Lashing out, jealousy, and fury

Dan Savage and Keith Olbermann met at a performance of the Broadway musical "Book of Mormon" and Olbermann invited Savage onto his Current TV show for a long (over 14 minutes) chat. Somewhere after minute 9 the discussion turns to the anti-gay crowd and Savage has some interesting things to say:

When Tony Perkins says it [homosexuality] is a choice I invite him to choose it. I volunteer to choose it with him. He can choose it on me. … If you can reach into your head and flip a switch and make yourself gay, Tony Perkins should make a gay porno, where he shows us exactly how that's done.

A lot of these people [the anti-gay crowd] are bisexual or gay people and have chosen in their hearts to be straight. Being gay isn't a choice, for some people being straight is a choice. The closet, to remain in the closet, that's the choice they've made, and they resent those of us who didn't choose to remain closeted, who decided to live with some integrity and be who we are.

Most of those people are very religious people who were spiritually abused. They've bought into this idea that there is this higher power, there is this Jesus Christ and he's going to throw up of you are who he created you to be. … You've pitted someone's religious life against their intimate needs. For some people they feel salvation and eternity is worth seventy years of no intimacy, seventy years of living a lie, and of living in the closet, and at being at war with yourself. I think it's a tragedy. It's malpractice, religious malpractice.

People often giving that advice [to stay in the closet] are folks who've done it. It's not just they believe this is the right way to live, they're angry at people who haven't made the same decision they've made to remain in the closet. They fell abandoned. A lot of what you see from anti-gay activists is lashing out, it's jealousy, and its fury, because you are living the life they denied themselves.