#neil bartlett

The steam gets right to work and you can feel all the muscles unknotting one by one. I count them as they go; quadriceps, triceps. Your fingers are usually the last to go, but if you let them go too you can feel them just hanging there, and you know they’ve forgotten all their usual weekday jobs too. All that buttoning and lacing and knotting, collar and shoes and tie. They couldn’t button you up even if you asked them to.

You want to know what happens next to these two. You recognize that what really matters is what happens when two people try to hold things together. You do not believe that love is enough, and you think that what happens after love (if you see what I mean), the practice and not just the principle of love, that is what matters. That is what you want to know how to do.

Darling, it's all for you. We're doing all this for you. I wish you could be here to see us. The streets are not all that different - you wouldn't get lost - but we are very different these days. [...] The weight of a lover's arm on your shoulder is not a sensation you can ever enjoy now, nothing can ever be worth what was done to you, nothing can change that, but oh almost it does. We're walking your streets.

As I sit in the library, Wilde's books can make my face break into a ridiculous smile. I look round to see if anyone notices. I will read anything that is "about us", anything that makes me smile as I see myself, even a small part of myself, a half-seen gesture at night [...] I experience the commonest of gay pleasures: recognition. I recognize in this old book my own feelings when I wake and turn and look at the face of the man sleeping next to me. I discover the heart, the meaning locked in a text which cannot, for historical reasons, declare itself. I sympathize. I understand; I am one of them too.