Lawyers From The United States

"Our culture is in large part a majority-takes-all, reward-and-punishment system of sexual preference. It expresses itself by not only marginalizing minority preferences but by obsessively associating them with immorality and perversion."

"What we do want is equal protection of the laws and all that implies, and we want our fellow citizens to acknowledge that our constitutionally protected choices about what is, after all, our own business should not disqualify us from equal membership in the multitude of American communities. We ask and deserve that our fellow citizens recognize our existence and accept us into the common life. This is neither begging for acceptance nor looking for approval. It is the corollary of the Bill of Rights that creates a nation of equals, equally free. The constitutional protections we are entitled to must go along with the effort to educate nongay Americans out of their hostile conditioning. Again, this is not to win approval, but to change perceptions enough to prevent majority prejudices from being acted out against us. In the end, acceptance does matter - acceptance not of the way other people live their lives, but of their right to live them. Stated generally, what gays and lesbians want is not very different from what most Americans want: to live as little disturbed by government as possible but secure in the knowledge that social institutions will serve them equally and that laws affecting them will be enforced fairly. We are demanding our basic rights, rights that Americans are not supposed to be deprived of without due process of law and that are nevertheless denied us, without due process, as a matter of routine. It would be nice if our families, friends, neighbours, leaders, and other fellow citizens could just get over their prejudices about us. It is really difficult sometimes to see what in the lives we lead should be a source of such interest to so many people. At the very least, public institutions should treat gay and lesbian Americans and their lives with the same respect they give heterosexual Americans. People's inclinations, orientation, preference, nature, and private lives should be respected, unless it can be shown that some harm to the public interest would result. This is the principle of equal protection under the law."

"The price you must pay for the enjoyment of your own liberty is the recognition that other people, especially people with whom you may not like to identify, have an equal claim to the same liberty. America requires an allegiance to the stern principle of liberty. This is the reason gay rights matter to Americans generally and not just to lesbians and gay men. Liberty, unlike nationality, cannot be safely restricted. Restriction turns liberty into privilege, and no American's freedom is safe if individual liberty changes from a right rooted in nature to a privilege rooted in custom."

"In my father's house are many dwellings. Is that what Jesus had meant? Was he speaking not only of heaven but of this life in which each person carved out of the vast, unified reality of existence the little houses of personality they inhabited? She had a vision of children making sand houses at the edge of the sea and of waves gently spilling over and eradicating them. The little sand houses were like the houses of self, and the waves were the fingers of God drawing the sand back into himself."

"[Alicia] "What is false does not become true simply because people shout it. What is right does not change because it is inconvenient.""

"The fighting had ended and his old routines had begun to be re-established ‑ even El Morito had reappeared, skinny and flea-ridden - but nothing was as it had been. He was like someone who had stepped into a long, dark, and frightening tunnel and, coming into the light, could not blink away the darkness that continued to cloud the periphery of his vision. The world was a more arbitrary and crueler place, and even though his family surrounded him, he knew now that he was essentially alone in it."

"Since then, however, his city had disintegrated around him, shattered buildings and the glassy-eyed dead transforming familiar landscapes into a circle of hell. He had felt the fear of the adults whom he had once believed were impervious to fear and invincible in their certainties. The world had taught him there are no certainties and ultimately no safety. Terrible things happened without warning or explanation. He blinked back his tears. He was not yet a man, at least not like his father or Tió Damian, but he could no longer be a child. He felt the world's enmity and he responded not with a child's grief but a man's defiance, as if his blood were being infiltrated with threads of iron."

"[Madero] "An eye for an eye ends in blindness.""

"[Jorge Luis, to young José's mother] "You must help him accept his nature," Luis replied forcefully. "Do not let him do as I did and stumble for years in the darkness trying to make sense of his feelings and his shame. Can you do that, Alicia?""

"This struggle is not about sex. It is about privacy, individuality, and civil equality and the right of all Americans, not just gay and lesbian Americans, to be free."

"Madero focussed his magnetic gaze on Sarmiento. "Arresting Huerta would not have solved the problem because the problem is not Huerta, it's the army. Huerta's replacement would have also schemed behind my back and his replacement and his replacement. Don't you understand, Miguel? Until the army finally submits to civilian control, México will never be a real democracy. The army must stop thinking of itself as a branch of the government. Its generals must stop thinking of themselves as presidents-in-waiting. Until then, México will be condemned to repeat the last one hundred years of coups, countercoups, civil wars, and military dictatorships until Jesus arrives in the glory of his second coming and puts an end to it.""

