante. When we touched, it seemed like it was something pure. What wasn't easy was learning how to live in the world, with all of its judgments. Those judgments managed to make their way into my body. It was like swimming in a storm at sea. Any minute, you could drown. At least it felt like that. One minute the sea was calm. And then there was a storm. And the problem, with me, anyway, was that the storm lived inside me.

But here we are, we're in it, this world that does not want us, a world that will never love us, a world that would choose to destroy us rather than make a space for us even though there is more than enough room.

"How come people aren't as sincere as dogs? Tell me. What's your secret?" She looked at me intently with her dark, dark eyes, and I knew that even though dogs didn't understand the language of human beings, they did understand the language of love.

A lot of adults had to say something about my looks, which I always found interesting. I didn't have anything to do with the face I was born with. And it didn't mean that I was a good guy. And it didn't mean that I was a bad guy either.

If we're lucky. If we're very lucky, the universe will send us the people we need to survive.

I'd never found it difficult to keep my mouth shut—but maybe I should think about keeping my mind shut when it came to judging the things other people did that I didn't understand.

Dante asked me what I was thinking. And I said, "My dad told me that during the Vietnam War, there was a body count. He said that the country was counting bodies when they should have been studying the faces of the young men who had been killed. I was thinking that the same thing is happening with the AIDS epidemic."

I wanted us to be lovers because I liked that word. It was a word that appeared in some books I'd read. But seventeen-year-olds didn't have lovers—because we weren't adults, and only adults had lovers. Seventeen-year-olds only had sex that they weren't supposed to be having—but it didn't have anything to do with love, because that's what we were told—because we didn't know anything about love. But I didn't believe that.
Nobody was going to tell me that I didn't love Dante. Not anybody.

Sometimes, when I was in Dante's presence, I felt that I knew everything there was to know about love. But, for me, to love was one thing. To let yourself be loved, well, that was the most difficult thing of all.

We stood there in the silence of the desert—and he kissed me. And in that moment, I thought that we were the center of the universe. Couldn't the universe see us?
He kissed me and I kissed him back. Let the universe see. Let the sky see. Let the passing clouds see. He kissed me. Let the plants of the desert see. Let the desert willows, let the distant mountains, let the lizards and the snakes and the desert birds and roadrunners see. I kissed him back. Let the sands of the desert see. Let the night come—and let the stars see two young men kissing.