The most meaningful sort of literary classical experience for me was in my freshman year of college when I first read Plato's Symposium.

And this is a story that I think a lot of gay men tell.

The symposium is a dialogue about love and the meaning of love.

It consists of a series of speeches.

And one of the guests at the symposium is a literary version of the comedian Aristophanes.

We wrote a lot of excellent comedy, including a play called The Sistrida that is incredibly funny that everyone should read.

But Plato has to make this speech that is incredibly strange and also deeply beautiful about what humanity used to be like that like we were that we were

actually we had two faces one on each side of our head we were like two bodies basically stuck

stuck back to back and for some people both of them were male and for some people both of them

were female and for some people it was it was mixed but then humanity grew too powerful and

the god struck us down and

Zeus split us, split us up, split us in half and created sort of a primordial wound in human nature.

And that's what love is. Love is the expression, desire, erotic desire is the expression

of that wound, of that incompleteness. So at the same time,

you have this sort of comical picture of like these sort of like roly-poly round people sort of

rolling around. But this incredibly like just heart-wrenching portrayal. Incidentally,

this speech has also been reinterpreted as a song and a spectacular musical called

Hedred and the Angry Inch,

which is a wonderful musical by John Cameron Mitchell and is deeply weird and deeply queer and is obsessed with Plato. You should also go see that. Oh man, I saw it with Neil Patrick Harris and

it was divine. It was divine. Oh my God. It was so amazing. There's a point where he was dancing

on top of a car in heels, and it was, like,

terrifying, because it seemed like, you know, he would fall at any moment. And it was like,

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