I feel so sorry for [ Sen. Larry ] Craig.—Openly gay Ron Oden ( pictured ) , who finished his term as mayor of Palm Springs, Calif., Dec. 6.
'I'm not sure I've managed to deserve the family of friends that surrounds me ... [ including ] my beautiful Cydney who sticks with me through the rotten and the bliss.' — Actress Jodie Foster making a rare, if not the first, public acknowledgment of her same-sex partner, Cydney Bernard, on Dec. 4 as Foster received the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award at the 16th annual Women in Entertainment Power 100 breakfast at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
'No. I'm not. Nor have I ever been, although I know there are people who thought I was. I do have a lot of women friends, but none of them is gay, nor have they ever been. [ The allegations ] used to bother me, but I can laugh about it now. It's silly.' — Singer Anne Murray when Toronto's Globe and Mail asked her if she's gay, Nov. 10.
'I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.' — Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee to the Associated Press in 1992, as reported by the AP on Dec. 8.
'I feel so sorry for [ Sen. Larry ] Craig. ... I mean, when do you finally get to a point when you can say: 'This is who I am. No more apologies, no more lies.' How frightened he must be. Now it's easy for people just to put him down, but when you try to understand just where this person is and what he has, he thinks his image is so valuable that he's willing to lose all credibility, because he doesn't have a credible story. And the further he goes with it the more asinine it all becomes.' — Openly gay Ron Oden, who finished his term as mayor of Palm Springs on Dec. 6, to the local gay magazine The BottomLine, Dec. 7.
'He's the worst kind of closet queen there is. I believe he's so uptight and so in denial he could probably pass a lie detector test now. ... Divine did once, when he passed bad cheques! He passed a lie detector test and I think that was brilliant acting.' — Gay filmmaker John Waters on U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, to the Montreal weekly newspaper Hour, Dec. 13.
'If he was out of office, it wasn't really relevant [ to keep chasing the story ] . But then he decided to stay. ... I don't like writing about anal sex for people who don't want to read about it over their corn flakes.' — Dan Popkey, the Idaho Statesman reporter who has doggedly pursued the story of U.S. Sen. Larry Craig's alleged numerous gay sexcapades, to Editor & Publisher, Dec. 3. The Statesman now has published the stories of eight men—four of them named—who claim they had sex with Craig or experienced sexual come-ons from him.
'If there is some sort of creation, a piece of art, a TV show, a column or a book or a movie or a statue or a blog or a movement, a wine bottle or sexual position or Jesus-shaped dildo that somehow deeply threatens the various ultraconservative sects of Christian-blasted America to the point where their pale, dour representatives demand boycotts and distribute angry pamphlets and try to stop people from experiencing said hunk of culture because of how negatively it portrays their seething, condemnatory God, well, you know it's time to break out the Champagne. Or buy that book. Or get very, very naked.' — San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford, Nov. 30.
'I was a fuck buddy of Rock Hudson's. ... It wasn't exactly an elite club.' — Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin to Instinct magazine, November issue.
—Assistance: Bill Kelley