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<><><1><><>
"Are you sufficiently proud
of me now?"
--Cher to her lesbian-activist
daughter Chastity Bono at the 9th annual Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation Media Awards April 19 in Los Angeles. Cher received the 1998
Vanguard Award for promotion of gay equality. |
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"I could have been
bankrupt without my gay fans. If you guys like someone, you stick with
them. I feel like a female Tallulah Bankhead."
--Singer and actress Cher
as she received the 1998 Vanguard Award for promotion of gay equality at
the 9th annual Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Media Awards
April 19 in Los Angeles.
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"A lot of people are fed
up with the mental Prozac that passes as gay culture. What they are realising
is that it isn't great and good to be gay any more than it is great and
good to be human. Being human involves the whole gamut of emotions and
feelings, and being homosexual is just the same." --
Mark Simpson, columnist for
Britain's Attitude magazine, to London's The Pink Paper, April 24.
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"How do you make someone
less gay? Could you make her a little less white?"
--Ellen DeGeneres on complaints
that her now-cancelled sitcom Ellen had become too gay, to London's The
Pink Paper, April 24.
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“Yes, I got fired from that
job, but it doesn't mean that my career is over. I truly believe I will
go on to bigger and better things. My life is not over. My career is not
over."
--Ellen DeGeneres on the
cancellation of Ellen to London's The Pink Paper, April 24.
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"We put the show on and truly
supported it in the midst of tremendous pressure, because it was funny.
But as the show became more politicized and issue-oriented, it became less
funny and the audience noticed."
--ABC Entertainment Chairman
Stuart Bloomberg on the cancellation of Ellen, to AP April 30
<><><7><><>
"ABC entertainment chairman
Stu Bloomberg says [Ellen DeGeneres] and [her partner Anne] Heche accosted
him at a party last month, and called him an asshole, several times. 'OK,
I'm an asshole,' Bloomberg recalls finally conceding, just to get away
from the two. 'I don't want to deal with this here.' Which is when Heche
fired back, 'That's a copout! I haven't wanted to deal with my wife coming
home every night crying!'"
--Philadelphia Daily News
"Tattle" column, May 1.
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"['Ellen' was cancelled because]
the character was gay every single week. ... It was too much for people.
... I got uncomfortable with, uh, some of the scenes that, uh, were
more physical than others. Between Ellen and her ... and her girlfriend."
--ABC-TV President Bob Iger
as quoted in Newsweek, May 11.
<><><9><><>
"I love every single thing
about her look. Anne's a shining star. She's just full of light. I don't
know why there are 49 other people in this issue."
--Ellen DeGeneres to People
magazine on her lover Anne Heche's selection as one of People's "50 Most
Beautiful People."
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"I think once you've lived
through it [AIDS] it changes you. It burns up your quota of bullshit. It
burns up your quota of tolerance for easy answers and cheap lies. It makes
you impatient and it makes you political and it makes you eloquent or boring
but at least you're in motion about it. It's an incredible, cathartic experience.
Most people who don't go through an actual war only greet these experiences
when they're about 79 or 80 and all their friends start dying. That's the
last war, the battle to just stay in the world, the horror of watching
so many people bite the bullet before you do. But this latest experience
has organized itself in an incredible way. It grabbed the young. For those
of us who lived through it, it's been an immense university of the spirit.
Watching the gay and artistic community rally around itself and its fallen,
and seeing it use all its resources to protect itself and its loved ones,
that has been the reason to hang on, a new reason to live hard and to make
light of the darkest of human events. Such survivals may account for the
number of gay characters on sitcoms today, even if they're the fluffy neighbor
from across the hall who comes on for comic relief--it's a start."
--Allan Gurganus, author
of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, White People, and Plays Well
with Others, to The North Carolina Review of Books, Spring 1998.
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"Sex comes as close to perfect
communion with another person as we can imagine. That's precisely why it's
considered heretical, it's the godliness we're being warned away from,
it's the ecstacy that's illegal. Sex has to be contraband in a Calvinist
culture. It's playing with matches, it outranks so much. One of the reasons
I've always liked kind of slightly dangerous, outlaw sexual exploits is
precisely for that reason.
|
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Alan
Gurganus
|
There's an extra edge,
you know--the Secret Service might walk in on us at any moment in the Oval
Office--whoops! Caught again! I was just having a hard time getting my
zipper down and she volunteered to dislodge it with her teeth!"
--Allan Gurganus, gay author
of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, White People, and Plays Well
with Others, to The North Carolina Review of Books, Spring 1998.
