Цитаты из книги Split Screen: Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies / Bride of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies

Despite what some people try to pretend, the research on sexual orientation is clear and overwhelming: it’s a characteristic, not an illness; the feelings are involuntary, not freely chosen; and it’s not changeable.

Most people really don’t understand bisexuality. I hate it when people talk like bisexual people are indecisive, unable to make up their minds. It's not a question of being changeable, like a sea anemone, able to switch genders. I don’t shift or waver or change, and I’m not on my way to anything other than being bi; I’ve…

That’s the thing about gay people and straight people. We gay people understand them a lot better than they understand us. After all, we have to understand them, in order to live. But most straight people don’t even try to understand us. They have no reason to.

“We’re a family,” my mom said. “And somehow we have to learn to get along. So we’re all going to have to make sacrifices.” Let me guess, I wanted to say: your sacrifice will be the almost unbearable burden of having a gay son. And my sacrifice will be to stop seeing Otto (or any other boy, ever, for that matter).

It’s one thing to be sad that you don’t have the one thing you desperately want. It might be even worse to get what you want for a little while, only to have it taken away from you.

“I’m sorry, Russel, but sex between two men just isn’t a part of God’s plan!” This annoyed me. “Who said anything about sex?” I said. “I never told you I was having sex. I never brought up sex at all. You did, twice now. I'm talking about love. And it seems weird to me that the Church would say that two people falling in…

People like to say that we gay people don’t know what it’s like to experience “real” discrimination—that we were never slaves, that we never had our land stolen from us, that we were never put in concentration camps (wait, yes, we were—okay, bad example). But let me say here and now that being rejected by your own parents…

“The Church teaches things,” I said. “People like my parents hear those things, and they believe them. And then they freak out when they learn their son is gay. And other people hear those things, and they beat up gay people. Or they vote for politicians who write laws that make us second-class citizens. And now you’re…

But to tell the truth, the whole “religion” thing had never really worked for me. I considered myself spiritual, and hopefully somewhat moral. But being moral because someone gives you a list of rules to follow (and warns you you’ll be punished if you don’t), well, that always seemed to me to kind of miss the point. And…

Body parts. A flier on one of the school bulletin boards was covered with little drawings of them: dismembered arms and feet and heads dripping with blood. They looked the way I felt. Disconnected.