This is not a joke book, nor is it an anthology of aphorisms - of ugly truths prettily phrased. This may surprise some potential readers who think of epigrams and poetry as the everyday speech of a certain category of gay men. In these pages can be heard both elegant and crude exclamations of disbelief or contempt or sheer panic from the unenlightened. Some of these express a genuine moral indignation; others are only the voice of a society determined to preserve itself at all costs from a force that it considers subversive but that in reality is, at its worst, iconoclastic and, at its least harmful, merely sterile and frivolous. From within the stockade come occasional cries of mourning, darkening growls of rage, and elsewhere, considered opinions from the gay community about its human environment and about itself. [From the Introduction]