'On one side, you have book-burners, congressional wives and Pat Robertson. On the other side, you have vulgar comedians, foul-mouthed rap groups and Dennis Hopper. All of your choices should be so easy.' — Bisexual comic and actress Sandra Bernhard to Instinct magazine, July issue.
'I learned really early that if I could make the bullies laugh I could keep them at bay. So during dodgeball I'd scream, 'Spare the queer,' and I was the one tap-dancing and making everyone laugh. [ My ultimate nonsexual fantasy is ] I go back to Chattanooga and I get to tell all those boys who tortured me during dodgeball to kiss my very gay, very rich ass!' — Actor Leslie Jordan ( who played Beverly Leslie on Will & Grace ) to Instinct magazine, July issue.
'For years I did love scenes with women, and I had to pretend to create passion. It was nice to do a gay love scene and not have to pretend so much. I consider it my payback to have good gay love scenes in my career.' — Actor Chad Allen on his role as a gay private investigator in here! TV's Shock to the System, to the Palm Springs gay magazine the Bottom Line, Aug. 4.
' [ Bush ] and his cabal of Rove-licked imps happily leveraged Sept. 11 as an ideological nuclear warhead against their own nation, kowtowed to Jerry Falwell's hate-filled religious right and inflamed all sorts of bogus fears ( gays! anthrax! Terri Schiavo! ) as they set forth one of the most divisive and spiritually poisonous domestic agendas in your lifetime. ... [ A ] ll aspects of culture and American life have somehow been tainted, darkened, poisoned.' — San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford, Aug. 23.
'OK, I get it: I am going to live. Yeah, yeah, that's great—now who's gonna pay for my fucking Lexus? I had intended on dying before I ever had to make any major payments. I bought it as a going-away present to myself and financed the whole thing, even the taxes. Now, with new meds, I see a future, a future that is heavily mortgaged. For the past 16 years, I have planned to die within the next year. It is how I have lived my life.' — Columnist River Huston in the September issue of POZ magazine.
'What the Republican elites really care about is making sure that as much money as possible flows into their bank accounts. To placate their base, they're willing to make sympathetic noises about issues like abortion and gay marriage, but when push comes to shove they either don't care very much about those issues, or, in many cases, they themselves hold liberal views on such matters. Conversely, what the Democratic elites really care about are cultural issues. They may cluck their tongues about the destruction of another labor union, but what they're actually willing to fight for are things like liberal abortion laws and gay marriage. And, truth be told, they don't find big tax cuts for the rich that distasteful, for reasons which are obvious when one considers that they come from the same economic class as their Republican counterparts. Hence we'll soon be a nation in which the rich gay married couples will pay no estate taxes.' — University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos writing for the Scripps Howard News Service, June 27.
'I believe that God creates us with different gifts. Each one of us comes into this world with a different collection of things that challenge us and things that give us joy and allow us to bless the world around us. Some people come into this world with affections ordered toward other people of the same gender and some people come into this world with affections directed at people of the other gender.' — The newly elected leader of the U.S. Episcopal Church, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, when asked by CNN if homosexuality is a sin, June 19.
' [ CNN anchor ] Anderson Cooper pulls family skeletons—but not himself—out of the closet in new memoir' — Headline in the gay newspaper Dallas Voice, June 16.
— Assistance: Bill Kelley
