Gay Relationship Quotes

The more you love,the more love you have to give.It's the only feeling we have which is infinite...

I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do — to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like.

But I think we both knew, even then, that what we had was something even more rare, and even more meaningful. I was going to be his friend, and was going to show him possibilities. And he, in turn, would become someone I could trust more than myself.

I’ve said over and over again jokingly that the only way a woman can truly be completely satisfied is to get herself four different men—an old one, an ugly one, a Mandingo, and a gay guy. Now the four of them combined? They got you covered.

I don't care who anybody sleeps with. If a couple has been together all that time -- and there are gay relationships that are more solid than some heterosexual ones -- I think it's fine if they want to get married. I don't know how people can get so anti-something. Mind your own business, take care of your affairs, and don't worry about other people so much.

Me being in love with a girl and wanting her to be with me, doing what I need to do to make her stay with me; it affects no one, yet it’s terrifying to people and they think you’re a monster.

For the first time in his life he understood why the Bible called sex "knowing". Everything was different. Now he knew Dante. He'd known Dante. And wonder of wonders, Dante had known him right back.

Love has no gender - compassion has no religion - character has no race.

Not everyone gets sex when they want it. Not everyone gets love when they want it. This is true for men and women. A relationship is not your reward for being a nice guy, no matter what the movies tell you.

It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.

Current relationship status?” Her voice cut like an arctic chill blowing through the room. “If you mean me, then you’re not my type. If you mean my dad, he’s single, but I don’t think you’re his type either,” I said with a small smile. Mercy didn’t find it amusing. A small blue vein in her forehead started throbbing like crazy....“Actually, come to think of it, I don’t think he has a type. I’ve never seen him with a woman. Mercy, I hate to break it to you, but there’s a very real possibility my dad is gay.

That's part of being gay, you know. It's not just who you want in bed. It's who your emotional relationships are with the other twenty-three hours of the day, whose arms you want around you when life hands you shit.

Homophobia is the ignorant and arrogant assumption that copulation and reproduction is all there is to a relationship.

Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

Part of the reason relationships and friendships can be so difficult for me is because there is a part of me that thinks I have to get things just right. I have to say the right things and do the right things or I won’t be liked or loved anymore.

Love should never mean having to live in fear.

To those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender -- let me say -- you are not alone. Your struggle, for the end to violence and discrimination, is a shared struggle. Today, I stand with you. And I call upon all countries and people, to stand with you too. A historic shift is underway. We must tackle the violence, decriminalize consensual same sex relationships and end discrimination. We must educate the public. I call on this council and people of conscience to make this happen. The time has come.

We, gays, can get married in Canada. We let heterosexuals too, but that was a huge thing, we had to have a referendum and a vote, it’s crazy! But then we were like, if they want to get married.. that’s cool. That’s gonna destroy their relationships, but.. Heterosexuals deserve the same rights as homosexuals.

I closed my eyes and resigned myself to the fact that my boyfriend was a pervert. He was lucky he was so cute.

You love him because this is what you do. Over and over again. You knit yourself right up into these men's lives, these men who will never ever be able to love you back, and then you wonder like a crazy person why you aren't the chosen one at the end. You have to stop doing this...

Hi honey, I’m home! Take your pants off!” Wesley announced. He kissed my cheek as he passed me and put his lunch container in the sink.

You can argue that it's a different world now than the one when Matthew Shepard was killed, but there is a subtle difference between tolerance and acceptance. It's the distance between moving into the cul-de-sac and having your next door neighbor trust you to keep an eye on her preschool daughter for a few minutes while she runs out to the post office. It's the chasm between being invited to a colleague's wedding with your same-sex partner and being able to slow-dance without the other guests whispering.

The more I lived with Jan, the more I loved her, the more I made her miserable. It was a vicious cycle (page 209)……The more I loved her the more I hated her. And the more she loved me, the more I harmed myself (page 269).

Being homosexual is no more abnormal than being lefthanded.

Either you are homophobic or you are a human - you cannot be both.

One of my favorite moments is when a guy, at that certain point in a relationship, says something desperately hopeful like, 'Are you on the pill?' I simply say, 'No, are you?

All I really know is that nothing I've experienced so far compares to you. Maybe that makes me gay . . . or maybe that just makes me yours.

I sometimes go and sit there. it is my museum of broken things.

What does love mean if we would deny it to others?

Fat daughters and their thin mothers have especially complicated relationships.

In the unification of two minds, orientation of sexuality is irrelevant.

The power of love is that it sees all people.

