"Had I considered coming out five years ago, it would've been very difficult. But right now I'm experiencing the same emotions that my friends have told me they felt when they came out: this great clarity and this great peace. There have been no repercussion, no hate mail. I think people have had so many good times with my music that my coming-out is easier for them to accept. It's like, 'Well, look at the great music, look at the great shows--does it really matter?'" 

--Rob Halford, lead singer of the heavy metal group Judas Priest, to the Advocate, May 12.

<><><2><><>

"Now that I'm out about my homosexuality, I'm gonna be shouting my mouth off about having the same rights and being treated the same way as every other person on this planet. All of us are human beings, and we should not be denied the same kinds of things that the greater portion of straight society receives. That's got to be the next step on this journey for me. I'll stand up for it and make my voice heard for equal rights." 

--Rob Halford, lead singer of the heavy metal group Judas Priest, to the Advocate, May 12.

<><><3><><>

"Lately we've been talking about me having a kid. And if I do that I'm gonna have to do it, you know, like in the next five minutes. I'm getting old." 

--Ellen DeGeneres on ABC-TV's Primetime Live, May 6.

<><><4><><>

"I can understand why someone looks at that [same-sex affection on Ellen] and is a little uncomfortable because they're not used to seeing it. You know, it must've been uncomfortable for some white people to see some black people walk into a restaurant that they weren't supposed to be in. It's conditioning. We're all raised with: 'There's something wrong. You're not quite normal.' ... Well, there's nothing wrong. And someday, people are going to get it."

--Ellen DeGeneres on ABC-TV's Primetime Live, May 6.

<><><5><><>

"[Ellen became gayer than I said it would become because] I changed. I grew up. ... I didn't even realize the internal homophobia and the shame that I was still dealing with. I thought, if I just say the words 'I'm gay,' if I just do that, that's going to be enough. I mean, just to give you an idea, I'm on vacation with Anne, and she went to grab my hand, to hold my hand, and I pulled away. And I said, 'You know, I don't want to do this in public.' Now, meanwhile, that same week, I'm on the cover of Time magazine, big picture of me, 'Yep, I'm gay.' But I'm not going to hold my girlfriend's hand in public. Over the summer, I all of a sudden realize, you can't just come out and then go back in the closet and not show anybody anything. ... If I just had this one year of doing what I did on television, I'll take that over 10 more years being on a sitcom and just being funny. ... Because the comfort level of the audience is never going to say: 'Come on, give us some gay stuff. We're ready for it now.' You know, when I'm accused of becoming political, I'm showing love. How is that political? How is that political to teach love and acceptance?"

--Ellen DeGeneres on ABC-TV's Primetime Live, May 6.

<><><6><><>

"[Ellen] became a program about a lead character who was gay every single week. And I just think that was too much for people. ... Jerry Seinfeld's character in his program is a heterosexual male. Now, I think when you watch the program, you have a sense every week that he's a heterosexual male. But the theme of each program isn't that he's a heterosexual male. ... I believe Ellen was driven by a very powerful inner passion that made it absolutely impossible for her to slow down. ... She's absolutely right [that] we would not ask a black person to modulate the fact that they were black at all. But our society, our audience, has been dealing with racial issues and is much more open to differences in race than they are differences in sexual choice, sexual tendency. So there's a reality that exists here that she wanted to ignore. ... I believe we tried to give her more personal support. But, again, I think her own passion got in the way of that a bit. She had a great opportunity, and she knew it. To some extent, she took advantage of it. To some extent, she tried to take advantage of it too much, and the result was failure."

--ABC-TV President Robert Iger on Primetime Live, May 6.
 
 

Jason Stuart on the set of Drew Carey

<><><7><><> "It's [the cancellation of Ellen] very sad. First of all, I think [the network] didn't support the show. They put these parental warnings on it and that sent the message that she was doing something wrong. People were saying it was too gay. I thought the show was absolutely hysterical. I don't think it was too gay at all, in the same way that Friends isn't too heterosexual." --Gay comedian Jason Stuart to the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, May 8.

<><><8><><>

"I've said somewhere that promiscuity has always been good to me. I think one of the losses to H.I.V is the easy way we used to meet people of all races, all classes. It's one of the few avocations that cuts across class and race lines. What I really learned about people in the Walt Whitman sense is how alike we are--a Spanish aristocrat or a housepainter in Harlem or a TV personality or the guy who's delivering the milk--the plumbing is essentially the same, the impulses are essentially the same, what works on one works on the other. What's beautiful is the democracy of beauty and the democracy of sexuality which says in the baths that the dockworkers outrank the stockbrokers--it's a beautiful reordering that I tried to bring to bear in the book in the final vision of an erotic paradise."

