Starless and Black

Abstract

John Rechy, Andrew Holleran, Joe Orton, Hart Crane — four authors who speak of difference, of how culture can massively determine the limitations in our understanding of ourselves and others. Of how society inscribes the order in which people are accorded worth. And of gayness as a lived experience of alienated desire.

What therefore is truth? A flexible army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations, which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transformed, bejewelled and which after long usage seem to a people to be fixed, canonical and binding.

(Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)