<><><1><><>

"We need to stop asking permission to exist! We do exist, this is it. You've really got me on a soap box now. I feel like we're asking people to understand our lives. Well, they'll never completely do that. What they need to do is to take our lives at face value. ... There's a point where our community has to get to where we just start demanding ... that our lives be valued."

--Gay actor Wilson Cruz (Ricky on My So-Called Life) to Milwaukee's In Step, Nov. 17.

<><><2><><>

"I was definitely the Lenny Bruce of lesbian comedy, the nasty one, the dirty one. But there has been a swing, a change in attitudes in the '90s, [a] swing back to radicalism. ... Audiences have finally caught up with me. I seem to have become the gay poster child."

--Lesbian actress/comedian/singer Lea DeLaria to the New York Blade News, Nov. 13.

<><><3><><>

"As nicely as they could, the Conan O'Brien [TV show] people said, 'You can't be a homosexual on our show, because we're trying to appeal to a Middle American audience.' Now it's not like I have to talk about that every time I open my mouth, but you hate for somebody to say you can't talk about it. But, you see, ten minutes before you go on, they give you a list of things you'll be talking about. So if instead I get up there and decide to talk about, say, finding a dildo in somebody's silverware drawer, they would kick my ass, basically."

--Gay author and National Public Radio star David Sedaris to UNo MAS magazine, Nov. 28.

<><><4><><>

"I'm going to visit him [my former boyfriend Michael] in Bristol next week. It's possible Michael and I might end up back together again. More than anyone in my life, Michael, without even knowing it, changed me as a person because he is so vulnerable that I couldn't be a bully any more. He never put me down. Never made me feel insecure about myself. Was never cruel. Never insulted my music. Never, ever called me fat. Or ugly."

--Singer Boy George to London's The Times, Nov. 28.

<><><5><><>

"Each Tuesday night, Ellen [DeGeneres] and I teach a class for homeless kids. They ask a lot of questions, but basically these kids just want love. They've been kicked out of their homes and are afraid and confused. What we try to do is tell them, 'You are perfect just the way you are.' That's what the workshop at the Gay and Lesbian Center is all about. Helping kids discover that they didn't deserve to be treated like they were. They are perfect and they are loved."

--Actress Anne Heche to Entertainment News Service, Nov. 28.

<><><6><><>

"If I had to put the philosophy that I hold very dear into words, it would be this: You are God. I believe in love as the foundation of everything. I also believe this foundation has gotten trapped in a lot of separation and hate, fighting and warring against individuals and groups, and everything else. My personal belief is that we are all God. If you look to another, you can see that in him. And you can pass that along. If we all just started passing that along, we'd have a much better place to live, and then the foundation would return to love. That's what keeps me going. I know there is that world, that universe, that is truly accepting of all individuals. I believe that's really the only important thing. To get people to understand this about themselves is a gift we must give every time we see someone. ... When I was 18, I began therapy for the first time. Dr. Bernie Rosenbloom, who I'm still in touch with, started me on this course, or made me aware of it. It's the most incredible experience to start on this journey of self-exploration. My reward was meeting and falling in love with Ellen [DeGeneres]."

--Actress Anne Heche to Entertainment News Service, Nov. 28.

<><><7><><>

"Everything that I ever feared happened to me. I lost my show. I've been attacked like hell. I went from making a lot of money on a sitcom to making no money."

--Gay actress Ellen DeGeneres to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Nov. 29.

<><><8><><>

"I'll fight anybody to this day who says the show [Ellen] was not good. We did some great episodes that last season, and someday their brilliance will be recognized. ... My show wasn't appreciated, and my talent isn't appreciated, and I wish people could get beyond the fact that I'm gay. I'm sure even talking like this brings it up again -- 'If she would just shut up for two years, then we'd hire her.' That's what people say: Has it been enough time, has it died down? But we're just trying to be truthful, and what we've learned is that this is a hard town to be truthful in."

--Ellen DeGeneres to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Nov. 29.

<><><9><><>

"When you discover discrimination for the first time, which I did with Ellen, there is no other calling except to be an activist."