Criticism and blame are addictions. They are costly addictions, because they are the number-one destroyer of intimacy in close relationships.

Those who benefit from unearned privilege are too often quick to discount those who don't.

A lot of ink is given over to mythologizing female friendships as curious, fragile relationships that are always intensely fraught. Stop reading writing that encourages this mythology.

There was something stubborn in me that didn't want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, he'd be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be. Of course, what I'd forgotten was that he was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product.

Genuine love is between two people who know they are already complete. Genuine love is based on a new paradigm in which both partners are committed to the celebration of each other and their loved ones.

People think that LGBTs adopting children will hurt them, but it's not being in loving homes that hurts children most.

Same-sex marriage has not created problems for religious institutions; religious institutions have created problems for same-sex marriage.

Fortunately, Park seemed more bemused than offended. “Do you disapprove of human-werewolf relationships, Agent Dayton?” “No. Of course not. I—that’s not what I meant. I just didn’t understand...” Cooper trailed off, thoroughly uncomfortable, and Park took pity on him. “She’s not my type because I’m gay.” The silence was sharp. Vaguely Cooper was aware his mouth was hanging open. He shut it quickly. Then opened it again to say, “Oh, that’s nice.

His moods changed minute to minute, and Jan could change him quicker than anyone. The more he loved her the more mixed up he got. He was such a beautiful man, but so unstable.

The kind of relationship I had with my mother didn't make me gay. I had that kind of relationship with my mother because I was gay.

Star friendship.— We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see one another again,—perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us! That we have to become estranged is the law above us: by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other! And thus the memory of our former friendship should become more sacred! There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path,—let us rise up to this thought! But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility.— Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.

I think this conversation was making Grayson uncomfortable, but I couldn’t stop myself. My brain was stuck in a loop because moving forward meant acknowledging that Aiden saw me as a sister, and that was simply unacceptable. “He just hasn’t ever considered the possibility of a relationship between us,” I insisted. “Maybe he hasn’t hit that level of maturity yet. I mean it’s not like he’s ever gone out with anyone else. He never talks about any other girls.” “Maybe he’s gay.

Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an “Arms are for Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.

Once," Fran says, settling against the worktable, folding her arms, "I knew this kid who very bravely and bossily came out of the closet when she was only fourteen years old. She told me then that we can't choose who we love. We just love the people we love, no mattter what anyone else might want for us. Wasn't that you?

There are those from religious backgrounds who resist and oppose LGBT equality; some very obsessively and publicly. They make bold accusations and negative statements about gay and lesbian people, their supposed "lifestyle" and relationships. But when a son, daughter, brother, sister or close friend comes out it is no longer an "issue" it becomes a person. They realise everything they'd said was painfully targeted at someone they love. Then......everything changes.

I want to make a commitment to you, to create a passionate, creative lifelong relationship with you. Is this what you want?

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

The only thing fairytales have taught us is the slipper doesn't always fit, the kiss won't always wake you, and the prince won't always fight for you. However, one thing that rings true, the apple will ALWAYS be poisoned.

Don’t answer the door without a shirt! Now, go get dressed before you catch a cold,” I scolded. “Why? He was kinda cute. Do you think he would’ve went for it if I said I didn’t have any money?” Wesley asked. “You’re mine and I wouldn’t let you prostitute yourself for pizza. Now go put on a shirt,” I said, pulling two slices onto a plate.

But it might have started way later than I think without my noticing anything at all. You see someone, but you don't really see him, he's in the wings. Or you notice him, but nothing clicks, nothing "catches," and before you're even aware of a presence, or of something troubling you, the six weeks that were offered you have almost passed and he's either already gone or just about to leave, and you're basically scrambling to come to terms with something, which, unbeknownst to you, has been brewing for weeks under your very nose and bears all the symptoms of what you're forced to call I 'want'.

I'd be staring at you and thinking, I should ask, I should ask, I should ask; do you want to be in a stable monogamous relationship for the rest of your life?

Most people who are would each not be in love with their partner, if they did not have the kind of genitals they have.

Marriage,love and commitment does not give a man permission to act like Julius Caesar by pushing his partner into sexual promiscuity like a concubine for his own sexual pleasures.

Homosexuals are not made, they are born.

Relationships are valuable no matter who they are between.

The world could use more love. Why deny it to others?

Christians throughout history have affirmed that lifelong celibacy is a spiritual gift and calling, not a path that should be forced upon someone.

A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart’s. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back—it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it.

