As I was coming out of the closet, our car was hurtling over an embankment.

The bulk of my learning - if I may call it such - has come within the past three months, after I became a part of the fragile body of patients who make up an AIDS hospice. Here, surrounded by teams of supportive nurses, attentive doctors, and interns, one gently comes upon his own strengths and shortcomings.

Coming out involves varying degrees of difficulty that are affected by class, race, religion, and geography.

Unlike straight men, who have the luxury of being slobs because women usually expect them to be, gay men - whether preppies, fashion victims, or jocks - are thought to be more obsessed with how they look because they dress for themselves and, consequently, for each other.

Tears are the silent language of grief.

We as Americans believe it's OK to kill people. We believe it's OK to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. We think it's OK to invade a country where we think Osama Bin Laden is and he's in the other country. So we just go in and we just kill. And we have the death penalty; we sanction it.

Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.

When it comes to war, we focus more on the mainstream coverage of the event, rather than the event itself. People dying is never funny. Protest puppets are always funny.