Johnny Collette

“He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality.”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“When it came -- thirty cents -- he pinned it up in his trailer, brass-headed tack in each corner. Below it he drove a nail and on the nail he hung the wire hanger and the two old shirts suspended from it. He stepped back and looked
at the ensemble through a few stinging tears.

“Jack, I swear -- “ he said, though Jack had never asked him to swear anything and was himself not the swearing kind.”
― Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain

“Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they’d never got much farther than that. Let be, let be.”
― Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain