“It is simple and beautiful.”

MAIRA KALMAN, “Back to the Land”

– And the Pursuit of Happiness Blog, NYTimes, 27-11-09.

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Just married

Damon D’Oliveira & Maxime Desmons, Bastille Day 2009, Wards Island, Toronto

What is all this juice and all this joy?

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Nature has a very simple way of amazing us—

First leather.

I think all happiness depends on having the energy to assume the mask of some other self; that all joyous or creative life is a rebirth as something not oneself — something created in a moment and perpetually renewed; in playing a game like that of a child where one loses the infinite pain of self-realization, a grotesque or solemn painted face put on that one may haste from the terrors of judgement.

W. B. YEATS

Eternity

And the crowning blow Out of joy, I became a fabulous opera.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD, from Rimbaud Complete, Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction by Wyatt Mason. New York: Modern Library, 2002.

The world has just gotten bigger.

Photo: NYTimes

I cannot cure myself of my heart.

I have lived recklessly off beauty: eternal bread.

I cannot live outside beauty. This is what makes me weak in the presence of certain people.

A world in which there is no more room for human beings, for joy, for active leisure, is a world that should die. No people can live outside beauty. It can live on after itself for a time and that is all.

ALBERT CAMUS, Carnets, 1942-1951

Pictured: Maurizimo @ dudesnude

In choosing my “destruction,” I’ll choose joy.*

With the greatest enthusiasm, I suggest we embrace the very threatening principle of joy. The poet Audre Lorde once said that sexuality stems from a deep wellspring of joy. Gay people are by definition, and in my experience, joyous people. We have found a way to turn everything into a celebration; in our lives dancing resembles a sacred act. We should not look at this as a sign of moral weakness, as our enemies and the more self-hating among us do; we should consider this gay impulse toward pleasure to be a central part of the gay and lesbian character. The disdain of some gay activists toward what Michael Bronski has termed “the pleasure impulse” reflects our adoption of straight morality’s condescending attitude toward pleasure, joy, and desire. But in gay life pleasure serves a very different role. We do not fear it; we embrace it, ritualize it, and are transformed by its power.

URVASHI VAID, Virtual Equality

Yes, I’m asking you to become a sex radical. It’s the best sort of radical to be. Because when you get more information about your own sexuality, the quality of your life improves immediately. When you free your body from the invisible control of church and state, you not only challenge some of the most evil authoritarian institutions in the world, you have more fun and better orgasms.

PAT [now Patrick] CALIFIA, Forbidden Passages: Writings Banned in Canada

To be homosexual [in America] is to have learned to resist one particularly powerful form of societal conditioning. Some of us take that lesson much further, questioning all manner of conditioned behaviour. Unfortunately, being gay or HIV+ guarantees nothing about one’s readiness to shed conditioned thoughts. Consider how many gay men continue to whine about the display of flesh at pride celebrations. Their letters of complaint appear in gay papers and in the mainstream media. Why must we show our dark side to the world, they ask. Maybe these people miss the point because it’s so simple: some of us have no respect for societal taboos about nudity and sexual expression. We feel that a society that cannot accept a naked human being walking down the street is rotten to the core.

TOM ACE, Diseased Pariah News, No. 8.

Artists: MICHAEL BAKER and PHILIP HARE @ Propeller through July 6th. (Opening Reception, June 26th, 7pm.) OTHER PRIDE PICKS: Will Munro’s Vazaleen/Shame Party at Wrongbar, June 27th (sold out). The Hidden Cameras South Stage (Church Street), June 28th, 10pm. Free.

* Kirby, Letters. Xtra. January 8, 2004.

We were talking about desire,

how sometimes only an image,
a surface compels us:*

. . . I have for hours
believed—without judgment, without condemnation—
that in each body, however obscured or recast,

is the divine body—common, habitable—
the way in a field of sunflowers
you can see every bloom’s

the multiple expression
of a single shining idea,
which is the face hammered into joy.

MARK DOTY, from Homo Will Not Inherit

*from To Cavafy