Even if it's deep unhappiness, it's your unhappiness.

I enjoy being around people who disagree with me; and I enjoy being in non-political contexts and activities.

It's also one thing to see a celebrity or some kind of character on a TV show being gay. It's a totally different thing when you know your husband... not your husband, but your brother or your friend or the dude you hung out in high school was gay. I mean, that is what changes people's minds, what changes people's minds.

My own early crusade for same-sex marriage, for example, is now mainstream gay politics. It wasn't when I started.

I think there were two great gay Americans obviously, and that was Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman.

It's only because you can now watch cheerfully biased Fox News that you begin to realize how cheerlessly biased CNN really is - and always was. Or CBS. Or ABC. Or the BBC.

I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that's going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.