All Quotes By Tag: Homosexuality

“For myself I couldn’t care less, but I have a lover. Not a partner, Susannah, or a friend or a significant euphemism, but the love of my life. And he believes. And I’ve watched him tie himself in knots, as he struggles to find a place for himself in texts that were written thousands of years ago, with the deliberate aim of excluding him.”

“He who is jealous is better off not dating someone who is bisexual.”

“So he was queer, E.M. Forster. It wasn’t his middle name (that would be ‘Morgan’), but it was his orientation, his romping pleasure, his half-secret, his romantic passion. In the long-suppressed novel Maurice the title character blurts out his truth, ‘I’m an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.’ It must have felt that way when Forster came of sexual age in the last years of the 19th century: seriously risky and dangerously blurt-able. The public cry had caught Wilde, exposed and arrested him, broken him in prison. He was one face of anxiety to Forster; his mother was another. As long as she lived (and they lived together until she died, when he was 66), he couldn’t let her know.”

“In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo’s male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.”

“But let us laugh carelessly like other men. Let us be timid even among fools. Let us knot silence around our throats.For they would surely kill us.”

“I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England’s.”

“When asked why I don’t believe in God I reply, quite simply, “vaginas”.”

“I think it doesn’t matter if you or I or anybody else thinks homosexuality is a sin. It doesn’t matter if you or I think anything is a sin. It doesn’t matter if homosexuality is a sin or not. In fact, it doesn’t matter if anything anybody else does is a sin or not.Because sin is a very personal thing! It always has been and it always will be!And it has nothing to do with love.”

“Don’t we get it? To put our arm around someone who is gay, someone who has an addiction, somebody who lives a different lifestyle, someone who is not what we think they should be… doing that has nothing to do with enabling them or accepting what they do as okay by us. It has nothing to do with encouraging them in their practice of what you or I might feel or believe is wrong vs right.It has everything to do with being a good human being. A good person. A good friend.”

“Nobody is wired wrong, because there’s no wrong and right in the way we are.”

“My request today is simple. Today. Tomorrow. Next week. Find somebody, anybody, that’s different than you. Somebody that has made you feel ill-will or even hateful. Somebody whose life decisions have made you uncomfortable. Somebody who practices a different religion than you do. Somebody who has been lost to addiction. Somebody with a criminal past. Somebody who dresses “below” you. Somebody with disabilities. Somebody who lives an alternative lifestyle. Somebody without a home.Somebody that you, until now, would always avoid, always look down on, and always be disgusted by.Reach your arm out and put it around them.And then, tell them they’re all right. Tell them they have a friend. Tell them you love them.If you or I wanna make a change in this world, that’s where we’re gonna be able to do it. That’s where we’ll start.Every. Single. Time.”

“Though gay men have begun to understand it is something in themselves these upright men so fear, too many of us have internalized their self-hatred as shame. That the flesh and the spirit are one in love is none of the business of the celibate men of God, especially those who believe they rule the province of love. But the mission of the homophobe is more pernicious even than his morality. He wants every one of us to be all alone, never to find the beloved friend.A man ought to be free to find his reason. Not that freedom alone will serve it up: it requires the gods’ own fury of luck to get two people to meet. But when it finally happens, two men in love can’t rejoice out loud—joy of the very thing everyone burns for—without bracing for the rant of prophets, the schoolyard bully, and Rome’s “intrinsic evil.” I try to remember that we fight as a ragged people to outlast the calamity so that others can sleep as safe as my friend and I, like a raft in the tempest.”

“I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one’s erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.”

“Yes, I believe that there is life after death. Any physicist will tell you that energy doesn’t die, it only changes forms. What makes you you, Alex? That hunk of gray matter inside your skull? No way. You- all of us- have a life force. Energy. Some people call it a soul. Whatever you call it, it makes you you. And when your body dies, your energy will remain. I can’t say for sure what heaven is. But I have faith that it’s a special place, and that you will be welcome there.”

“Dad might think being gay is a sin, but he sees it more as a sign of human weakness, not Satanic interference. At least, I don’t think he does. I figure it’s between me and the Big Guy upstairs. We used to go to church a lot, and I never heard on word to make me think I’m some sort of adbomination. If God is in fact responsible for creating me, He made me just how He wants me. And if He loved every bit of his handiwork, He loves me. And if all that is nothing more than mythology, what harm is there in believing the stories anyway? When I pray- or meditate, or consider the universe, whatever you want to call it- I find comfort. Self-acceptance. Understanding, at least in some world.”