“In India, a "bride burning"-- to punish a woman for inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry-- takes place approximately once every two hours, but rarely constitute news.”

“Rescuing girls from brothels is the easy part, however. The challenge is keeping them from returning. The stigma that girls feel in their communities after being freed, coupled with drug dependenci...”

“There are 2-3 millions prostitutes in India, and although many of them now sell sex to some degree willingly, and are paid, a significant share of them entered the sex industry unwillingly.”

“Anybody who has spent time in Indian brothels and also, say, at Indian brick kilns knows that it is better to be enslaved working a kiln. Kiln workers most likely live together with their families,...”

“Here, in impoverished northern India state of Bihar, near the Nepalese border, there's not much else available commercially-- except sex.”

“Imagine the outcry if the Pakistani or Indian governments were burning women alive at those rates. Yet when the government is not directly involved people shrug.”

“Kind of gay? I wanted to say. Do you have any notion how many homosexuals sweated their ass off on the dance floor to make this soaring bit of derivative trash possible? How many died of AIDS, OD'd...”

“You are a hole in my life, a black hole. Anything I place there cannot be returned. I miss you terribly. Ci vedremo lassu, angelo.”

“The disaster, as Dad and others saw it, was the emerging AIDS crisis and the cultural attacks instigated by conservative against gay men and women in the early 1980s. It was found in the cruel indi...”

“The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constan...”

“... the effort to discover an authentic self, to strip away layers of alienation and culturally imposed identity and find a soul in a clear, unimpeded communion with the sacred is consonant with sp...”

“I'm a queen with or without a king. Chasing anything is beneath me. Until you're ready to put away childish things and be my man, my king, someone I can trust to shepard my soul to the Almighty I h...”

“Power engenders the evil-minded who ill-treat the needy in all parts of the world.”

“Men think it is philanthropy to give away sex.”

“All that work: his generous patronage of the arts, the vast sums of money he had donated to worthy causes, setting up charitable organizations . . . for what? In the end, none of those good works h...”