People of all faiths are responsible to help the weak, the downtrodden, the sick, and the helpless, especially children. And of all the religions in the world, Christians are the only ones that are commanded not to judge, yet we do every day -- gay people, ethnicities different from our own, people in mixed relationships, people with gifts they were born with, power they were born with, genetic mutations they were born with, illnesses of the brain and body. I've got a little girl's mother to save, and, yes, she's a witch. Are you gonna make it possible for me to save her?

Homophobia and the closet are allies. Like an unhealthy co-dependent relationship they need each other to survive. One plays the victim living in fear and shame while the other plays the persecutor policing what is ‘normal’. The only way to dismantle homophobia is for every gay man and lesbian in the world to come out and live authentic lives. Once they realise how normal we are and see themselves in us….the controversy is over.

Guys who would make fun of girls for sexual inexperience are terrible people, and when girls do it to other girls it feels even shittier. Guys who shame girls who haven't had sex want them to feel like they aren't doing their job, which is to be sexually available and attractive to guys. (And never mind if they are gay, or just uninterested.) Girls who shame other girls for these reasons are helping those guys. They are saying this: You are not accomplished where it matters, and I am better than you. I have proven that men find me attractive, and that is what counts. These people, boys and girls and men and women alike, are all dickheads.

I watched him put the peach in his mouth and slowly begin to eat it, staring at me so intensely that I thought lovemaking didn't go so far. "If you just want to spit it out, it's okay, it's really okay, I promise I won't be offended," I said to break the silence more than as a last plea. He shook his head. I could tell he was tasting it at that very instant. Something that was mine was in his mouth, more his than mine now.

Good luck on your test.” “I’m gonna ace it for sure!” I said, rolling to Wesley’s side of the bed and pulling the sheet up. “Don’t I know it,” he smiled, and then slapped the doorframe. “Oh yeah. If Gus calls, just tell him I was balls-deep in your ass and that I’m on my way now.

A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart's. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand, only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back -- it does not matter which because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it. The joy of such a pattern is...the joy of living in the moment. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined. One cannot dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directly on the present step as it comes... But how does one learn this technique of the dance? Why is it so difficult? What makes us hesitate and stumble? It is fear, I think, that makes one cling nostalgically to the last moment or clutch greedily toward the next. [And fear] can only be exorcised by its opposite: love.

But as I became more aware of same-sex relationships, I couldn’t understand why they were supposed to be sinful, or why the Bible apparently condemned them. With most sins, it wasn’t hard to pinpoint the damage they cause. Adultery violates a commitment to your spouse. Lust objectifies others. Gossip degrades people. But committed same-sex relationships didn’t fit this pattern. Not only were they not harmful to anyone, they were characterized by positive motives and traits instead, like faithfulness, commitment, mutual love, and self-sacrifice.

Equal rights should extend to everyone. Homosexuals cannot be excluded because their relationship is unavoidable conspicuous. Same-sex couples are entitled to the same discreet displays of intimacy that heterosexuals entertain. Handholding and kissing are not viewed as vulgar among masses and should not solely determine acceptance or rejection. People need to be viewed as human, sentient, and feeling creatures in their pursuit for love. Until we acknowledge that, no gay-straight alliance will succeed. Because it's not about being gay or straight, it's about being human.

I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E.M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold… These are not invisible men. Poor Bruce. Poor frightened Bruce. Once upon a time you wanted to be a soldier. Bruce, did you know that an openly gay Englishman was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do — and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don't they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and maybe you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are. The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there—all through history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed. That's how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war.

Contentment is created when your behaviour is consistent with your values. When you act in ways that are consistent with the core of who you are, even when your actions aren't approved by others, you increase your overall contentment. Happiness, success, money, relationships, and even the approval of others will come and go in your life, but what is ultimately satisfying is feeling content.

If one does not make an ego out of gender, one would still know whether one is a man or a woman, gay, straight, bisexual, transgender—whatever else we may think of. But those identities need to fit very loosely and be worn very lightly. All sense of privilege or deprivation that has developed around one’s gender identity, all rigidity regarding proper roles and behaviors for the various genders, must be cut through.

Can you imagine, somebody telling you, your love for your dearly beloved is a sin! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, women are inferior to men, and are meant only serve the men! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, a man can have multiple wives, and yet be deemed civilized! Here that somebody is a fundamentalist ape - a theoretical pest from the stone-age, that somehow managed to survive even amidst all the rise of reasoning and intellect.

