Gay: Stories: Gay Death

"[At a dinner party of some straight friends, my lover and I realized that] unconsciously we had come to live with a different set of expectations and assumptions about life, about what it means and what the possibilities are. We have a different sense of time, and of possible futures or lack of them, and a different sense of what is important and what is not. We live with a habitual level of intensity that comes from existing daily with matters of life and death. They [the straights at the party] neither live with this intensity nor do they understand it -- though I think they peripherally perceive it, and with some discomfort. It is as if we move through our troubled world walking in deep sand, while our hosts still walk on paved roads - - perhaps not gold, but firm, relatively clean and trustworthy nevertheless. What was so apparent in them during that dinner was their ease, their easy sense of expectation and their trust that each step would follow the last, and that the road actually went somewhere. We have so little of that left. We move with so much more effort, and do it with so much doubt about its purpose."
--Walt Odets in his book "In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV Negative in the Age of AIDS."