"For death, or life, or toil,
To thee myself I join;
I take thy hand in mine,
With thee I would grow old."
-- From an ancient Chinese male-male wedding ceremony

"Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality."
-- James Baldwin

"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."
-- James Baldwin

"Penguins accept same-sex commitments. Why do some people have so much trouble with the idea?"
-- Canadians for Equal Marriage, headline

"Love is the big booming beat which covers up the noise of hate."
-- comedian and activist, Margaret Cho, weblog, 01-15-04. Cho is Korean-American. She's married to a man but generally, in interviews, avoids labeling her sexual orientation.

"Where there is great love, there are always miracles."
-- Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Willa Cather, believed by many historians to have been lesbian and who, at the very least, transgressed gender in various ways (http://www.essortment.com/all/whowaswillaca_rlui.htm)

"Anyone who thinks that love needs to be cured has not experienced enough of it in their own lives."
-- Joan Garry, then Executive Director of GLAAD, the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation

"Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."
-- novelist, poet, essayist, translator and children's author, Ursula K Le Guin who writes from a feminist perspective, often with gender-bending or non-heterosexual characters and who's been married to a man, Charles Le Guin, since 1953

"One Year Of Love Is Better Than A Lifetime Alone."
-- Freddie Mercury, born Farok Bulsara in Zanzibar in 1946, openly gay lead singer of the band Queen, who passed away in 1991 from complications of AIDS

"For me [marrying] is about finding that person you call home. Realizing that you're traveling with someone that at times may be behind you, beside you or in front of you. We can be completely fine with that without having to prove anything."
-- Denise Newman, discussing her upcoming wedding to Vallerie Wagner in an interview with journalist MacArthur H. Flourney in Arise magazine

"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."
-- author, Anais Nin, who was bisexual

"It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death."
-- human rights advocate and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt

"Oh! I want to put my arms around you, I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and think she does love me or I wouldn't be wearing it!"
-- Eleanor Roosevelt, in a letter to Lorena Hickok, March 7, 1933

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind."
-- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act i. Sc. 1. (Some historians believe that Shakespeare wrote love sonnets about men as well as women)

"The most successful marriages, gay or straight, even if they begin in romantic love, often become friendships. It's the ones that become the friendships that last.”
-- Andrew Sullivan

"It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the 'Love that dare not speak its name,' and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it."
-- Oscar Wilde, at his trial

"Who, being loved, is poor?"
-- Oscar Wilde

"There is no good reason for denying these [same-sex] couples the rules, the responsibilities, and the respect of marriage. Allowing these families to be stronger is not going to take anything away from anybody else."
-- Evan Wolfson