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"The last year I was in Illinois, I started going out with this guy. When I went to his house, he had a little poodle and all these pictures of Judy Garland on his wall, and I just couldn't relate to that at all. But that is a certain stereotype of what it means to be gay. There's nothing wrong with it, but it just seems that it's predominant in a way that is oppressive -- or at least it was in that place at that time. I just couldn't be gay [in that way]. That's why I ended up starting this band -- to try to reconcile the two main threads of my life, which were my sexuality and my music."

--Jon Ginoli, lead singer of the pop-punk band Pansy Division, to the San Jose Mercury News, June 12.

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"I didn't want to come out and do preachy songs. I wanted to do songs that were celebratory of gay sexuality, but not to the point where it sounds like propaganda. I think that's one of the reasons we've been successful. We don't propagandize. We just tell stories. We tell stories of people that we know. We tell our own stories -- and make up some stories along the way that are interesting."

--Jon Ginoli, lead singer of the pop-punk band Pansy Division, to the San Jose Mercury News, June 12.

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"I would argue that monogamy is part of a pleasure-hating package being sold by aging gay leaders, now in their 50s and 60s, people who through some ghastly process of natural selection managed to survive the plague precisely because they were so dysfunctional that they never could get laid. Whereas normal red-blooded gays in the late 70s were breaking down roles and indulging themselves, these tight-asses were too unredeemably macho to experiment or too drunk to stay awake for the coupling or too homely or self-loathing to attract partners. The virus selected against men who were affectionate, progressive, and fun-loving and left us with these boring old prudes."

--Famed gay writer Edmund White in the June 23 Advocate.

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"We're like an old pair of slippers, kind of worn-down and raggedy. There are certainly better-looking shoes out there, but none quite so comfortable. Nobody would laugh at my stupid jokes the way Aleta does. I can't imagine being with anybody else, and I don't want to imagine it."

--Jean Mayberry of Omaha, Neb., in the June 23 Advocate, which was devoted to the topic of gay monogamy.

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"Although gay journalists need to be journalists first and foremost, I sometimes feel that they employ a divide and conquer strategy for no other purpose than to sell magazines. I just wish that the gay press would see that the true enemy is the far right, not us."

--Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, to the Advocate, June 23.

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"My gay men friends think [Viagra] will make straight men happier, which is good for gay men who are often the target of straight sexual resentment. Maybe with something to do at home other than spin cats by the tail, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, even Dan Burton will retire."

--Lesbian comedian Kate Clinton writing in the June 23 Advocate.

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"I actually think gay people are getting more straight and straight people are getting more gay. I think straight people are very homogenized, very homo, very similar, might not be same sex, but same logo. Everything is merging, banks are merging, you know. And gay people want to get married, they want to get in the military, they're having tons of children. And culturally, as interminable as the discussions were about gays in the military and the 'Ellen' show, all kinds of people had opinions and that's part of the national conversation, and that's good."

--Lesbian comedian Kate Clinton to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 19.

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"I'm the longest married woman in my family. I guess it was serious when we put them rings on. I put one in her left nipple and she put one in my pussy and ever since then we felt like we owned a piece of each other."

--Author Dorothy Allison, (Bastard Out of Carolina, Cavedweller) to the national lesbian magazine Curve, July issue.

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"Important note: please go before you come as all conveniences will be locked to protect the host."

--Note on the invitation sent to 300 people for George Michael's 35th birthday party at a London restaurant June 27.

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"Our sense of history is very disturbing to me. The whole Ellen thing was almost Orwellian. It was like as if she'd come out of nowhere, and no one had come before her. Don't be Canadian, and don't be a male. And don't be on cable."

--Openly gay actor Scott Thompson who played gay characters on national television (Kids In The Hall) years before Ellen DeGeneres and Ellen Morgan came out, to the Texas Triangle, June 11.

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"Leaving aside the question of whether or not witnessing sexual activity is more traumatic than watching automobile accidents or Miami City Commission meetings, the fact remains that an unsuspecting youth or man is more likely to be hit by a bolt of lightning (or win the lottery) than run into sexual activity in a public john (unless he's looking for it). As any vice cop could tell you, catching men having sex in restrooms is difficult, which is why they have to resort to entrapment or other extralegal subterfuges. The fact that reporters had to use hidden cameras to catch their men just proves my point."

