"I had formed my stereotype of evangelists from channel-surfing through the Sunday morning religious shows: white Southern men in expensive suits, with brittle, poufy hair and faces slimed theatrically with tears as they condemned people like me to the crude hells they constructed out of ignorance and fear. Sometimes the face was black, and instead of tears was frowning sternness, but the condemnation was always the same and it was animated by that purposeful energy of hatred. I expected Ortega to be the same kind of shrieker and weeper, and assumed the best I could hope for was that Leviticus was not this week's text."

“A child's sexual innocence isn't moral, it's literal: he has no context for it. From the adult who uses him sexually, he learns a context”

“... the usual hired guns who made up the expert witness circuit and would say basically what they were paid to say.”

“While his father had railed against the church, to Sarmiento, the Christian sky-king, the virgin impregnated by the air, and the man who came back from the dead were stories so manifestly absurd they did not merit much more than a raised eyebrow and a shrug at human credulity.”

“Being out of the closet is a luxury that many gay people can't afford. Maybe you can't understand that, but it's something I think about.”

“It was one of those winter days in Los Angeles when the wind has swept away the smog and the air is clear and the light still and everything has the immediacy of a dream. I parked on a street called Overland in the Hollywood Hills. It was lined with white-skinned birch trees. Their nude branches shimmered against the sky. Tattered yellow leaves clogged the gutters and the air was scented with the rainy smell of eucalyptus. There were no cars on the street and the houses were barely visible behind walls and fences and sweeping lawns that had never been trod upon except by gardeners.”

“It has never taken much for me to dislike a cop. My automatic assumption that most of them are assholes is seldom disappointed.”