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My advice for a gay couple – especially if one of the two has traveled a lot or is older – is don’t take your new, naïve lover to the city that you love and know best. Go to a city that neither of you have ever been to before. Because if you know everybody in Venice, and you’ve been to Venice a million times, and you speak Italian, and you take your young lover, he’s gonna hate you within a day. Because you’re going to be showing off, saying, “Now you must see this altarpiece from this angel” and all this stuff, and he’s going to be ready to wring your neck. When one man is older and more experienced and richer than the other one, there’s already a very delicate problem of a balance of power, and you have to be very respectful of the younger one’s integrity. If you don’t know how to do that, you aren’t going to keep him very long.
-- Edmund White
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