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"During Stonewall, when we
were coming out, we had this vision of breaking from rigid categories of
what is feminine and what is masculine. Today, we buy into these masculinity
myths -- not just to straight people, but to each other . ... We're going
to have the perfect body, pecs and abs and show that we are 'just like'
straight men, if not better."
--Gay writer Michelangelo
Signorile to the Texas Triangle, April 23.
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"AIDS groups in the 80's
became so zealous about making money ... they began feeding into and promoting
[circuit] parties that were focused around drugs and drug use. I think
the AIDS groups didn't want to look at that because they were zealous in
wanting to make money to fight the epidemic. Now, 10 years into the circuit,
it's this huge well-organized machine ... something like 53 parties a year
or more. These are weekend-long events, most of them AIDS benefits, taking
place over three or four days and [with] tons of drug use."
--Gay writer Michelangelo
Signorile to the Texas Triangle, April 23.
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"Disappear, Reggie White.
Disappear from the NFL. From those Campbell's soup cans. From my television.
Go away. Hide inside whatever church it is that dares give you a pulpit,
and spew your stereotypes, racism and outrageous homophobia there. Spread
your narrow-mindedness there. They say you are an ordained Baptist minister?
The Baptists must be so proud."
--Miami Herald columnist
Greg Cote, April 27. As Cote put it, "White's true colors showed a month
ago in front of the Wisconsin Legislature when he insulted blacks, whites,
Hispanics, American Indians, Asians and gays in a stunning, flabbergasting
monologue."
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Larry
Kramer
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<><><15><><>
"I think controlled clinical
[drug] trials are an utter, complete total waste of money and time and
I would like to destroy the whole system that they embody. With the exception
of AZT and pregnant women, there has not been a controlled clinical trial
that we didn't know the outcome of within two weeks of that trial being
started -- just by how people were doing on it." |
--Author and gay/AIDS activist
Larry Kramer to Britain's Positive Nation magazine, May issue.
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Overall, I would say if one
has to have AIDS, then it is better to have AIDS now than a few years ago.
The big question now is 'what combination [of drugs] do I take?' ... That
is the biggest problem in America and doctors are literally saying, 'We
don't know what to give you.'"
--Author and gay/AIDS activist
Larry Kramer to Britain's Positive Nation magazine, May issue.
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"The legal system is still
based on the straight supremacist doctrine of 'sexual apartheid': human
rights for heterosexuals, discrimination for queers. We are denied partnership
rights, banned from the armed forces, turned down as foster carers, sacked
from our jobs with no redress, and criminalised under sex laws that apply
only to gay men. If this were happening to black people there would be
swift government action. However, apart from equalising the age of consent,
Labour has no plans to repeal anti-gay laws. Society needs to be jolted
out of its complacent homophobia. Discreet lobbying won't achieve that."
--OutRage! leader Peter Tatchell
defending the group's disruption of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Easter
service at Canterbury Cathedral, to London's The Guardian Weekend, April
18.
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"Our methods are modelled
on the Suffragettes and US black civil- rights movement, both of which
used confrontation to overturn oppression. No movement for social justice
has ever won equality without being provocative. Stonewall was a riot,
not a letter- writing campaign! ... OutRage! is proud that we turned over
tables in the temple of homophobia."
--OutRage! leader Peter Tatchell
defending the group's disruption of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Easter
service at Canterbury Cathedral, to London's The Guardian Weekend, April
18.
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"Your paper's boring. Why
do you have this crap on the front page that's not even gay? George Michael
got caught in a bog. So what? Some gardener joins the AIDS Council. Who
cares? Men are still dressing up in frocks. What's new? When I first came
out being gay was exciting, dangerous, subversive and illegal. Now it's
all about designer homeware. Yawn. I'm taking my bat and ball and going
home."
--Letter to the editor of
Australia's Melbourne Star Observer.
<><><20><><>
"I was very friendly with
Rock Hudson. I know what that man went through. And the studio made him
marry that awful woman. I find people surprised at my openness ... but
who would want to live with a veil on or handcuffs?"
--Gay composer Jerry Herman
(La Cage aux Folles, Hello, Dolly!, Mame) to the Miami Herald, April 30.
<><><21><><>
"Straight Americans need
... an education of the heart and soul. They must understand--to begin
with--how it can feel to spend years denying your own deepest truths, to
sit silently through classes, meals and church services while people you
love toss off remarks that brutalize your soul."
--Gay writer Bruce Bawer
in the April 28 Advocate.
Rex Wockner's "Quote Unquote"
is archived from mid-1994 onward at http://www.qrd.org/qrd/www/world/wockner.html
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