“on the other hand, who would be a more dedicated gay-basher than a gay school board member? look at congress.”

“What a strange thing it is to recognize a sound like the shriek of a wounded animal, when you've never heard the shriek of a wounded animal.”

“A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.”

“...even if gay marriage were legalized there would still be gay men who didn't want to marry, gay men no other gay men would want to marry, and gay men who didn't want to leave the priesthood in order to marry.”

“Gay men should not adopt the sophomoric model of heterosexual dating; gay men should always have sex first.”

“In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a).”

“Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.”