"Abuelita," he said, groping for words to frame his thought. "Was today history?" "History is simply the passage of time, José, so we are in history at every moment."

"My father was a man of many sayings," Sarmiento replied. "And one of them was "A mas honor, mas dolor." No risk, no reward."

"[Jorge Luis] "I am a man like other men who love and suffer. Do I love Ángel? Yes, I love him. Do I suffer because of it? Yes. I suffer because my love for him must remain a secret and our life together enshrouded in lies." He swigged the pulque. "Can you imagine living in a world where there is no place in the sun for you, Miguel? Only a few rat holes like this one.""

""War is destruction and destruction is easy," Madero said."

"Sarmiento waited for Luis at a sidewalk table at the Cafe Colón on the Reforma. Two sumptuous carriages filled with beautifully dressed women passed beneath Columbus's monument. They were the advance guard of the daily procession of the rich that wound its way up the boulevard and around Chapultepec in a stately and pointless show of opulence. Meanwhile, ragged Indian men swept the sidewalks with branch-and-twig brooms, bent over at their labour and ignored by the passers-by. The distance between the silk women and the pauper Indians was the true history of México, Sarmiento thought."

"What blocks gay equality is prejudice. What fuels the movement for gay equality is the conviction that this prejudice is not constitutionally protected, but that the individual rights of homosexual Americans are."

"Many Americans share the feeling that our society has forgotten how to mind its own business."

"But something terrible had happened - she had become old. The decades of her marriage had curdled her gaiety into scorn, transformed her charming impertinence into sarcasm, bent her back, whitened her hair, and withered her limbs."

"..."a male with a woman's psyche"..."

"[Alicia, with Miguel] "As long as the poor are regarded as expendable parts of the machinery of the economy, they will continue to be ground into the dust." "The Lord said the poor will always be with us," she murmured. "One reason I am not a Christian," he replied. "Your Jesus should have spent less time teaching the poor to accept their lot and more time teaching the rich to share.""

"You're a fine one to talk about motherhood," Eulalia replied. "You expelled your children from your womb directly into Swiss boarding schools."

"Everywhere, he saw the symptoms of starvation as one economic crisis after another was balanced on the backs of the poor, while the city's anxious rich hoarded their wealth or sent it out of the country for safekeeping in foreign banks."

"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."

"The harsh emphasis on sinfulness that she heard elsewhere in the city's churches was absent in Padre Cáceres's homilies. Instead, he spoke of fallibility and forgiveness and the passionate, unchanging and ever-present love of Jesus for his people whatever they did and in whatever circumstances they found themselves. At the end of each Mass, before the final blessing, he always reminded them that while Moses had given the Hebrews ten commandments, Jesus had promulgated only two: "Love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbour as you love yourself. Children, that is the whole Gospel.""

"[Jorge Luis] "It is my nature to love other men, Miguel. That may disgust you, but that night I decided I would no longer allow it to disgust me. It no longer does. I am at peace with myself." "Once I made that decision," Luis continued, "remarkable events occurred.""

"I refer you, sir, to the work of Sir Francis Galton," King said. "England's preeminent eugenist. Galton points out, and quite correctly, that if the morally and physically enfeebled are allowed to reproduce themselves, humanity will be dragged down." "Even allowing that that is true, there are enfeebled individuals of every race, Señor King. Even among white Americans." "But it is true that our Indians seem utterly impervious to self-improvement. Surely your decade at the department has demonstrated that over and over." "It is difficult to assess the Indian's capacity for self-improvement since he is never offered the opportunity for it," Sarmiento said. "He is forced to take the worst and lowest-paying jobs, eat food unfit for human consumption, drink putrid water, and live in squalor. His children must work rather than attend school, assuming there is a school available to them, and he is caught between the church and the pulqueria, one offering the false panacea of a future heaven and the other the false panacea of intoxication to console him for his present misery. That's what I have learned in my ten years at the department."

"[Alicia, with Miguel] "I do what I can to be faithful to Christ's admonition to love God and to love my neighbour. Nothing else matters." "To love God," he repeated. "How can you love a phantom?" "Because he is not a phantom to me. I perceive him in the scent of the flowers and the sun's warmth on my face. Do you truly not feel at this moment a benign and loving presence?" "Only yours," he said."

"He felt like Hercules at the Augean stables commissioned to clean out the accumulated filth of centuries."

"The vendors shrilled their wares as if the lard, coal, tortillas, or candies they were selling were the last of their kind. Their cries, as they blended together, were like bird calls, as if the city were a gigantic aviary."

