My gayness became quietly accepted and, shock of all shocks, life went on.

It was a pleasure to be a gay eyesore.

If there is a gay uniform, the differences are in how each man coordinates the details: the brand and cut of the jeans, the design of belts and boots, the haircut, the number and size of earrings.

When you've grown sick of reading and bug-eyed from watching TV, when your friends are all visited out, no words can adequately praise the link to the outside world provided by your parents and family.

I wore a woman's antique fur jacket to my high school junior prom.

I am now faced with mortality. Definitely not the most generous move.

As I was coming out of the closet, our car was hurtling over an embankment.

My gayness became quietly accepted and, shock of all shocks, life went on.

Sexuality is a private matter; some believe that broadcasting it destroys the very things that make it sacred.

As anyone who is gay will confirm, being that way is not something you become, it is a set of emotional and physical responses that just are.

Gay culture is surviving and thriving. Some activists believe the recent rise in homophobic violence might be a gauge of the success of positive gay images.

Coming out is a means of redefining oneself, of claiming membership in a lifestyle and a social order with distinct values. Chief among these values is honesty.

Proclaiming a sexual preference is something that straight men never really have to bother with.

My reasons for declaring a sexual preference had to do less with the pursuit of personal freedom than with the lust for pure shock value.

Coming out involves varying degrees of difficulty that are affected by class, race, religion, and geography.

Perhaps there is no agony worse than the tedium I experienced waiting for Something to Happen.

David Bowie and Boy George created a safely contained theatrical expression of gay style.

I had been found in a mud puddle at 4:30 in the morning.

I believed I was invincible.

One result of An American Family was that I became a gay role model.

For the naysayers that claimed 'American Family' revealed us to be vacant, unloving, uncaring morons of the materialistic '70s, this image will be proven wrong when Mom and Dad remarry... Make no mistake. This is not to emphasize the sadness of my demise but rather emphasize the love of my family and friends.

Gay culture is in a coming-out process of its own. From out of the closets in the '60s, the culture moved onto the disco floors of the '70s and through the hospital wards of the '80s and onwards to the streets.

I don't know if hep C is called 'the quiet killer,' but it easily could be, so unnoticeably does it nestle into your body before crankin' up the screws and letting you race to figure out what's going on.

In 1970, television ate my family. The Andy Warhol prophecy of 15 minutes of fame for any and everyone blew up on our doorstep.

Scrawling 'I'm gay' in lipstick on your parents' bedroom mirror may demonstrate a personal signature of the highest style, but is not particularly sensitive to their feelings. Upon hearing me utter those words almost twenty years ago, my own mother did what and self-respecting middle-class mom would do: went directly into a seizure.

The bulk of my learning - if I may call it such - has come within the past three months, after I became a part of the fragile body of patients who make up an AIDS hospice. Here, surrounded by teams of supportive nurses, attentive doctors, and interns, one gently comes upon his own strengths and shortcomings.

Too pop for punk, too 'old school' for the New Wave, Mumps were a '70s era New York rock band, out of time.

As anyone who is gay will confirm being that way is not something you become it is a set of emotional and physical responses that just are.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.

Yes, I am Algerian of Moroccan origin through my parents, but all my life is Algeria. I was born there.