Even if you believe the Genesis record of creation you’ll see that God did not create a black and white world of male and female. Creation is not black and white, it is amazingly diverse, like a rainbow, including sexualities and a variety of non-heterosexual expressions of behaviour, affection and partnering occurring in most species, including humans. The ability to reproduce is only a small part of the creation. Before God created male and female he made an even more important statement; ‘it is not good for mankind to be alone’. This is fundamental to all heterosexual and same-sex relationships. Lasting relationships are based on love, trust and commitment, not sex or reproduction. So stop with the ‘God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve’ quote already. It’s boring and an insult to the creator of this incredible universe.

In marriage, we're called to reflect God's love for us through our self-giving love for our spouse. God's love for us isn't dependent on our day-to-day feelings toward him, on how hard we work to please him, or even on how faithful we are to him. It's grounded in his nature and his covenant.

[W]ithout changing the most molecular relationships in society — notably, those between men and women, adults and children, whites and other ethnic groups, heterosexuals and gays (the list, in fact, is considerable) — society will be riddled by domination even in a socialistic ‘classless’ and ‘non-exploitative’ form. It would be infused by hierarchy even as it celebrated the dubious virtues of ‘people’s democracies,’ ’socialism’ and the ‘public ownership’ of ‘natural resources,’ And as long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction

The failure of reorientation therapy is why the "ex-gay" ministry Exodus International shut down in 2013. It places gay Christians who adhere to the traditional biblical interpretation in an agonizing, irresolvable tension. In order to truly flee from sin as well as the temptation to sin, they must constantly attempt what has proven impossible: to reconstitute themselves so they are no longer sexual beings at all.

I read things that male relationship experts write about women and I read things that female relationship experts write about men, then I feel a true sadness in my heart. Why can’t there be a simple, pure, direct openness? Why can’t there be a simple, real, open trust? The truth is that male or female, gay or straight— we are all people— we have all been broken and put back together in so many different ways... it’s really just about learning how to recognize the sound of the other one's cracks. And that’s what it’s really about, just that.

The reason William and Caroline don't stay together is that while he really is in the lifestyle, she's not. She's only in the relationship for him. It's their sexuality that's the problem, not the love. It's like a gay man being married to a straight woman. No matter how much he loves her, it's a sacrifice every moment they're together.

It's the gays who say, We are everywhere, but straightness really was everywhere. The world was sodden with it. Versions of the relationship I was now in played out in everything ever written, acted, sung, sold, declared. The abundance of representation dizzied me. There was so much written and sold about the love and trouble between men and women that if you lined it all up end to end the whole world would be wrapped as thickly and totally as a rubberband ball.

I look at some of my worst relationships and think, At least they didn’t hit me. I work from a place of gratitude for the bare minimum. Since then I’ve never been in a relationship where I’ve had to hide nonconsensual bruises. I’ve never feared for my life. I’ve never been in a situation where I couldn’t walk away. Does this make me a lucky girl? Given the stories I’ve heard from other women, yes, it does make me a lucky girl. This is not how we should measure luck.

There is the relationship between the two of you as real people, and there is the relationship between the two shadows. The shadow is the part of us we do not know about. It is the hidden repository of all our old feelings and patterns. You come into the relationship bringing a shadow with you, as does the other person. If you and the other person do not look into what these shadows contain, your relationship will be between two shadows instead of the two of you as real people.

As Rotundo, Donald Yacovone, and other historians have argued, the men involved in such same-sex relationships should not retrospectively be classified as homosexual, since no concept of the homosexual existed in their culture and they did not organize their emotional lives as homosexuals; many of them were also on intimate terms with women and went on to marry. Nonetheless, the same historians persist in calling such men heterosexual, as if that concept did exist in the early nineteenth century.

The structure of straight coupledom still represents an appropriation of the physical and psychic energy of women to benefit men. And insofar as gay people re-create the straight couple, this structure of violence, domination, and emotional paucity is what they are re-creating. Whatever Beyoncé says about not making a big deal out of the little things, marriage is no more the logical full extension of sexual desire than prison is the utmost expression of sheltering from a rainstorm

Since the family is the irreducible core unit of cities or any other political order, one may say the same thing of marriage: it was established to render justice, to give each his due—in this case, what is due between husband and wife in the inimitably unique relationship that they form. Owing to the exceptional complementarity and procreative potential of a husband and a wife, the legal form for their relationship is likewise distinctive, and not replicable for other relationships that are neither complementary nor potentially reproductive.

