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"The AIDS crisis is over. Three years ago in Seattle, 500 people died. There were 30 deaths this year. Habeas corpus. We're stepping over the bodies of women with cervical cancer, elderly gays and lesbians, people with hepatitis, as if there were only one disease in the world. It's instructive that all of the hate mail I get [about my position on this] is from fags."

--Syndicated sex-advice columnist Dan Savage in an Oct. 13 interview with New York City's Village Voice.

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"For all the dick I suck I don't feel that gay anymore. Identity is an act of will, not a fact. You can't take a scraping of someone's DNA for their identity. I think we tend to overanalyze each other. This need to know the reason why something makes your dick hard or your pussy wet can really take the erotic substance out of life."

--Syndicated sex-advice columnist Dan Savage in an Oct. 13 interview with New York City's Village Voice.

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"The most powerful and widespread communications tool in the world is beaming neutered gay people into Americans' homes several times a week, making us less of a threat and more a part of the collective story that the nation entertains and comforts itself with each night. The significance of this penetration into the lives of straight America is huge. In becoming a regular part of the TV schedule, we seep into the nation's consciousness. Assimilation is about being a regularly featured character in the eternal autobiography of the United States, most of which is told and received via television. Gay people, minus the sex, are becoming as common as cable; we're now just another channel in the TV Guide of humanity."

--John Fall, columnist at www.cruisingforsex.com, Oct. 20.

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"I wouldn't want to be called that [a gay actor], because if I categorized myself that way, or as 'a queer artist,' a term that's sometimes used, I would be cutting myself off from plenty of parts. There are a lot of roles I enjoy playing -- from Dussander to Uncle Vanya to Macbeth -- that have nothing to do with being gay." --British actor Sir Ian McKellen to the Boston Globe, Oct. 11.

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"When you think a little about it, it comes down to the idea of keeping a needless secret. You're just hurting yourself. Coming out publicly turned out to be the best thing I ever did, from a personal and a professional standpoint. I feel that there's nothing I can't do now."

--British actor Sir Ian McKellen to the Boston Globe, Oct. 11.

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"If your ears ever told you that I ever said anything complimentary about that nitty twit [James Collard] who edits your repulsively banal and useless magazine than you are even more out of touch with the realities of today's gay world than even its last three issues has led our world to witness. Have a nice life and if you ever regain your intelligence please inject some of it into OUT."

--Letter from author-activist Larry Kramer to Henry Scott, president of Out magazine, Oct. 13.

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"[T]he opportunity to be threatened, humiliated and to live in fear of being beaten to death is the only 'special right' our culture bestows on homosexuals."

--Denver Post columnist Diane Carman, Oct. 10.

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"I remember spending two hours on Texas talk radio on a book tour and then curling up into a ball, and saying, 'No, I can't do this anymore.' It's emotionally battering, psychologically battering. Yet I know there is no alternative to that debate. Until gay people realize that's what they've got to do, however difficult, we're not going to get anywhere. It's so easy to just say, 'Oh, we'll hang out in Provincetown, and we'll seal this place off, and we'll have fun, and we'll forget that any of this happens, that any of this has already affected us, already affected the way we live our lives.' There is a way of surviving that is basically a form of abdication -- and the temptation for that is so enormous, especially now. AIDS took that luxury away from us. We couldn't abdicate because if we abdicate we'd be dead. It was as simple as that."

--Gay author-activist Andrew Sullivan to the Boston Globe, Oct. 13.

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"It's one of the few places where you can see a day-tripping family from Revere walking absentmindedly past two bearded drag queens, and nobody bats an eyelid. It proves to me that that sort of integration is actually conceivable -- if not likely -- if you set a standard and say, 'This is the way things are.' People are much more flexible and adaptable than they're sometimes given credit for."

--Gay author-activist Andrew Sullivan on Provincetown, Mass., to the Boston Globe, Oct. 13.

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"The country now knows what some of us have asserted for several years now: that, whatever his other virtues, President Clinton is, indisputably, a liar -- a pathological, premeditated, serial, self-conscious, shame-free liar. The occasion for this revelation is a sad and tawdry tale of infidelity, sexual exploitation, abuse of office, and perjury. But sex is not the fundamental issue here and never has been. And neither is the appalling nature of Clinton's enemies. Starr's inquisitorial excess is something gay people are right to suspect and fear. But Starr's prissy puritanism does not and cannot excuse the presidential dishonesty that prompted it. For the fundamental issue here is honesty -- and Clinton's lack of it."

--Gay activist-author Andrew Sullivan writing in the Oct. 27 Advocate.

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"[I]f you wage a well-financed media air war in which people with an innate difference in sexual orientation are ceaselessly branded as sinful and diseased and un-American seekers of 'special rights,' ground war will follow. It's a story as old as history. Once any group is successfully scapegoated as a subhuman threat to 'normal' values by a propaganda machine, emboldened thugs take over."

--New York Times columnist Frank Rich writing on the Matthew Shepard murder, Oct. 14.

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"By the time [Mathew] Shepard died in a Colorado hospital, his suffering had been transformed into a passion play of sexual politics, touching off a vicious new debate: on one side, civil- rights crusaders who say that federal law can help protect gays from hateful violence; on the other, evangelical Christians who believe that Jesus Christ can save gays from themselves. At his funeral in Casper, 700 mourners heard him eulogized as a martyr to the cause of tolerance. Outside, however, a dozen TV trucks uplinked video of protesters with signs that said 'No Fags in Heaven' and 'No Tears for Queers.'"

--Newsweek magazine, Oct. 26.

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"Fred continues to be an embarrassment to our state. ... Ultimately this will be between Fred and God. But, I'd love to be there for the discussion." --Kansas Gov. Bill Graves on Topeka Baptist preacher Fred Phelps, who pickets homosexual funerals (including Matthew Shepard's) with signs saying "God Hates Fags." Phelps is online at www.godhatesfags.com. Graves' remarks appeared in the Oct. 17 Topeka Capital-Journal.