"[Padre Cáceres, to Miguel Sarmiento] "Poor people are not simply a set of diseases or potential diseases, Señor Doctor. They are human souls. If you wish to change their habits, you must learn what those habits are and why they have acquired them. You must meet the people.""

"The room took shape in all its squalor: clothes scattered everywhere; plates of half-finished meals; the long table used as a desk, every inch of its surface covered by moldering documents, books, and sheaves of paper bestrewn with his father's tiny script."

"As destitute as it was, San Francisco Tlalco was not the worst of the barrios in Sarmiento's district. At the edges of San Antonio Abad were massive garbage heaps scavenged by entire families who lived on-site in huts constructed of plywood and tin. In other neighbourhoods, slop jars filled with human excrement were left on the roadways, where they were intermittently collected by the leaky night soil carts that rumbled through the dirt streets. One evening at dusk, he saw dozens of men, women, and children walk out of the city into the far distant fields, where, having nowhere else to sleep, they bedded down on the earth. He saw the decaying carcasses of burros, dogs, and cats left in streets where the city's garbage collectors refused to venture; fountains that gushed slime the people used for drinking, cooking, and cleaning; and malnourished infants at the breasts of skeletal mothers. Sarmiento had never systematically examined his attitudes toward the poor, but he did so now. He observed, as if recording the results of an experiment, his disgust as well as his pity, his superficial identification with the poor as a matter of their common humanity, and his profounder feeling of superiority to them. In the end, he felt anger. How, he wondered, could the poor persist in habits and customs that experience alone must have taught them were detrimental to their health and moral well-being? Why else, for example, would the men squander their pittances at filthy pulquerias while their women and children went ragged and hungry? But then rationality overcame emotion. Every human was born ignorant, he reasoned, and their habits and understanding were shaped by their environment. How could he reasonably expect those born into a cesspool from which there was no escape to acquire the habits of someone like him, born by comparison into a palace? He could not. Therefore, he concluded, his attitude toward the poor should be one of humility and understanding, not superiority or condemnation. He must meet the poor on their own ground."

"Come on, then," Gustavo said. "Let's get the circus started."

"[His father, to Miguel] "I know that a man's honour means nothing to your generation, but it is all that a man possesses in this life.""

"[Miguel Sarmiento] "The principle of all existence is cause and effect. Scientific knowledge illuminates causes so that men are not condemned to go on living ignorantly in effects.""

"[Alicia Gavilán] She had learned to distinguish between her personal thoughts and those thoughts that came to her like messages from a deeper source than her own personality. These deeper messages were sometimes consoling, but more often they had a challenging and unsettling quality. Her first impulse was always to resist them [...]. Yet as always happened, the thought simply repeated itself until she was forced to examine her reasons for rejecting it."

"This is my life, I thought, these are the people among whom I have spent it, prostitutes, tattooed boys with dead eyes, and horny cops."

"[Miguel Sarmiento, to Alicia] "I do not wish to be disrespectful of your beliefs, but in my view religion is no more than superstition, a way to explain natural phenomena for which there are now rational and scientific explanations. Those superstitions may have served their purpose once, but their time has passed. The longer they persist, the more pernicious they become. ""

"[Dr Hayward, to Henry, after his heart attack] "Sex is not going to kill you — well, let me amend that. Safe sex is not going to kill you.""

"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?""

"[Alicia Gavilán, to Miguel] "We are all birds in cages, but some of us find reason to sing.""

"[Henry] "Maybe she hasn't learned yet that good people can make terrible mistakes and still be good people.""

"[John, about children] "Mostly, you have to listen and try to hear what they're really telling you and remember that, half the time, they don't know themselves.""

"[Henry, to Vicky] "I know you think homosexuality is a sin, but that's because you've been taught by ignorant people.""

"[John, to Henry] "Here's your dog. Con todo, like you said. Mustard, relish, onion — you sure it's okay for you to eat this with your heart and all?" "If it's not," I said, biting into the hot dog, "I'll die a happy man.""

"[John] "I tell you, Henry, I did not want to grow up. I figured if I grew up, I would stop having fun." "Something change your mind?" "No. I was right! You do stop having fun, or maybe the things that were fun when you were a kid stop being fun. For a while I just did 'em more, faster, harder, trying to get the fun back, but it didn't work.""

"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."

"He laughed, but then in a serious voice said, "I have my slips. You gotta know that about me." "Anyone who has standards has slips, John. Only good people worry about being good.""

"[Her elderly mother, to Alicia] "Except in the novels of the Brontës, marriage is a barter. You make the best bargain you can before I die.""