To prevent humiliating collisions with the universe, I suggest we all adopt an attitude of being open to learning in every moment of our relationships. Every interaction contains within it the possibility of deep connection with our beloved, with ourselves, and with the cosmos. Relationship is the ultimate spiritual path, because it constantly presents us with the challenge to love and embrace in the very situations in which we're most prone to shun and reject. For that reason above all, relationship is the place where our spirituality most visibly comes to light. You can tell more about a person's true spirituality from the way he or she treats his or her partner than you ever could from tallying that person's church attendance.

So how long have you been together? Two months?' 'Five.' 'Five? Jesus, Steve, you might as well get married. I should buy a hat.' 'Don't. They give away your Spock ears.' She laughed. 'This is the Romanian girl?' 'Croatian.' 'Right. She's a painter?' 'Photographer.' 'Right.' She studied him. 'What?' he laughed self-consciously as though he was a twelve-year-old boy who'd just been caught with his first girlfriend. 'Nothing.' 'Come on.' 'I don't know Steve,' she cut into her meat, 'you've changed. You no longer write about Victoria Beckham and you have a girlfriend. I think...' 'You think what?' 'I don't know, I might be jumping the gun here, but I think there's a possibility you might not be gay after all.' A chip was hurled at her head.

Why do we view the boundaries people create for themselves as challenges? Why do we see someone setting a limit and then try to push? Once, I was at a restaurant with a large group of people and the waitress kept touching me. It was really fucking annoying because I don't want to be touched like that unless we are in a sexual relationship. Every time she passed by, she would rub my shoulders or run her hand down my arm and I kept getting more and more irritated but I said nothing. I never do. Do my boundaries exist if I don't voice them? Can people not see my body, the mass of it, as one very big boundary? Do they not know how much effort went into this? Because I am not a touchy-feely person, I always feel this light shock, this surprise, really, when my skin comes into contact with another person's skin. Sometimes that shock is pleasant, like Oh, here is my body in the world. Sometimes, it is not. I never know which it will be.

This is where we come," he said. Albie and I look at each other. “We?” “Me and, you know.” Albie’s eyes got wide. “I really don’t think I want to know about this.” I surprised myself. “I do,” I said. I guess I was tired of having to withhold the truth from Toby. Other than Ben, he and Albie we’re easily my best friends at Natick. Toby looked a little surprised, like he’d just assumed we wouldn’t want to hear the details. “You do?” “Yeah.” He looked around to make sure we were alone. We definitely were. No one came back here to my knowledge. Also it was cold. Like twenty degrees. Only three idiots would be in the woods in the winter, it seemed to me. “Robinson” he said. “Gorilla Butt,” I said, nodding. “I know.” “You know?” “Yup.” Toby crossed his arms an then deflated into a fake pout. “You’re stealing my scene, bitch. Scene stealer.” “Sorry,” I said. “So you and Gorilla Butt. Wow.” He flipped me off. “He hates that,” Toby said. “But, yeah. It’s hairy.” “Oh, look, almost anything else in the universe,” Albie said, heading back to campus and leaving us in the clearing. “He’s such a prude,” Toby said rolling his eyes.

You know, there's this bullshit idea that you just magically know when you like someone romantically or sexually. But that's all it is - bullshit. Emotions are messy. People are messy. I imagine that magic makes it all just messier. And anything that isn't a clear-cut heterosexual romance out of a Disney film or a Hollywood romcom is constantly being put into doubt and questioned, because we are so used to seeing the same simple story repeated over and over again. That being straight or gay are the only options, that one person is right for you your entire life, that you just know you're meant to be, that couples have to be exclusive to be real relationships, that couples need to be couples, that romance always comes with sex. Life is not that easy. People and attraction are way more complicated than that.

Co-commitment is made possible when two people deal with their sense of responsibility and integrity. Being alive to the full range of your feelings, speaking the truth at the deepest level of which you are capable, and learning to keep agreements: all of these actions are required to master a co-committed relationship. When these three requirements are met, the real intimacy begins to unfold. A co-committed relationship may look like magic, but it really is composed of tiny moments of choice. Choosing to tell the truth. Noticing that you are projecting, and finding the courage to take responsibility. Choosing to feel rather than go numb. Choosing to communicate about a broken agreement. Choosing to support your partner as he or she goes through deep feeling. Ultimately, once these skills are practiced and internalized, the relationship flows effortlessly. Once your nervous system learns to stay at a high level of aliveness and does not need to numb itself by lying, breaking agreements, and hiding feelings, the creativity starts to flow.

