'Everything we've seen about this document so far leads us to believe it is an absolute perversion of the Catholic social justice tradition. It starts from the premise that all people are not created equal, and that laws should reinforce that inequality. The Vatican has poured out increasingly harsh rhetoric against equal civil protections for committed gay and lesbian couples and our families in recent years. This new document is intended to intimidate public officials across the globe into doing what the Vatican has not been able to do on its own-stem the growing tide for justice. It is a tremendous shame that the leaders of our Church are becoming the vocal proponents for intolerance and continuing discrimination.' — Marianne Duddy, DignityUSA's Executive Director. DignityUSA, the organization of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Catholics and their supporters, is denouncing anticipated Vatican instructions to Catholic politicians and the public on opposing legal protections for same-sex couples.
'A majority of New Jerseyans support allowing gay couples to marry, according to a Zogby International Poll commissioned by advocates for legalizing same-sex unions. [Nearly] 55 percent of likely voters agreed that gay couples should be able to marry, while 41 percent disagreed. The poll also found that 57 percent of Catholics supported gay marriage, even as the Vatican announced it plans to issue new instructions to bishops and Catholic politicians to oppose extending marriage to gay and lesbian couples.' — New Jersey Star-Ledger.
'I would treat it like I would any other thing my child comes to me with. Try to deal with it in a loving, supportive way. You try to point out to them what is the right thing to do. And we have many temptations to do things we shouldn't do. That doesn't mean we have to give in to those temptations. I have temptations, as we all do, all the time, to do things we shouldn't do. Whether we have that disposition because of environmental factors, genetic factors, whatever, it doesn't mean you have to submit. We are people of free will and free choices.' — U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., when asked July 15 by GQ magazine what he would do if one of his children came out to him. Santorum recently likened gay sex to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery.
'Like many conservatives and people in the Bush White House, when I wake up in the morning, I log on to AndrewSullivan.com, a gay conservative web logger writing from Provincetown. All these Republicans, their first human contact in the morning is with a gay Catholic.' — Conservative pundit David Brooks on the PBS' The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, July 11.
'It broke all of our [viewership] records. There's a very happy mood around here.' — Bravo spokesman Dan Silberman following the July 15 premiere of the Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, to the Boston Globe, July 17.
'Every now and then in the midst of the non-stop party whirl of gay life in San Francisco, where shirtless men dance in large warehouses with fog machines, where the mayor shows up at a street fair for leather men, gay life can feel almost too legitimate. Sometimes I get the oddest hankering for the fillip of danger that went with being gay, when it was still forbidden fruit.' — Sandip Roy writing for the Pacific News Service, July 17.
'The single greatest problem facing Seattle's gay community today is the terminal use of crystal meth. It threatens to implode our existence, to steal away as many of our friends and loved ones as AIDS, and to destroy the souls and spirits of hundreds of people who used to glow with hope and potential.' — Columnist Beau Burriola in the Seattle Gay News, June 27.
'It's really weird. A below-average baseball player tells one reporter he's gay, and he becomes a bigger celebrity than when he was playing. Only in America.' — Former pro baseball player Billy Bean to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 14.
'The U.S. [government] declared May 18 as HIV Vaccine Awareness Day.' [I]t seems better to call it 'No Vaccine Awareness Day.' Or how about 'HIV-Was-Discovered-Twenty-Years-Ago-and-There-Is-Still-No-Vaccine Awareness Day.' AIDS research and prevention have been a veritable history of irresponsibility, malfeasance, political manipulation, unsubstantiated 'breakthroughs,' meaningless gestures, uneducated guesses, ineffective measures, squandered resources, bureaucratic bloat, rampant careerism and deliberate dishonesty.' — Syndicated gay-press columnist Paul Varnell, May 12.
'TV I had no such control. The, uh, the pizza-eaters had the control. They're busy munching; they're enjoying a nice pizza and bread and breadsticks. Everyone is having a good time. They forgot that they're there to work. Not my problem. Well, it is my problem, but it was their fault.' — Recently cancelled TV talk-show host Michael Savage. He still has a nationally syndicated radio show.
'Two transsexual women who are featured in a controversial new book by the chairman of Northwestern University's psychology department have filed complaints with the university, saying that the professor did not tell them that they were subjects of his research and did not get their consent as participants. At issue is a book by J. Michael Bailey, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism ... . 'The book contains numerous observations and reports of interviews with me,' C. Anjelica Kieltyka, one of the transsexual women, wrote in a letter this month to C. Bradley Moore, Northwestern's vice president for research. She added: 'I did not receive, nor was I asked to sign, an informed-consent document.' ... Ms. Kieltyka wrote that she unwittingly became 'recruiter for [Mr. Bailey's] research subjects.' During th 1990s, she brought several men who wanted to get sex-change operations to Mr. Bailey's office, where he agreed to sign the letters they needed to proceed with 'sex reassignment' surgery. ... Bailey befriended the women, socializing with them at Chicago bars and even attending one of their weddings. Stories about several of the transsexual women then appeared in Mr. Bailey's book ... .' — Article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
'A sturdy hyphenate—old-fashioned New-York-Jewish-artist-intellectual-lesbian-social-activist with unwaveringly progressive politics—[Sarah] Schulman has built a career on works that tackle issues of class, homophobia, racism and misogyny as they play out in the lives of urban dwellers, against large-scale political and cultural canvases.' — LA Weekly weekly article, 'Upsetting the Record Straight,' by Ernest Hardy.
'People in Trouble was inspired by [Schulman's] days as an activist with ACT UP; she was a member almost from the start of the protest collective. Set in New York's East Village and peopled with fags, dykes and artists of every hue and inclination, the book was one of the first American works of fiction to tell of the queer community's activist reaction to the health crisis. And while Puccini's La Bohéme is the clear musical framework for Jonathan Larson's overrated musical Rent, the play's updated characters, issues and urban flavor are lifted from Schulman's novel. ... [In] her capacity as a theater critic for New York Press, she was sent to review Rent and saw a work that bore more than a passing resemblance to her own novel. But where multidimensional queerness and people of color were the locus of the world Schulman had created, Larson had tweaked the center, making the heroes straight white boys (for whom HIV is delivered via the needle, natch)—the Puerto Rican queen dies, the lesbian lovers show everything but love, and the status quo song remains the same. Schulman recovered from her shock and wrote the book Stage Struck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America, in which she ... documents not only her claims that Larson used her work as the backbone for his own, but the ways in which a deep-pocketed corporate machine—having backed Larson's play—made the prospect of her receiving compensation or acknowledgment a pipe dream.' — LA Weekly.
