"Virtually Normal"

Reviewing Milk, Gus Van Sant's movie about the gay San Francisco county supervisor who was assassinated in 1978, Andrew Sullivan describes a life of paradox yearning toward wholeness:

I can no more stop loving my church than I can stop laughing with drag queens. I can no more abandon my political conservatism than I can my cultural liberalism. I can no more disown my own Catholic family than I can my dead gay friends. And the struggle of these years has been the insistence that all of this is true and none of it should be denied. Because we are human before we are gay; and humans are complicated, fascinating, vulnerable creatures. We are all virtually normal. The goal of the movement Milk helped propel is not to allow everyone the freedom to be gay so much as it is to allow everyone the freedom to be themselves.