[Elena, about daughter] "Now I understand that it isn't up to her to be who I might want her to be. It's up to me to love her for who she is." - Michael Nava

It had that unnatural stillness of a place where people feared to venture outside.
"You better come in before someone tries to kill you," she said. "Did you lock your car?"
"Yeah. It has an alarm."
"That won't stop anyone around here."
"Bad gang problem?"
"When I was raising my kids, they used to play out in the streets. You see any kids out there now?"

What gays and lesbians have to teach other Americans is that morality is how you live and how you conduct yourself, not what you happen to be.

The common experience of being gay is deeply individual. You discover your sexual identity yourself, your closet is your own, your coming out is individual. Coming out represents a decision to transform one's life from the inside out, choosing the natural over the conventional at great personal cost. The process of coming out is harrowing, but it can leave in its wake an unshakable core of certainty of self. Coming out is more than an acknowledgement, acceptance, or even announcement of one's sexual identity. It represents a continuing process founded on an act of compassion towards oneself - a compassion, alas, seldom shown by one's own family or friends, let alone society. That act is the acceptance of one's fundamental worth, including, and not despite, one's homosexuality, in the face of social condemnation and likely persecution. Coming out is the process through which one arrives at one's values the hard way, testing them against what one knows to be true about oneself. Gay men and lesbians must think about family, morality, nature, choice, freedom, and responsibility in ways most people never have to. Truly to come out, a gay person must become one of those human beings who, as psychiatrist Alice Miller writes, "wants to be true to themselves". Each gay man and woman has to come to terms with his or her homosexuality, decide whether to accept it, deny it, or try to change it, and face the consequences of the choice.