“My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren’t they? I know they didn’t invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves.”

“Now, whatever you do, don't say anything, because no one must know that Liberace is gay.""Excuse me?" I said. "I'm eight. I know he's gay.”

“My problem wasn’t that he was a vamp, or that he was gay. I didn’t like him because he was a politician.”

“Two years had passed, and still I had not told the boys anything. I had not told them that their grandfather was gay. I wanted to. I wanted them to know. It seemed like every month a new state was taking up the issue of gay marriage, and it seemed like every month another teenager killed himself because he was being mocked or threatened or bullied for being gay, and I wanted my sons to know that I considered this the most important moral issue we faced as a country since Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King...”

“Guys hung out all the time. It didn’t mean they were gay. But when you are gay, you automatically think everybody knows and wonder if you’re safe.”

“Let me tell you about gays in the military. I don't want any gay people hanging around me while I'm killing kids. I just don't want to see it.”