I hope that by just being a competent member and expressing informed views on issues that aren't related to issues of LGBT equality, Republicans see me as a general asset.

As someone who is both an ethnic minority and openly gay, I often talk about how simply being who I am has given me a double awareness of the vulnerability that some Americans may be facing.

When I first ran for Congress in the 1990s, my background as an openly gay Asian was one of the focal points of the campaign, and, in fact, my opponent attacked me for it.

You can't not be changed by the experience of seeing extreme poverty. You start to want to think about ways in which you can make the world better.

I saw my friends being beaten because they said no to child marriage.

Marriage, like death, is a debt we owe to nature.

My mom was a professional. My dad and mom met each other in a movie called 'New Faces of 1937.' My mom went under the name Thelma Leeds, and she did a few movies, and she was really a great singer, and when she married my dad and started to have a family, she sang at parties.

I know the dangers and the seductions of the Middle East. It is part of my identity. I grew up among a people who routinely referred to the creation of the State of Israel as the Nakba - the catastrophe. And yet I fell in love with and married a Jewish American woman, the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both Jewish Austrians.