Louis Muñoz

“What had it been like for those boys, that transitional generation? Lying in bed, whispering secrets with a best friend, holding hands, kissing cheeks, age-old patterns of friendship that no longer seemed quite so innocent… ​Why hadn’t they fought harder to keep it? ​Why had it been taken away at all?”
― Aster Glenn Gray, The Sleeping Soldier

“Always denied, never expressed, but impossible to ignore, the thought he was different to normal men plagued his mind when he allowed it to, and although he kept the thought as deeply covered as he could, it rose to the surface in moments such as the one that had just passed.”
― Jackson Marsh, Finding a Way

“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

“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