I got into my first serious relationship with a man when I was twenty-three. I had, before that, sort of a typical, sad history of relatively promiscuous sexual encounters with men I didn't know, because I felt that if I were involved with people I did know, other people would know that I was gay, and it was something that I needed to keep so secret.

I look at the rates of suicide among gay teens. They are so, so high for suicide attempts and for completed suicides.

I think a lot of the time people assume that their values are universal. And they don't understand which aspects of their values are actually universal and which aspects are very specific.

We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it.

In these xenophobic times, when politicians are stoking everyone's anxiety about threats from abroad, I would argue that engaging with the rest of the world is not only a luxury, in the way that travel is, but actually a moral responsibility.

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.