His body was sweet and clean smelling. As she finished [massaging his dislocated shoulder], Fay bent and gently kissed him on the neck, that part where the skin is so soft abd sensitive, midway between the angle of the jaw and the hair line at the back of the neck. He opened his eyes, startled, then smiled as he murmured, "Oh! It's you. That's all right." He folded his arms about her, bringing her head close to his, then like a contented child sank into a deep sleep. His clean body odor gave her keenest delight. She hesitated to attempt to alter their relationship, and possibly lose him entirely. He had accepted her as a pal, that she would be.

I’m not sure how the ponies happened, though I have an inkling: “Can I get you anything?” I’ll say, getting up from a dinner table, “Coffee, tea, a pony?” People rarely laugh at this, especially if they’ve heard it before. “This party’s ‘sposed to be fun,” a friend will say. “Really? Will there be pony rides?” It’s a nervous tic and a cheap joke, cheapened further by the frequency with which I use it. For that same reason, it’s hard to weed it out of my speech – most of the time I don’t even realize I’m saying it. There are little elements in a person’s life, minor fibers that become unintentionally tangled with your personality. Sometimes it’s a patent phrase, sometimes it’s a perfume, sometimes it’s a wristwatch. For me, it is the constant referencing of ponies. I don’t even like ponies. If I made one of my throwaway equine requests and someone produced an actual pony, Juan-Valdez-style, I would run very fast in the other direction. During a few summers at camp, I rode a chronically dehydrated pony named Brandy who would jolt down without notice to lick the grass outside the corral and I would careen forward, my helmet tipping to cover my eyes. I do, however, like ponies on the abstract. Who doesn’t? It’s like those movies with the animated insects. Sure, the baby cockroach seems cute with CGI eyelashes, but how would you feel about fifty of her real-life counterparts living in your oven? And that’s precisely the manner in which the ponies clomped their way into my regular speech: abstractly. “I have something for you,” a guy will say on our first date. “Is it a pony?” No. It’s usually a movie ticket or his cell phone number. But on our second date, if I ask again, I’m pretty sure I’m getting a pony. And thus the Pony drawer came to be. It’s uncomfortable to admit, but almost every guy I have ever dated has unwittingly made a contribution to the stable. The retro pony from the ‘50s was from the most thoughtful guy I have ever known. The one with the glitter horseshoes was from a boy who would later turn out to be straight somehow, not gay. The one with the rainbow haunches was from a librarian, whom I broke up with because I felt the chemistry just wasn’t right, and the one with the price tag stuck on the back was given to me by a narcissist who was so impressed with his gift he forgot to remover the sticker. Each one of them marks the beginning of a new relationship. I don’t mean to hint. It’s not a hint, actually, it’s a flat out demand: I. Want. A. Pony. I think what happens is that young relationships are eager to build up a romantic repertoire of private jokes, especially in the city where there’s not always a great “how we met” story behind every great love affair. People meet at bars, through mutual friends, on dating sites, or because they work in the same industry. Just once a coworker of mine, asked me out between two stops on the N train. We were holding the same pole and he said, “I know this sounds completely insane, bean sprout, but would you like to go to a very public place with me and have a drink or something...?” I looked into his seemingly non-psycho-killing, rent-paying, Sunday Times-subscribing eyes and said, “Sure, why the hell not?” He never bought me a pony. But he didn’t have to, if you know what I mean.

And it’s a shame that the measure is what is not so bad instead of what is thriving and good. I look at some of my worst relationships and think, “at least he or she didn’t hit me.” I work from a place of gratitude for the bare minimum. I’ve never been in a relationship where I’ve had to hide nonconsensual bruises. I’ve never feared for my life. I’ve never been in a situation where I couldn’t walk away. Does this make me a lucky girl? Given the stories I’ve seen women sharing via the hashtags #whyIstayed and #whyIleft, yes. This is not how we should measure luck. I have had good relationships but it’s hard to trust that because what I consider good sometimes doesn’t feel very good at all. Or I am thinking about testimony and how there has been so much over the past day and some–women sharing their truths, daring to use their voices to say, “This is what happened to me. This is how I have been wronged.” I’ve been thinking about how so much testimony is demanded of women and still, there are those who doubt our stories. There are those who think we are all lucky girls because we are still, they narrowly assume, alive. I am weary of all our sad stories–not hearing them, but that we have these stories to tell, that there are so many.

