Siarl > Recent Status Updates

Recommend by Mitzi 2/5/25

“I remember looking around the table and realizing that six different decades of gay men were represented in our group. . .
I remember thinking at that moment: This is how it should be. This is how the camaradarie of queers can span generations, offering solace between young and old, bonding us through friendship and sex and art. And not just among the living.”

“As I drove to the base with the top down on my sunbeam alpine, I felt like a freshly minted human being. I had finally held another man’s naked body against mine and the world had not come to an end. Yes, I had passed the point of no return, but it was not at all what I’d imagined, not the death of innocence, but the birth of a giddy, wide-eyed adolescence.”Maupin recounts losing his virginity, at age 25.

So relatable. Maupin’s early recognitions of his homosexuality: “I knew I was mentally ill. I had read it somewhere in a magazine. I took my cues from Dear Abby, who had recently told her readers that parents should be concerned if their 16 old child had never kissed a member of the opposite sex. I decided that one way to thwart my inevitable shame would be to become paralyzed from the waist down.”

It is a small country, in many ways the archetype of a small country, but its smallness is not petty: on the contrary, it is profound. Intense and unaccommodating continuity is the essence of the place, and if its frontiers were ever to be extended, or its nature somehow eased, its personality would lose stature, not gain it.

BROODED over by mist, more often than swirled about by cloud, drizzled rather than storm-swept, on the western perimeter of Europe lies the damp, demanding and obsessively interesting country called by its own people Cymru, signifying it is thought a comradeship, and known to the rest of the world, if it is known at all, as Wales.

This book is breaking my heart, and making me so frustrated at the same time. I just want the boys to fall in love and have everything be hunky-dory 😭😭😭

The things they have done to us! The truths they have turned into lies. The ideals they have fouled and made vile. Take Jesus. He was one of us. He knew. He damn well meant when he said it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. But look what the Church has done to Jesus in the last 2,000 years - turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends.

“Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty. It was good to talk, his voice gave him pleasure. The tones seemed to echo and hang on the air so that each word sounded twice. He swallowed and moistened his mouth to speak again. He wanted suddenly to return to the mute's quiet room and tell him of the thoughts that were in his mind. It was a queer thing to want to talk with a deaf-mute. But he was lonesome.”

“The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers- an eternal classic of the melancholy. I read it as a kid, read it many times over, and I cannot see my reading life without having read it.
…one of the great LGBTQ books of all time, of its queerness, of its melancholy. I can open Lonely Hunter and immediately burst into tears. That's how that book changed my life.” Marcos

🥹

Fascinating read. I’m still not sure what the hell is going on, but I’m fully invested till the end!

Maybe I shouldn’t read celebrity memoirs. I love Will Wheaton, but 45 minutes into this audiobook and I haven’t gotten out of the introductions and explanations for the 23 hour book ahead. I forecast a DNF with this one. Gads

“No matter how hard one works to construct a theology with long strings of elaborate words, those words cannot contain either the world of great nature or the world of the spirit of Kami. In Shinto, it is important for each person to experience and feel in his or her own way and not to use language to force others to believe in a certain way.”

Is this book over my head? 5 chapters in and I find myself thinking, "Where the Hell is this going?" Critically acclaimed, Nobel prize winning book… I feel like I’m in one of those "It's not you, it's me" situations with this book. I don’t like that… but I’m intrigued and will carry on.

Shintoists, Japanese generally, don't believe in words very much. They understand that it is wrong to consider human language as absolute, recognizing that human existence is very small and limited when compared with the great nature. The Western mentality that treats human knowledge and language as absolutes is, from Shinto's perspective, a form of human arrogance.

I loved the first book in this series (Better than People) so much that I dove right into this one (#2 of the Garnet Run Series). I’ve been brought to tears many times already. It’s so wonderful (with fully formed characters living a similar life as my own) having true and loving adult connections. Absolutely in love with this cast of characters, and the loving way the author moves them through their traumas. <3

Tim Hanks’ narration, unsurprisingly, is wonderful in this tragic yet charming novel.

Had to dive right into book #2 of this trilogy. They changed the narrator sadly and I’m pretty disappointed in that aspect, but I can’t put it down… so I guess I’m a fan. Pretty sad there’s nothing happening romantically (this is a space opera/ gay romance novel, right?

"I met over one thousand Shinto priests and Shintoists, and I have never heard the same words from each of them. In Shinto, people don't talk in the same pattern. They neither need nor are obliged to talk in the same fashion."

Interesting stuff here

Finally THEY KISSED! (It was worth the wait).

They’re BOYFRIENDS 🥰 but only as a ruse. Still no kisses 🥹 This book is action packed and I love it. Very thinly veiled Star Wars Poe/Finn fanfiction and I’m here for it!

The Essence of Shinto is a lovely small book written to explain the basics of the Japanese faith.
Western religions typically have a founder, doctrine, commandments, and objects of worship (symbols or idols.) Shinto, by contrast, has none of these. This alone makes Shinto radically different.
Shinto has evolved out of the life and experience of millennia of Japanese people. It has its own way of thinking and feeling.

i can’t put this one down. It’s so good! Though I just wish he’d go on and kiss him already!

“A young pilot risks everything to save his best friend - the man he trusts most and might even love - only to find out he’s secretly the heir of a brutal galactic empire.”

A FASCINATING READ! Shinto, Japan’s unique religion, does not have a fixed point of view regarding a founder, doctrine, or object of worship. Shinto has nothing to do with any dogmas that point towards absolutism.
Shinto can be summarized: 1st, how each person makes contact with the noble spirit; 2nd, how each person shows gratitude and respect for the noble spirit; and 3rd, how each person grows spiritually.

💔🥹
A story of survival and hope, set in the not-too-distant future, about a young gay
man forced to flee the fundamentalists in United States and seek refuge across the Atlantic in Ireland.

WHAT THE HECK AM I READING? AND WHY DO I LIKE IT SO MUCH? It’s a coming-of-age story that "focuses on an Iowa teen trying to come to grips with his own raging hormones and sexual feelings as he and his cohorts cause a deadly genetically engineered plague by unleashing an army of 6-foot-tall praying mantises. The bugs act on an insatiable appetite for fighting, food, and fornicating."

Jordan is a young gay artist growing up in a Midwest town, where all anyone seems to care about is sports. But Jordan was lucky. He met Owen in 2nd grade, and they've been BFFs ever since. Owen is a big, beautiful blond and their school's champion wrestler. No one messes with him, or with anyone close to him, and he bucks popular opinion by keeping Jordan as his wingman even after Jordan comes out at school.