--Columnist Jesse Monteagudo in Miami's gay The Weekly News, June 17.

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"If it's serious crime you're trying to prevent, then having lots of people around is very effective. And one of the cool things about public sex is that it gets people into the parks at night."

--Toronto city planner Carolyn Whitzman to Now, Toronto's biggest weekly newspaper, June 25.

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"I wanted to end it all, I wanted it to be over. I didn't have a bright future, and drugs and alcohol didn't help my situation, it depressed me even more. Everything seemed to be going wrong."

--Gay porn star Ryan Idol on his fall from a fourth-floor Manhattan window March 20, to Los Angeles' In magazine, June 29.

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"Gays should quit bitching about Southern Baptists exercising their constitutional right to free speech about homosexuality, which is indeed condemned by the Bible, despite the tortuous casuistry of so many self-interested parties, including clerics. I have been warning and warning for years that the insulting disrespect shown by gay activists to religion -- which has been going on for 20 years virtually unchecked on TV talk shows, with their biased liberal hosts -- would produce a backlash over time."

--Author and academic Camille Paglia in her June 23 Salon Magazine column.

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"[There] was a depressing face-off about Trent Lott's [anti-gay] statement[s] on CNN's 'The Larry King Show' between Gary Bauer, head of the conservative Family Research Council, and openly gay Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts. It would be difficult to say which of the two guests was more physically repellent as a specimen of alleged manhood: the creepy, desiccated, squirrely Bauer or the nasty, whiny Frank, with his puny infant's mouth still squalling for mama's bottle. How bizarre it was to watch homosexuality being acrimoniously debated by two asexual blobs who are still licking their wounds from getting squashed and scorned by all the guys and dolls in the schoolyard."

--Author and academic Camille Paglia in her June 23 Salon Magazine column.

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"I have been struck, in my brief encounters over the years with a half-dozen prominent gay male activists, by the frightening coldness and deadness of their eyes. Behind their smooth, bland faces I saw the seething hatreds of Dostoevskian anarchists. Gay crusading, I concluded, was their way of handling their own bitter misanthropy, which came from other sources. I found these men more spiritually twisted than anyone I have encountered in my life. The gay movement should not be left in their hands."

--Author and academic Camille Paglia in her June 23 Salon Magazine column.

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"For some reason, when I was younger, I dressed up like a girl, I looked feminine, and so straight boys wanted to fuck me. And now I don't really look like that anymore, I'm not a little girl. I'm not skinny, frail, petite. I'm a big guy, although I still wear makeup. So I'm in this weird no-man's-land, and it's fucking strange. I'm learning as I get older that sexuality is a very gray area. I don't actually believe in gay and straight anymore. The older I get, the more I think it's kind of a mind-set. When I was 16, I did not find women attractive. As I've gotten older, I can now look at women's bodies and think, Yeah, they're nice. And I can watch porn videos with straight men and women and actually get turned on."

--Singer Boy George to the Advocate, June 23.

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"I think he thinks he's better than other people. And in particular, he thinks he's better than other gay people. And that's why he's never been able to say he's gay, because if he says he's gay, he has to align himself with people like me and Jimmy Somerville and the drag queens. And he thinks he's a different type of homosexual. George actually thinks he's too good for the gay community."

--Singer Boy George on Singer George Michael, to the Advocate, June 23.

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"We're going to return to a subject we talked about last week, which is the Christian right and homosexuality. And people sometimes say to me, 'You know, you talk about that a lot on your show.' I don't intend to. It's just in the news a lot because the Christian right talks about homosexuality more then they do down at The Ramrod."

--Host Bill Maher on TV's Politically Incorrect, June 22.

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"I was the youngest of four children. And when I found my mother's love was to be divided equally between the four of us, I flew into an ungovernable rage from which I've never really recovered."

--Gay writer-actor Quentin Crisp to the Seattle Gay News, June 12.

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"I just think we got a little too much on the soapbox at times. Every week, I scanned the script to see where we were going to go with this. I think Ellen wanted to get away from the gay story lines, but as soon as you open up, you have to commit to this. We certainly lost some audience. People were not ready for the visual."

--Post-mortem from "Ellen" cast member Joely Fisher (Page), to the Detroit Free Press, June 15.

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