Quotables: Camille Paglia

You began to have sex shows, and fist fucking was coming in, men in swings, that kind of thing. And almost immediately, this was in the mid-Seventies, I remember reading this in the New York Native or something like that, and it reported — now also, my friends started talking about having this — trouble with amoebas, these parasites that would not go away. And then I saw this — this is in the mid-70s — this article that said a parasite had been identified in the intestines of gay men in New York that had never been identified in human medicine before. Only veterinary medicine was able to recognize it. It was an animal parasite. A chill went through me. This cannot have been more than six or seven years after Stonewall. I’m saying that the signs that something terrible was about to happen were already obvious within a few years after Stonewall. The idea that this came out of nowhere — this is a piece of historical nonsense.