"Frankly, I don't think Ann ( Coulter ) believes a single word she says. She just loves the press. I used to do a really scary joke in my routine that I was having a bad day because I woke up from a dream where I was going down on Ann Coulter." — Veteran lesbian comedian Kate Clinton to the gay newspaper Dallas Voice, Feb. 13.
"Not only is it the most beautiful place to live, the most important thing to me is that I'm treated like a guy, like a regular person. They don't ask for autographs around here. I walk into a store or a restaurant and it's, 'Hey Barry!' They really take care of their little celebrities in this town." — Barry Manilow to the Palm Springs gay magazine The BottomLine, Feb. 13.
"I was there in the '70s when suddenly this very strange thing ( AIDS ) started happening to friends of mine. ... By 10 years into it I had lost half of my phone book. All these people that I had worked with and that I knew were gone, and at a relatively young age. I had never thought that I would be that close to death; it was shocking. ... So whenever anybody asks me to do something for this disease, I'm there." — Barry Manilow to the Palm Springs gay magazine The BottomLine, Feb. 13.
"I never really wanted to be a pop singer. That job, singing on stage in makeup and everything—that's for other people; it wasn't for me. I was going to be a piano player, conductor, arranger, composer, but not standing in front of an audience. That was the last thing I ever thought I was going to be." — Barry Manilow to the Palm Springs gay magazine The BottomLine, Feb. 13.
"Maybe gay people shouldn't talk about being gay anymore. Maybe we should talk about heterosexist supremacy. Gay identity politics don't seem to be working. Instead, we should go after Christian fundamentalists. ... I'm just tired of our tactics. ... Let's make an amendment that divorce is a felony." — Veteran lesbian comedian Kate Clinton to the gay newspaper Dallas Voice, Feb. 13.
"Abraham Lincoln may have been the first American to write about a same-sex couple getting married. His 1829 poem recounting the marriage of Nate and Billy was 'perhaps the most explicit literary reference to actual homosexual relations in 19th century America.' Lincoln's most important early biographer, William Herndon, initially included the poem in his Life of Lincoln, but as so often with gay subjects, it was subsequently omitted and largely ignored by later scholars." — Freedom to Marry Executive Director Evan Wolfson writing at The Huffington Post, Feb. 11.
"You have to have a lot of firsts in life, but the first 'galimony?' It's one of my claims to fame. God had plans, I'll just go with them. The LGBT community is very important to me. If I've helped in a very small way, I'm very happy about that." — Tennis legend Billie Jean King to Tennis.com, Feb. 16.
"I wish we could get a guy at the top of his game just saying, 'I'm gay, let's move on, next.' But it's got to be while he's playing. While he's at the top of his game. But they're going to take a lot of heat, man. The first is always a breakthrough. There's always a shift when that happens. It's a little bit like an earthquake in a way. But it's not going to be as big an earthquake today as it would've been years ago. What the seismic equation is, I don't know." — Tennis legend Billie Jean King to Tennis.com, Feb. 16.
"I think the reason why we secular ungodly New Yorkers are soaking it ( the Ted Haggard saga ) in is we are tired of being judged by the holier-than-thou, finger-wagging preachers, ( and ) are feeling vindicated." — Alexandra Pelosi ( daughter of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ) , who made a documentary about disgraced mega-church preacher Ted Haggard that is currently airing on HBO, to New York magazine, Jan. 29.
"I've got a long line of girls who could testify that I am not gay." — Country singer Kenny Chesney to Playboy, March issue.
—Assistance: Bill Kelley
