Normality: The psychosis of the majority.............

"Why can't you be more normal?"  my father once yelled at his neurotic teenage son.  "Well, what's normal?"  I hurled back.  It was a good question, however defensively yelled: and still is.  During the plague, it became perhaps more pressing than ever.  "The poor homosexuals," Patrick Buchanan memorably wrote.  "They declared war on nature and now nature has taken its revenge."  As the epidemic continued its onslaught, and as the human horror of its path through the lives of hundreds of thousands of gay men became clearer, the question receded.  It became offensive, even obscene, to raise the question of the "normality" of people in such distress, to disregard what they so obviously had in common with everyone else - fear, family, isolation, death - from what resiliently set them apart.  
-Andrew Sullivan, from his essay Virtually Abnormal from Love Undetectable:  Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival