"Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life? I believe a lot of our lives are spent asleep, and what I've been trying to do is hold on to those moments when a little spark cuts through the fog and nudges you." -; Gay singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright to the Philadelphia Daily News, June 5.
"I know him [ the guy who infected me with HIV ] but I never confronted him although I was very angry. I suppose I'd tell him how very disappointed I am in him for being so dishonest." -; Skating champ Rudy Galindo to the AIDS magazine A&U, June issue.
"A lot of ad executives happen to be gay, and they can use their imaginations to make people think differently about homosexuality itself. I mean, this [ Minute Maid orange juice TV commercial ] is right out of the gay playbook. The interaction between Bluto and Popeye is clearly romantic." -; Robert Knight of the Culture and Family Institute on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, June 11.
"Perhaps what Melissa Healy should investigate next is what 'causes' straightness, since she did such a smashing job of uncovering the causes of homosexuality in her hard-hitting article 'Pieces of the Puzzle' ( March 21 ) ." -; Letter-writer Roger White in The Los Angeles Times.
"It all began in April, when [ writer Andrew ] Sullivan published a mocking account of his recent visit to San Francisco. 'The streets were dotted with the usual hairy-backed homos,' he had snarked. 'I saw one hirsute fellow dressed from head to toe in flamingo motifs.' Wandering into a gay bar, he recoiled: 'Rarely have I seen such a scary crowd. Gay life in the rest of the U.S. is increasingly suburban, mainstream, assimilable. Here in the belly of the beast, Village People look-alikes predominate, and sex is still central to the culture ... . I'd go nuts if I had to live here full time.' This was classic Sullivan, right down to the contempt for what he calls the 'libidinal pathology' of gay sexual culture. He considers gay marriage the only healthy alternative to 'a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation.' He has hectored gay men for their obsession with 'manic muscle factories,' and written at length about the need for 'responsibility' in the age of AIDS. But thanks to the outing squad, we now know that this gay moralist is guilty of the same sins he disses others for committing." -; Richard Goldstein in The Village Voice June 20.
"Using the screen name RawMuscleGlutes, Sullivan posted on a site for bare backers ( the heroic term for gay men who have sex without condoms ) . He was seeking partners for unsafe anal and oral intercourse. Sullivan revealed that he was HIV-positive and stated his preference for men who are 'poz,' but he also indicated an interest in 'bi scenes,' groups, parties, orgies, and 'gang bangs.' This hardly fit the gay ideal Sullivan had created in his book Virtually Normal. In fact, RawMuscleGlutes is just the sort of 'pathological' creature who raises Sullivan's wrath. Hypocrisy has always been a rationale for outing, and it's the justification for a group of gay journalists who teamed up with the tabs to expose him." -; Richard Goldstein.
"Imagine Ward Connerly, the black opponent of affirmative action-;or a scathing antifeminist like Katie Roiphe—getting a column on race or women's issues in the [ New York ] Times. Yet when it comes to gays, the more 'politically incorrect' you are-;and the more cutting toward queer culture-;the farther you get in the liberal media. Consider Camille Paglia, the attack dyke who graces the virtual pages of Salon. Not many people hold Matthew Shepard responsible for the torture he suffered, but Paglia has. Not many columnists refer to fragile men as 'sissies,' but Paglia does. Not many people still think gay men are shaped by 'some protracted childhood trauma [ that ] has overwhelmed nature's pleasure-giving hormonal promptings,' but Paglia believes precisely that. Her pronouncement is the premise of Christian corrective therapy. Yet her throwback persona is precisely what makes her a draw. Like Sullivan, Paglia relies on gay-culture bashing to certify herself as an independent thinker. And like Sullivan, she thrives on the sexual backlash. These gayocons stand outside the tradition of queer humanism that runs from Oscar Wilde and E.M. Forster to James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, and Allen Ginsberg. The moral core of this lineage-;its compassion, its critique of power, its respect for the sexual—still informs queer culture. It is gay liberation. But this sensibility is barely visible in the liberal media. ( You have to read the radical press to find the real thing. ) What has emerged instead reflects the uneasiness that remains about gay coverage, even as genteel acceptance has replaced active abhorrence. No matter how secure we may feel, the fact is that gay people live in a halfway house at best. We are out on parole." -; Goldstein.
"I think I remember hearing about the article in The New York Times, but I remember reading the very first article in the New York Native ( a New York City gay publication ) . Then I remembered the first one that described the common symptoms, the first signs, which were night sweats, loss of some weight, swollen lymph glands and often fatigue. I remember reading it and just had a chill through my spine as I read each symptom and realized that every single one of them I was experiencing right then. That was in 1981. I was formally diagnosed right after Labor Day in 1985. I had assumed I had whatever it was when I first read that article and realized I had all the same symptoms that were being described. That in and of itself was sort of frightening, but I didn't feel alone at all because most of the guys I knew had the same thing." -; Poz magazine publisher Sean Strub to CNN.
"I think ( at ) first people wanted somehow to blame these people themselves, 'He had a death wish, he was the biggest slut.' To themselves, they were saying, 'I'm not as promiscuous as he is.' They'd find all these things, all these differences, between their lives and his life to sort of make them feel better that they weren't going to get it. Then it got so that people were dying so fast that if I ran into someone with whom I shared a friend and I hadn't seen or heard of that friend in the last three or four months, I'd be afraid to ask, 'How's Joe?' for fear that he was diagnosed or he was sick or worse, that he was dead. Then visiting people in the hospital ... at all these places, you would go wander the halls, walk very slowly, to read the names on the doors because more often than not, there was someone else you knew that was also hospitalized. There were times when I went up to St. Vincent's ( a New York hospital ) in particular, to walk through the AIDS ward to see if there was anyone there I knew. I wouldn't necessarily be visiting someone specifically. ... Rock Hudson. It really made a difference. ... At the time, there was a question, 'Was he gay or was he not gay?' A lot of people would think, 'No, he couldn't possibly be.' But he was such an idol, that this really said something. It was hitting them in their televisions." -; Strub.
