'Tell me, e-mail me, write me a letter, please, and explain to me how it can be justified in this day and age for any person to prowl around a public park, in the middle of the day, for any and all to see, for the purpose of engaging in sexual activity with strangers. Just explain it to me. How is this behavior acceptable? It happens in rest areas, public bathrooms, parks, hallways, stores, culverts, gullies, crevices. My gosh, is there no place that men won't use for public sex? Why don't you just go to the nice bathhouse?' — Marty Davis, publisher and managing editor of the Portland, Ore., gay paper Just Out, in her Feb. 21 editorial. marty@justout.com
'All the press that we've gotten has been through the gay media. None of the straight lifestyle magazines are interested in us.' — Openly gay Andy Bell of the pop duo Erasure to the Windy City Times, March 5.
'They're Nazi bastards from hell. They can do what they want because I've hired an anti-defamation lawyer and they're just adding to the damages they'll pay.' — Syndicated right-wing talk-show host Michael Savage on the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, to the New York Post, March 8. GLAAD and others have been lobbying MSNBC to drop Savage's new weekly TV show.
'I try not to make too much room in my life for sober alcoholics—especially members of AA, who remove themselves from all responsibility by blaming a 'disease' for their excessive drinking and mark their self-worth by the number of sobriety chips dangling from their key chains. ... AA people are selfish people. They're gluttons who when not over-indulging in their drinking, over-indulge in their self-pity.' — Always controversial columnist Paulo Murillo in the Los Angeles gay publication fab!, March 14.
'You work out in a gay gym, you drink in gay bars, you shop in gay stores, eat in gay restaurants and surf the Net in gay chat rooms. When I visited San Francisco, I even withdrew money at the gay bank, and washed my clothes at the gay launderette. Everything can so quickly become a pink whirlwind of promiscuity and superficial relationships. And before you know it, you are having pipe dreams of a loving husband and two-point-four children, even though in reality most gay men think that monogamy is something you make furniture out of.' — Columnist Sam Cotton in the British AIDS magazine Positive Nation, March issue.
'It's the same circumference of a late-model Cadillac radiator-hose ... it's a trunk.' — Gay-porn legend Jeff Stryker on his member, to Portland, Oregon's Willamette Week, March 12.
'I had a little lesbian thing. ... I realized pretty quickly that I was not a lesbian. I don't mind boobs but the other bit is not my cup of tea. I could never ever say who it was. It was just one of those moments. ... I think it is just part of experimenting—I was kind of drunk at the time.' — Former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell to England's The Sun, March 13.
'The purpose of supporters [of prayer in public] is political, not spiritual. Their faith is like Dial soap: Now that they use it, they wish everyone would. ... Our attorney general, John Ashcroft, is theoretically responsible for enforcing the separation of church and state. He violates his oath of office daily by getting down on his knees in his government office every morning and welcoming federal employees to join him in 'voluntary' prayer on carpets paid for by the taxpayers.' — Film critic Roger Ebert writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, March 5.
'I didn't really think about it [coming out] that much—which I know is infuriating to the gay community—because I think anyone who wanted to know I was gay knew. And if you didn't want to, if it was too much or it upset your vision of me, you just ignored it. But they did focus groups, and the housewives knew. It wasn't like a shock to them. It wasn't like I had been saying, 'Oh, I have this boyfriend and his name is Mike.' I never said anything.' — Rosie O'Donnell to And Baby magazine, March/April issue.
'Fame is very corrupting. I think it's corrupting enough to make me say I don't want any more of it. ... I want to open a detox center for people who used to be famous who are trying to get back into the real world. We're going to go to the movies and we're going to wait in line. We're going to go to a restaurant and you have to order off the menu—they're not makin' you anything special. All these stupid things that you think don't mean anything, but they mean a lot.' — Rosie O'Donnell to And Baby magazine, March/April issue.
'I call myself a gay man in part because I'm a member of a group of American citizens who are not fully citizens, who've not been allowed a full degree of enfranchisement. So I think it's very important that I continue to identify as a gay man. So I call myself a gay, Jewish, socialist American, all of which are identities that I'm proud of, all of which are identities that need to stay in the public consciousness.' — Playwright Tony Kushner to Windy City Times, Feb. 26.
'It's quite shocking, actually, to everyone in my life, because I always assumed that I would never marry. It was something that I had never really considered as part of my milieu, but at the same time I'm very much in love and unbelievably excited about the whole thing. The nuptials ... will be completely perverse and horrifying. We're not actually exchanging rings; we're going to do some weird kind of other type of exchange ... that will upset both of our parents.' — Gay-focused comedian Margaret Cho to Windy City Times, Feb. 26.
