Louis Muñoz

“Carefully, stealthily, Caleb added this photograph to the portraits of Russell and Julia. Then, calm as anything, he slipped them into his backpack, tucking them in the front cover of John Halifax, Gentleman, so they wouldn’t get crumpled. Russell needed them more than the archive, anyway.”
― Aster Glenn Gray, The Sleeping Soldier

“But even as he clung to Carol, even as he swore to himself he loved her, Caleb pursued a summer job in Chicago. Cities, he knew, were the place to meet other men like him. Even in his own mind he couldn’t bring himself to put it more clearly than that.”
― Aster Glenn Gray, The Sleeping Soldier

“As with so many of my books, The Sleeping Soldier grew from an observation in George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. Chauncey notes that when historians discuss passionate male friendship in 19th century America, they often “mistake the fact that men who passionately and physically expressed their love for other men were considered normal for their having been considered heterosexual, as if it were not the very inconsistency of their emotional lives with contemporary models of heterosexuality that made them seem curious to historians in the first place.”
― Aster Glenn Gray, The Sleeping Soldier

“Of course you sing different songs than we did, you have a different president, you dress in different fashions. I knew these things would change. But I would have thought feelings were feelings and always the same, and it turns out they are as changeable as popular songs. Maybe that is why the songs change,” Russell said. “Each generation needs its own songs, because each generation has a different heart.”
― Aster Glenn Gray, The Sleeping Soldier