#patrick nathan

Fave Five: Queer Literary Fiction about Grief and Mourning

Fave Five: Queer Hollywood Fiction

The only time György has siblings, as he imagined them, was when he was very young and snuck into his mother's boudoir, where she had a great folding screen with a mirror on each panel. If he folded them all together and stood in the center, there were dozens of boys just like him. George asked them what they should do, what secrets to keep, what fort or castle to build together in their shared strength.

Some people want nothing more than to be haunted. They look for ghosts and devils, for spirits to possess them. Are they vacant? A soul's container without the soul like a pitless peach? Not necessarily, George speculated, only lonely for themselves. They long to be, as one philosopher put it, the partners of their own thoughts, but don't quite know it. Their souls lie hidden or camouflaged and they take this for abandonment, and so share themselves, their spiritual bereavement, with obsessions. So much can fit into one human heart. Each of us can be, if we get lost, a little ark of vast demons ferried from life to life. And sometimes we drift, George told me, into sudden storms of shipwrecked lives, roomfuls of neurotics unburdening themselves of their hauntings.