Antigay activists have historically maintained that same-sex sexuality is a lifestyle choice that should be discouraged, deemed illegitimate, and even punished by the culture at large. In other words, if lesbian/gay/bisexual people to not have to be gay but are simply choosing a path of decadence and deviance, then the government should have no obligation to protect their civil rights or honor their relationships; to the contrary, the state should actively condemn same-sex sexuality and deny it legal and social recognition in order to discourage others from following that path. Not surprisingly, advocates for gay/lesbian/bisexual rights see things differently. They counter that sexual orientation is not a matter of choice but an inborn trait that is much beyond an individual's control as skin or eye color. Accordingly, since gay/lesbian/bisexual individuals cannot choose to be heterosexual, it is unethical to discriminate against them and to deny legal recognition to same-sex relationships. (...) Perhaps instead of arguing that gay/lesbian/bisexual individuals deserve civil rights because they are powerless to change their behavior, we should affirm the fundamental rights of all people to determine their own emotional and sexual lives.

And against whom is this censorship directed? By way of answer, think back to the big subcultural debates of 2011 – debates about how gritty fantasy isn’t really fantasy; how epic fantasy written from the female gaze isn’t really fantasy; how women should stop complaining about sexism in comics because clearly, they just hate comics; how trying to incorporate non-Eurocentric settings into fantasy is just political correctness gone wrong and a betrayal of the genre’s origins; how anyone who finds the portrayal of women and relationships in YA novels problematic really just wants to hate on the choices of female authors and readers; how aspiring authors and bloggers shouldn’t post negative reviews online, because it could hurt their careers; how there’s no homophobia in publishing houses, so the lack of gay YA protagonists can only be because the manuscripts that feature them are bad; how there’s nothing problematic about lots of pretty dead girls on YA covers; how there’s nothing wrong with SF getting called ‘dystopia’ when it’s marketed to teenage girls, because girls don’t read SF. Most these issues relate to fear of change in the genre, and to deeper social problems like sexism and racism; but they are also about criticism, and the freedom of readers, bloggers and authors alike to critique SFF and YA novels without a backlash that declares them heretical for doing so. It’s not enough any more to tiptoe around the issues that matter, refusing to name the works we think are problematic for fear of being ostracized. We need to get over this crushing obsession with niceness – that all fans must act nicely, that all authors must be nice to each other, that everyone must be nice about everything even when it goes against our principles – because it’s not helping us grow, or be taken seriously, or do anything other than throw a series of floral bedspreads over each new room-hogging elephant. We, all of us, need to get critical. Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA

It’s a bit ironic, you know,” Henry says, gazing up at it. “Me, the cursed gay heir, standing here in Victoria’s museum, considering how much she loved those sodomy laws.” He smirks. “Actually … you remember how I told you about the gay king, James I?” “The one with the dumb jock boyfriend?” “Yes, that one. Well, his most beloved favorite was a man named George Villiers. ‘The handsomest-bodied man in all of England,’ they called him. James was completely besotted. Everyone knew. This French poet, de Viau, wrote a poem about it.” He clears his throat and starts to recite: “‘One man fucks Monsieur le Grand, another fucks the Comte de Tonnerre, and it is well known that the King of England, fucks the Duke of Buckingham.’” Alex must be staring, because he adds, “Well, it rhymes in French. Anyway. Did you know the reason the King James translation of the Bible exists is because the Church of England was so displeased with James for flaunting his relationship with Villiers that he had the translation commissioned to appease them?” “You’re kidding.” “He stood in front of the Privy Council and said, ‘Christ had John, and I have George.’” “Jesus.” “Precisely.” Henry’s still looking up at the statue, but Alex can’t stop looking at him and the sly smile on his face, lost in his own thoughts. “And James’s son, Charles I, is the reason we have dear Samson. It’s the only Giambologna that ever left Florence. He was a gift to Charles from the King of Spain, and Charles gave it, this massive, absolutely priceless masterpiece of a sculpture, to Villiers. And a few centuries later, here he is. One of the most beautiful pieces we own, and we didn’t even steal it. We only needed Villiers and his trolloping ways with the queer monarchs. To me, if there were a registry of national gay landmarks in Britain, Samson would be on it.

We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized--“Don’t ask any questions!” "No discussion!" “Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!” And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There’s nothing interesting being written--in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions. So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton--aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile--they're engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power--and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy. Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, "Sexual Personae"--which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It’s too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven's sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac--a style that was popular in the late Victorian period in the nineteenth-century. It's hard to believe now, but you had men digging up corpses from graveyards, stealing the bodies, hiding them under their beds, and then having sex with them. So that’s exactly what’s happening here: to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for me to function. She’s too powerful for me as a living woman. And this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying unconscious. And women don’t understand this! They have no idea why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young woman who’s passed out at a fraternity house. But it’s necrophilia--this fear and envy of a woman’s power. And it’s the same thing with Bill Clinton: to find the answer, you have to look at his relationship to his flamboyant mother. He felt smothered by her in some way. But let's be clear--I’m not trying to blame the mother! What I’m saying is that male sexuality is extremely complicated, and the formation of male identity is very tentative and sensitive--but feminist rhetoric doesn’t allow for it. This is why women are having so much trouble dealing with men in the feminist era. They don’t understand men, and they demonize men.

