Owning a gun in America is one way for conservative white males to demonstrate their anger at crime, liberalism, feminism, and modernity.

I wouldn't say that holidays are manufactured by corporations, but they're certainly exploited and mined by them.

When I was a kid, and I was odd, the default assumption was that I was odd, not that I was gay. Now when a kid is odd in a Greensburg, gay or straight, the default assumption is gay.

Straight couples don't have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn't compulsory and its absence doesn't invalidate a marriage.

Parenting is about being competent and responsible. It's not about gender, necessarily.

I always kind of divided the gay guys I met up into two groups when I first started coming out. There were the guys who thought there was something fundamentally wrong with them and hated themselves and were so burdened with shame and internalized homophobia. It just really paralyzed and shredded them. And then there were guys like me who thought, "I'm fine, everybody else is crazy. My church is sick and the family's crazy, but me? I'm fine."

We all have our scars. That's what falling is love is all about: revealing your scars to somebody who then loves you anyway.