Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.

I can give or take elephants; I never can find the cheetah-but the zebras captivate me. They'd be one of the few things that would fit if we were lucky enough to live in a world that's black or white.

It's never the differences between people that suprise us. It's the things that, against all odds, we have in common.

Houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else's.

Instead of plotting the demise of the traditional family, as some politicians and religious leaders would have you believe, gay people mow their lawns and watch 'American Idol' and video their children's concerts and have the same hopes and dreams that their straight counterparts do.

We could all be lucky. We could all be what we want to be, instead of who someone else told us to be.

The world is a place where the extraordinary can sit just beside the ordinary with the thinnest of boundaries; that even in environments inhospitable to man, all sort of entities might thrive.