--Allan Gurganus, gay author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, White People and, now, Plays Well with Others, to The North Carolina Review of Books, Spring 1998.

<><><9><><>

"[The immortality of a good book is] one of the most miraculous transactions. ... That really is paradise for me, to have produced, at the end of one's life, five or six books that still beat with your heartbeat and jump with your erectile tissue, that are still hungry and satisfied at the same time. Amen." 

--Allan Gurganus, gay author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, White People and, now, Plays Well with Others, to The North Carolina Review of Books, Spring 1998. 

<><><10><><>

"If many of our [gay] spokespeople are to be believed, equality with straight America is best won by demonstrating that we can be monogamous spouses, tidy neighbors and loyal soldiers. ... True gay liberation is not about gay people _conforming_, but rather about the whole world _transforming_."
 
-Editorial in the national gay magazine The Guide, May issue.

<><><11><><>

"We need to be clear that gay liberation is about freeing _everyone_ from uptight sexual values, not simply creating a homosexual parallel to a corrupt straight universe. ... Queer assimilation is only a sign of a more enlightened society if society has become more inclusive, not if queers have simply become more conforming."

--Editorial in the national gay magazine The Guide, May issue.

<><><12><><>

"Viagra [the new anti-impotence pill] is already in short supply; gay porn studios are threatening to highjack trucks and hold up neighborhood pharmacies, so go get those prescriptions filled now, before it's too late."

--Windy City Times columnist Michael Beaumier, May 7.

<><><13><><>

"People think that there are a lot of gay people in figure skating, but actually there are not--there are hardly any at all. The ice dancers, the pairs skaters, they're all together as couples, or they're married." 

--Skating champ Rudy Galindo to Cleveland's Gay People's Chronicle, May 1.
 

<><><14><><> "A vagina, I think, is first and foremost [what I look for in a woman]. That's the most important thing in a woman. I tend to like vaginas with teeth, that's what I call them; I tend to like very bitchy women. I find myself most attracted to smart, sarcastic, bitchy women." --Comic Lea DeLaria to Los Angeles' Lesbian News, May issue.

<><><15><><>

"A woman will allow herself to be clouded by her emotions. Her reasonable thought becomes completely unreasonable over the most ridiculous thing. It's a girl thing. It's a cosmic joke that I'm a lesbian, because I understand men so well but women are a complete mystery to me. They're unpredictable. I don't call myself a woman, I'm a butch; it's an entirely different gender. You just never know what [a woman's] gonna do. You never know what they're gonna say."

--Comic Lea DeLaria to Los Angeles' Lesbian News, May issue.

<><><16><><>

"Catholic schoolgirls, about 14 years old [are my guilty pleasure]. It's not like I'm founding the North American Woman- Girl Love Association or anything, but I love to look at Catholic schoolgirls in their uniforms."

--Comic Lea DeLaria to Los Angeles' Lesbian News, May issue.

<><><17><><>

"Mickey Mantle--FBI kept a file on the Yankee slugger. Did Hoover hope 'switch hitter' meant something else?"

--Listed under "Losers" in Newsweek magazine's "Winners and Losers" column, May 18.

<><><18><><>

"A lot of people think that ACT UP's tactics wouldn't work now. I'm here to say that's simply not true." 

--Author and gay/AIDS activist Larry Kramer to Britain's Positive
Nation magazine, May issue.

<><><19><><>

"I'm a happy person. I feel that I did what I could with the talents I had. I know a lot of people think that I am beyond the pale, checked out of the hotel or whatever the expression is, but that doesn't bother me -- what people think -- anymore and that's good too." 

--Author and gay/AIDS activist Larry Kramer to Britain's Positive
Nation magazine, May issue.

<><><20><><>

"The average 23-year-old who doesn't do the circuit or have that much sex, just that one night when he's had unsafe sex – his chances of being infected are just so high because of the multiple-partner unsafe sex that is going on in a certain portion of the community. People have to realize that all of our behavior affects the whole."

--Gay writer Michelangelo Signorile to the gay Texas Triangle,
April 23.
 

Rex Wockner's "Quote Unquote" is archived from mid-1994 onward at http://www.qrd.org/qrd/www/world/wockner.html