"My ( gay ) story is relative to the times. Jane ( Wagner ) and I were out, but we never called a press conference. In those days the press also didn't write about ( our personal lives ) . And truthfully from my heart, I didn't encourage them. It was the '70s. But I don't know what would have come of it if I had. It could have been great. I mean, Time magazine offered me the cover in 1975 if I came out and Ellen ( DeGeneres ) came out on the cover 20 years later. She was the right person at the right time." — Lily Tomlin to Montreal's Hour magazine, May 28.
"I lived through eight years of the Clintons and then eight years of Bush. Through it all, gay people were treated at the federal level like embarrassments or impediments. With Clinton, we were the means to raise money. With Bush, we were the means to leverage votes by exploiting bigotry. Obama seemed in the campaign to promise something else. ... But I have a sickeningly familiar feeling in my stomach, and the feeling deepens with every interaction with the Obama team on these issues. They want them to go away. They want us to go away. Here we are, in the summer of 2009, with gay servicemembers still being fired for the fact of their orientation. Here we are, with marriage rights spreading through the country and world and a president who cannot bring himself even to acknowledge these breakthroughs in civil rights, and having no plan in any distant future to do anything about it at a federal level. Here I am, facing a looming deadline to be forced to leave my American husband for good, and relocate abroad because the HIV travel and immigration ban remains in force and I have slowly run out of options." — Gay writer Andrew Sullivan on his blog, May 13.
"Let's stop hurling dismay at beauty pageant losers for a second, considering the fact that our own President seems to have left the gays out to float on a block of ice too. As we know, Obama used to be in favor of same-sex marriages, but then he changed that to a far more politically expedient middle-of-the-road stance, shifting his true feelings on the road to ambition. Meanwhile, he can't exactly denounce the California Supreme Court's decision to uphold Proposition 8, seeing as he's now conveniently anti gay marriage himself, so he's staying mum about it. And he doesn't seem all that willing to reconsider the absurd 'Don't ask, don't tell' premise that still haunts gays in the military, despite gay activists begging him to abolish it now." — Village Voice columnist Michael Musto on his blog, May 28.
"I wish to spend my life's twilight being just who I am. I could claim noble reasons as coming out in order to move gay rights forward, but I must admit it is for far more selfish reasons. Now is the time I wish to find someone and I do not desire to force any potential partner to live a life of extreme discretion with me." — Actor David Ogden Stiers, who played Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester III on the '70s TV series M*A*S*H, in a March interview with Gossip-Boy.com that just recently caught the attention of other media.
"I got alienated from the gay world—when I went through my famous heterosexual phase—because everyone looked the same. To this day, I've never got the everyone-looking-the-same thing. ... ( T ) he clones and the checked shirts and the 501s and the same mustaches, you know. I mean, now you can look back, and it seems sort of endearingly kitsch. It's Tales of the City, you know—it's that period. I found that alienating because it seemed professional and narcissistic and just about doing sex really well. And all of that I don't find very sexy." — The Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant to Out magazine, June/July issue.
"It was the gayest season ever of The Amazing Race, and also one of the best ever. Coincidence? I don't think so. There was father and son Mel and Mike White, who are both gay; sisters Kisha and Jen ( Kisha is a lesbian ) ; one person who apparently isn't out of the closet; and, finally, Luke Adams and his mom Margie." — AfterElton.com, May 11.
—Assistance: Bill Kelley
