"Inside a small wood-frame house near a running creek, a mother sits on the edge of her slain son's still-made bed. Arthur 'J.R.' Warren Jr. is not coming home. The woman's hands are clasped in front of her face. Her brown eyes are cast down at the beige carpet. She chokes up as she speaks. She says she wants the battered and broken body of her oldest son to be shown in an open casket at his funeral Saturday. ... What [ his attackers ] did to J.R. Warren, 26, was repeatedly punch and kick him in the early morning hours Tuesday at a nearby house, according to police. They then loaded him either unconscious or dead into the trunk of a Chevy Camaro, authorities said, and drove about a mile away. Police said they then dumped his body on the side of the road, and ran him over with the car not once, but several times. Why they did this, no one knows for sure and the police are not saying. But there is plenty of speculation in this tiny former coal town about 8 miles outside downtown Fairmont. It seems that motives for the brutal attack are tied to two central facts: race and sexuality. J.R. Warren was black, and he was gay. His alleged attackers are white males." — The Charleston [ West Virginia ] Daily Mail, July 7, 2000
"Regardless of what my son was, nobody's child deserved this." — Brenda Warren.
"That's pure hate." — Arthur Sr. speaking of the murder of his son.
"Well, I didn't realize that that's what I was going to be doing. I think I was very naive. I thought that I was doing something for myself, and it certainly would be an interesting way to do it on television. And my character seemed pretty asexual anyway. It didn't really seem to be a stretch to have the character come out. I did not realize that I was going to be the so-called 'leader' of the gay community. I didn't know that that—I mean, so far I've received no banner, no crown, nothing. There's no payment for this job, and the hours suck. I'll tell you that. Because I've got to be gay 24 hours a day, every single day. And that's exhausting." — Ellen DeGeneres on the coming out of her Ellen Morgan TV character, and her own coming out, to SamDonaldson@ABCNEWS. com, June 5.
"I just really thought that I was going to do something that was going to help myself and live my life truthfully and honestly, which I believe that's what we are here to do, whatever that means to an individual is to live your life truthfully. And so it kind of hit me pretty hard, and to take on this responsibility so, you know, so to say as kind of carrying the torch. And I don't mind doing it. I think we have a long way to go, and I think we need help. I just want to get refocused back on what got me here in the first place, which is the fact that I'm a stand-up comedienne and that I—that I love doing comedy and I love making people laugh. And I guess that's really what I want to be known for." — Ellen.
"You know, people talk about dog years, that there's, I guess, you know, seven years to every human year in dog years. I think that gay years even surpass that. I feel like the last three years of my life have been like 30 years. I have lived through a lot. And I feel blessed, I feel grateful for every moment, because I've learned a tremendous amount. I went through a very tough period after the show got cancelled. And, you know, basically when you're fired from any job, it's hard, but when you're publicly fired and humiliated it's really hard. So I went through a pretty deep depression for a while, and didn't know if I was going to be able to make it back out. And I did. And that to me I feel like I survived something. I feel like I know what compassion is now, because I know what that feels like to be in that place, because I had never been there before." — Ellen.
"A recent appointment that took many by surprise was the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force naming Elizabeth Toledo, former vice president of the National Organization for Women, as its new executive director. Toledo was the ultimate choice after a nationwide sear
