Being gay is immutable. Maybe someday we'll figure out more of the science and it will be changeable, but we have no leads so far.

Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

Kids with Down syndrome are, by and large, quite affectionate and relatively guileless, and frequently, the attachments to them grow and deepen. And the meaning that parents find in it grows and deepens.

That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.

There is a great deal of sin that comes from homosexuals who believe their homosexuality is a sin.

I'm not studying everything that can go wrong. What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong.

Philip Galanes has fashioned a novel both bleak and funny about a young man's struggle to sort out his troubled love: the too-strong love for his mother, the too-weak love for his suicidal father, and the all-consuming love of anonymous sexual encounters. Pointed and acute, this story tells of the narrator's many betrayals of others and their many betrayals of him. It exists in an uncomfortable moral space where the humor of terrible things sometimes outweighs, but never obscures, their poignancy.