Un(der)known Writers: Gary Fisher

Friday, April 20, 1984: "Darkness, darkness. Good Friday. I'm feeling a little religious, a little inquisitive, a little frightened, a little lost in the magnitude of what I have to say. It's not going away, this tenderness under my arms, the occasional burning sensation. A couple of painless red dots - one on each hand. It's not going away and I don't feel good about that with AIDS such an issue. I want to blame and beg and apologize to certain people, to God, to my dying mother perhaps. That's been feeling like a consolation, a bit of relief perhaps knowing I won't go alone …. Never alone, Gary, just faster"

 

Monday, April 27, 1987: "I'm on BART and there's a man in front of me, big, white, mustached, glasses, raher cruel-and-solid-looking, kind of military and I'm turned on by him, want to be used and humiliated by him, then made love to in that odd one-sided way….What is this fantasy that cuts across all of me, racial intellectual, moral, spiritual, sexual?.... Can I divorce sexuality from power in the real world and do I want to? Here's one world explaining the other, and Christ, it's so hard to get answers."

 

September 1, 1993: "Andrew Young describes the night MLK was shot. Pictures of burning cities. The riots after the Rodney King verdict was my most exciting experience short of a sex encounter…I’m racing on decadrine or some horrid little white pill ….Look at the excitement in the smallness of things, the fraction of things – days, minutes, particles of time – back it with silver like you’d back glass for a mirror – back it with the silver of distances, of, say, tomorrow, reading your stories to a group of students at Duke, or of yesterday, remembering (re-membering, yes!) your legs so clear and beautiful in the air as Roy fucked you, and your perfect, perfect feet, worth kissing.”

-Gary Fisher, from Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher

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Excerpted and submitted by Zoe Sharpe. Thanks Zoe! If you have excerpts from writers you think are criminally un(der)known and we should highlight, you can send them to [email protected]