Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family.

I love to communicate, and I love music. That's why I always thought not being able to hear would be a tragedy.

Sometimes, people end up thankful for what they mourned. You cannot achieve this state by seeking tragedy, but you can keep yourself open more to sorrow's richness than to unmediated despair. Tragedies with happy endings may be sentimental tripe, or they may be the true meaning of love.

I feel, as a matter nearly of faith, that if you have known a certain amount of suffering and have emerged out of it into the light, you are obliged to share that light with as many of the still-beleaguered as possible.

Any community that remains an abstraction is an easy target for prejudice and cruelty, but any community that becomes fully humanized is much harder to treat in that way.

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.

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.