“In the week that Billy and I spend here, we attend a figure-drawing party held above a storage unit, where my pansexual illustrator friend Brett Marcus Cook poses nude with a bunny mask held over his crotch—and where the bisexual manager of a sex-toy shop puts on a Wonder Woman costume and whips a transgender woman in a frilly Victorian dress“
Page 74:
“A skinny young man wearing a crop top and suspenders circles the dance floor, collecting tips in a pitcher on behalf of the performers—who, we are told, cannot handle money directly under some puritanical statute that would consider them to be sex workers if they did. I would much rather hand my spare cash directly to Victor Vincent—a goateed drag king whose signature move is slinging his prop electric guitar over his shoulder and thrusting at the audience during performances of Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and Maroon 5’s “Sugar”—but I throw my spare bills in the pitcher anyway.”
Page 120:
“It is obvious that Giant Kitty has no interest in conforming to more masculine norms of punk culture. They revel in their quirky riot grrrlness, playing songs like “Old People Sex” that celebrate geriatric intercourse and “Don’t Stop That Bus,” a tribute to Keanu Reeves’s tour-de-force performance in the 1994 action thriller Speed.”
Page 141:
“The main attraction is the Kinsey Institute—the library founded by pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, creator of the Kinsey Scale, which measures sexual orientation on a gradation from zero (“exclusively heterosexual”) to six (“exclusively homosexual”). If you’re an American who has had good sex, you owe a debt to Kinsey. He has been called the “father of the sexual revolution,”5 a man who breached now-antiquated bedroom taboos decades before his time.”
“The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects,” Kinsey once wrote. “The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.”
Page 167:
“Rachael’s Café was one of the only places in town where Corey and I could feel like an ordinary couple—where our dreamlike summer romance felt rooted and real. A sex library and a dark basement have their place in any good queer fling but, to envision a fully fledged relationship, we needed to know what it was like to be Samantha and Corey in public, having lunch and getting coffee. When Corey and I went back to separate cities at the end of the summer (she to New York and I to Atlanta), it was that everyday stuff—not the fireworks—that made me want to give long-distance a chance.”
Page 190:
“In the week that Billy and I spend here, we attend a figure-drawing party held above a storage unit, where my pansexual illustrator friend Brett Marcus Cook poses nude with a bunny mask held over his crotch—and where the bisexual manager of a sex-toy shop puts on a Wonder Woman costume and whips a transgender woman in a frilly Victorian dress. I try to sketch them, but scrawl might be a more apt verb given my skill level. We hang out in Joe and Hannah’s loft, drinking La Croix and eating caprese crackers topped with basil grown on the balcony, all while playing with their tailless cat Hodu, whose name means “walnut” in Hannah’s native Korean.”
