Dan Savage

A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied.

School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender.

My dad was a homicide cop in the gay neighborhood in the city when gay neighborhoods were desperate, depressing, sad places run by the mob. The only gay people he'd met when I came out to him were corpses.

When you're young and queer and closeted, you can end up in this place where you regard your straight peers as the enemy.

The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone.

The successes of the LGBT civil rights movement and the more prominent role openly gay people are playing in the public eye has actually turned up the temperature in middle schools and high schools for queer kids.

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.

I believe it's in the best interests of a child to be in a stable environment.

I wanted to be a priest when I was a kid.

I didn't want kids to think that to be happy, they had to be famous or rich or live in the big city.

When I was a kid, and I was odd, the default assumption was that I was odd, not that I was gay. Now when a kid is odd in a Greensburg, gay or straight, the default assumption is gay.

One man's blasphemy doesn't override other people's free-speech rights, their freedom to publish, freedom of thought.