"Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life.
You haven’t acted on your desires.
You’ve suffered a stunted, vicarious existence.
You’ve silenced your passions.
The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal by contrast how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.
This rushing intimation of vacuity and loss (“I mourn all I haven’t seen, all I haven’t said!”) isn’t solely a gay or lesbian experience, but unsaid thoughts and unseen vistas particularly shaped gay and lesbian identities in the closeted years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the dark ages, when the shadow world of the opera queen flourished."
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