"I demanded that in the next season [ of Dawson's Creek ] I be able to get a piece of ass. It's been too long to have gone without any." -; Actor Kerr Smith who plays a gay character on the series, to Atlanta's Etcetera magazine, May 25.
"I wouldn't take anything for the moment I was on the closed set [ of Further Tales of the City ] with [ actors ] Billy [ Campbell ] and Paul [ Hopkins ] during their love scene and Billy looked up at me and said, 'Armistead, does my ass look big in this shot?' All I could think was, 'This is my job! This is what I do for a living! How did I luck into this?'" -; Author Armistead Maupin to Atlanta's Etcetera magazine, May 18.
"I made my own decisions about who I had sex with. I made those decisions before it was legal for me to do so. I don't feel damaged by any of the relationships I had with older men. I feel really empowered." -; Syndicated gay columnist Kirk Read to Genre magazine, June issue. Read's new book is called How I Learned To Snap.
"I was just different. I didn't want to go out a lot. I wanted to read. I wanted to watch old Bette Davis movies. I liked to watch Judy Garland films. My friends thought I was a freak." -; Singer/ actress/comedian Lea DeLaria to Genre magazine, June issue.
"Warren Beatty [ has ] had sex with 40,000 women. If that's not a role model for lesbians I don't know what is." -; Singer/actress/comedian Lea DeLaria.
" [ I'm looking ] for a fuck right now, that's it. A girl who will fuck me and leave and on the way out, she cleans my house." -; DeLaria.
"The military discharged more gay service members in 2000 than any year since 1994, when the controversial 'don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue' policy went into effect, the Pentagon said yesterday. The Department of Defense released figures showing that 1,212 members of the armed services were discharged for homosexual conduct or for stating their homosexuality-;a 17.2 percent increase from 1,034 the previous year." -; San Francisco Chronicle, June 2.
"The president believes every person should be treated with dignity and respect but he does not believe in politicizing people's sexual orientation." -; Scott McClellan, spokesman for George W. Bush, explaining the president's refusal to proclaim June Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, June 2.
"I hate to interrupt anyone's party, but the second wave of AIDS isn't coming. It's here." -; Veteran gay/AIDS journalist Bruce Mirken to the San Francisco Chronicle, June 2.
"I feel that many gay white men got their insurance, got their [ anti-HIV ] drugs and are back to their parties and sex joints." -; Longtime gay journalist Michelangelo Signorile to the San Francisco Chronicle, June 2.
"Larry Kramer is dying. ... He suffers from end-stage liver disease. Whether this is inflamed by his HIV medications, as Kramer believes, or caused solely by his chronic hepatitis [ B ] , as his medical team says, the result is the same: his liver no longer processes toxins from his blood. Instead they collect in his abdomen by the quart, distending his belly to make him look, as his best friend and health-care consultant Rodger McFarlane says, 'pregnant with triplets.'" -; Newsweek, June 11. Kramer is the author of Faggots and The Normal Heart, and a cofounder of Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT UP.
"It's disturbing to see the woman [ Anne Heche ] who made such a seemingly heartfelt appeal for public validation of her lesbian relationship now eagerly grabbing onto heterosexual privilege and running with it to Saks' bridal department. This—not her becoming involved with a man—is a betrayal of all the gay people who still can't get married and who gave her so much support during her stint in our community. What might Heche do instead? Ideally, as someone who has experienced discrimination precisely because of her very visible lesbian relationship, she could declare her intention not to marry until lesbians and gay men also have the right to do so." -; Q Syndicate columnist Paula Martinac in a June 4 filing.
"I figure I'm doing the early mid-life crisis, dating a 26-year-old and buying a Camaro." -; Lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge on her new relationship with Tammy Lynn Michaels who stars on the WB TV series Popular, as quoted by Fox News, June 7.
"I'm not wearing a tie. Isn't that extraordinary?" -; Former Canadian Prime Minister and current Progressive Conservative party leader Joe Clark as he grand marshaled the gay-pride parade in Calgary, Alberta, June 10.
"I gave up a yacht club opening to come to this. We are as straight as a ruler. We just came out to see how the other half lives. And it's marvelous! They're all so friendly!" -; Claire Pauley, 72, watching Boston's gay-pride parade with her friend Phyllis Kolostow, June 9, to the Boston Globe.
"'We're not doing anything for Gay Pride this year,' says the caption of a recent New Yorker cartoon, in which two casually dressed middle-aged men lounge on the couch in their well-appointed living room, one petting the dog and the other chatting on the cellphone. 'We're here, we're queer, we're used to it.' That blasé rewording of a once-militant gay-power catchphrase sums up what lots of lesbians and gay men feel with the onset of June, a.k.a. Gay Pride Month. At a time when out-and-proud people are becoming an increasingly greater force in pop culture and politics, at a time when comfortably situated couples like the New Yorker pair are becoming more and more the norm, it gets tough to convince the gay community that there's anything left to march about." -; Philadelphia City Paper, June 7.
"When you first get there, you're bowled over. You say things like, 'Where has this been all my life?' Two months in, you know what's behind any door, and it's emptiness. It's like a set." -; Gay singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright on Los Angeles, to the Philadelphia Daily News, June 5.
