What has become clear to me is that it is not the inherent nature of being gay that causes such a reduced life; it is, rather, the social circumstances around being gay: the perceptions of it and the cultural norms that it is said to violate. As some of those norms have changed, I have been able to be gay, to have a marriage, to have a family, and to have - if there is wood to knock on - a fortunate and happy life.

It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.

I spent years thinking I had to make a choice between being true to myself and being with a man and not having a family, and trying to live something of a lie and being with a woman and having children.

People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.

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.

The absence of marriages will result in all kinds of financial burdens that gay people wouldn't face if they could get married. If my brother gets hit by a car tomorrow, my sister-in-law will go on living materially in the same way that she does now. If the same thing happens to me, a great deal of what I have will go off to the taxman. That's because of one of, as you doubtless know, eleven hundred federal laws that favor marriage.

I think it's up to the parents to determine whether what they're doing is consigning their child to difficulty. It's not as though they were crippling their children after they were born.