Andrew Solomon
Andrew Solomon
Andrew Solomonis a writer on politics, culture and psychology, who lives in New York and London. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Travel and Leisure, and other publications on a range of subjects, including depression, Soviet artists, the cultural rebirth of Afghanistan, Libyan politics, and Deaf politics. His book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression won the 2001 National Book Award, was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, and was included in...
ProfessionWriter
giving trying world
I have always believed in trying to be a good person and giving to the world, and treating others in a just, kind, merciful way.
running gay church
If you don't want to have gay weddings in Mormon churches, that's fine. That's absolutely up to the members of the faith or the leadership of the faith. I would never suggest that the Mormon Church has to consecrate gay unions. But homosexuality runs at a fairly constant rate through all populations. There are many gay Mormons.
growing-up gay self
I know one gay ex-Mormon who is a talented, self-destructive alcoholic. Whenever he is drunk and going on a tear, we are back to the Mormon Church and his being thrown out of the Mormon Church and growing up with this sense of being evil.
ideas awful loses
The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.
the-end-of-the-day kind ends
At the end of the day, will God be interested primarily in whether I have been kind and helped others, or in whether I was baptized and how?
cutting people realization
If really good people who are deeply committed and who are thriving spiritually have to beat down the nature with which they seem to have been born and cut themselves off from the full realization of love, how can that be pleasing to God?
long ironic church
It seems particularly ironic that a church that at one stage, a long time ago, fought to redefine marriage should now be so opposed to these attempts to redefine marriage.
campaigns polygamy sentiments
The campaign against polygamy, around which a lot of anti-Mormon sentiment was organized, seems horrific to me.
ideas people joy
Penalizing homosexuals does not save any innocent victims. The idea that God and the Church accept these people while they are celibate; and then if they go off and do something with someone else and both derive joy from it without any apparent harm to anyone else, the Church excommunicates them - that, to me, is bizarre.
would-be betrayed doe
I understand why there would be prohibitions on straying from monogamy because of the harm that it does not only to the person who is betrayed, but also to the person who is betraying. "Betray" is a sort of shorthand for what happens.
hurt husband wife
If you are married and you go off and have an affair with someone, if you are a husband who does that, it may potentially hurt your wife enormously. But it seems to me likely also to compromise your marriage. That seems to me to be a harm.
errors looks done
I just look at my own life, which is full of error as all life is. I have done plenty of things that I am not proud of.
art sublime lines
There is a line that I always loved from Lucretius. He said, "The sublime is the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures." The presumption of that formulation is that the more difficult pleasures are actually better than the easier pleasures. That is why one makes the exchange.
moving suicidal self
I hope the Church will examine what is good and what is ill, and what good could be achieved by getting the suicidal, self-destructive, possibly carnal, or celibate to move toward this experience of love.