People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly un-charted territory—whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the "fag hag" label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are -patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our-parents or schools or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends' tricks and tricks' bar friends and gal pals and companions "in the life," queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from many straight people. Who among us would give them up? Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room. (In some circles this is a common party sport already.) You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends.

Shortly after becoming a Christian, I counseled a woman who was in a closeted lesbian relationship and a member of a Bible-believing church. No one in her church knew. Therefore, no one in her church was praying for her. Therefore, she sought and received no counsel. There was no “bearing one with the other” for her. No confession. No repentance. No healing. No joy in Christ. Just isolation. And shame. And pretense. Someone had sold her the pack of lies that said that God can heal your lying tongue or your broken heart, even cure your cancer if he chooses, but he can’t transform your sexuality. I told her that my heart breaks for her isolation and shame and asked her why she didn’t share her struggle with anyone in her church. She said: “Rosaria, if people in my church really believed that gay people could be transformed by Christ, they wouldn’t talk about us or pray about us in the hateful way that they do.” Christian reader, is this what people say about you when they hear you talk and pray? Do your prayers rise no higher than your prejudice? I think that churches would be places of greater intimacy and growth in Christ if people stopped lying about what we need, what we fear, where we fail, and how we sin. I think that many of us have a hard time believing the God we believe in, when the going gets tough. And I suspect that, instead of seeking counsel and direction from those stronger in the Lord, we retreat into our isolation and shame and let the sin wash over us, defeating us again. Or maybe we muscle through on our pride. Do we really believe that the word of God is a double-edged sword, cutting between the spirit and the soul? Or do we use the word of God as a cue card to commandeer only our external behavior?

But since we’re on the topic of identity and narrative voice - here’s an interesting conundrum. You may know that The Correspondence Artist won a Lambda Award. I love the Lambda Literary Foundation, and I was thrilled to win a Lammy. My book won in the category of “Bisexual Fiction.” The Awards (or nearly all of them) are categorized according to the sexual identity of the dominant character in a work of fiction, not the author. I’m not sure if “dominant” is the word they use, but you get the idea. The foregrounded character. In The Correspondence Artist, the narrator is a woman, but you’re never sure about the gender of her lover. You’re also never sure about the lover’s age or ethnicity - these things change too, and pretty dramatically. Also, sometimes when the narrator corresponds with her lover by email, she (the narrator) makes reference to her “hard on.” That is, part of her erotic play with her lover has to do with destabilizing the ways she refers to her own sex (by which I mean both gender and naughty bits). So really, the narrator and her lover are only verifiably “bisexual” in the Freudian sense of the term - that is, it’s unclear if they have sex with people of the same sex, but they each have a complex gender identity that shifts over time. Looking at the various possible categorizations for that book, I think “Bisexual Fiction” was the most appropriate, but better, of course, would have been “Queer Fiction.” Maybe even trans, though surely that would have raised some hackles. So, I just submitted I’m Trying to Reach You for this year’s Lambda Awards and I had to choose a category. Well. As I said, the narrator identifies as a gay man. I guess you’d say the primary erotic relationship is with his boyfriend, Sven. But he has an obsession with a weird middle-aged white lady dancer on YouTube who happens to be me, and ultimately you come to understand that she is involved in an erotic relationship with a lesbian electric guitarist. And this romance isn’t just a titillating spectacle for a voyeuristic narrator: it turns out to be the founding myth of our national poetics! They are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman! Sorry for all the spoilers. I never mind spoilers because I never read for plot. Maybe the editor (hello Emily) will want to head plot-sensitive readers off at the pass if you publish this paragraph. Anyway, the question then is: does authorial self-referentiality matter? Does the national mythos matter? Is this a work of Bisexual or Lesbian Fiction? Is Walt trans? I ended up submitting the book as Gay (Male) Fiction. The administrator of the prizes also thought this was appropriate, since Gray is the narrator. And Gray is not me, but also not not me, just as Emily Dickinson is not me but also not not me, and Walt Whitman is not my lover but also not not my lover. Again, it’s a really queer book, but the point is kind of to trip you up about what you thought you knew about gender anyway.