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.

There is a line that I always loved from Lucretius. He said, "The sublime is the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures." The presumption of that formulation is that the more difficult pleasures are actually better than the easier pleasures. That is why one makes the exchange.

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

Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.

When you banish the dragons you banish the heroes.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

I do think that if the Church can see its way to greater tolerance, Church members will have greater exposure to gay people, and the lives of those gay people will be better.