--Actress Anne Heche to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Nov. 29.

<><><10><><>

"The only reason anybody should go see 'Psycho' is to see Anne Heche get assassinated."

--Writer Camille Paglia as quoted in the New York Post, Dec. 3.

<><><11><><>

"Ellen [DeGeneres] went on to turn her dying sitcom into a preachy, self-congratulatory forum for lesbian issues, then was shocked, shocked that the ratings continued to plummet, resulting in cancellation. She accused ABC of yanking support for the show out of homophobic fear, when, in all probability, Ellen's making her homosexuality the issue mau-mau'd ABC execs into giving the foundering little show more time than it otherwise would have had."

--New York Post columnist Rod Dreher, Dec. 3.

<><><12><><>

"When the history of gay life in the 20th century is finally written, a small chapter might be devoted to explaining how an overgrown schoolboy and Tory moralist named Andrew Sullivan managed to emerge as the most prominent voice of the gay rights movement in America; how, in fact, the whole issue of gay liberation was hijacked in the wake of the AIDS epidemic by a band of reactionary, middle-class gay commentators in a dither over 'gay promiscuity,' urging marriage and monogamy on their wayward brothers and decrying 'the cult of masculinity' as the source of all evil in homosexual life. ... That marriage has never put a dent in the promiscuous nature of men is of no concern to the 'neo-culturalists,' as they like to call themselves. Bruce Bawer, Gabriel Rotello, Michelangelo Signorile, and the inevitable Larry Kramer have, with Sullivan and a few others, secured a virtual lock on gay commentary in the American media, appearing with depressing regularity on talk shows and op- ed pages, spinning out books and magazine articles in what amounts to an incessant rant about the crippled psyches and empty lives of male homosexuals."

--Peter Kurth, writing in Salon Magazine, Nov. 30.

<><><13><><>

"I believe that if you truly, truly love your children, you need to supply condoms in a place in your home, at a quantity that makes it a non-judgmental situation for them to have them. I mean, put 200 condoms in a box in some place in the house where everybody isn't all the time, so that your kids can take them. If they want to make water balloons out of them, great. If they want to carry them so they feel tough, great. If they want to give them to their friends, even better."

--Actress Sharon Stone in a speech at the United Nations on World AIDS Day, Dec. 1.

<><><14><><>

"Although I'm a gay person, I'm definitely a man on the ice. That's as simple as it is: I'm a man on the ice and I'm a man off the ice. Because I'm 'outed' doesn't mean I'm going to be a different person."

--Canadian figure-skating champ Brian Orser -- outed via a palimony suit -- to the Ottawa Sun, Dec. 2.

<><><15><><> "Brian never skated soft. He was masculine in his skating. He never flaunted it on the ice. He skated male, and I respect that a lot. I believe in that, because so many people can end up bashing the sport. We have some very colourful characters, like Rudy [Galindo, a gay U.S. skater] who's also a great friend, but we can't have it all like that."

--Canadian figure-skating champ Elvis Stojko in response to the outing of skating champ Brian Orser (via a palimony suit), to the Ottawa Sun, Dec. 2.

<><><16><><>

"If I'm going to be remembered in America as the guy that got caught playing with himself in the toilet, then I want people to know my take on it. ... I saw this guy cruising, an undercover cop who was basically pretending to cruise. He was very cute; he wasn't Karl Malden. I didn't get out of my car until everyone left the park. Then I followed him in. [Then] there was like a SWAT team! Once they got their man, eight of them jumped out of nowhere. I heard one officer say, 'Did you get one?' I'm not a fish. With the shit that goes on in this town, it's unbelievable that tax money pays for this. ... There were reports in the papers about me being led away crying. Not true. I wasn't thinking, 'I'm ruined.' I was absolutely furious. It was clearly entrapment, not an accident. ... The minute it happened, I knew it would be massive news and hugely embarrassing. But within a day, after the anger died down, I started to see how funny it was. I had helicopters flying around my house because I got my willy out. It pushed something of monumental importance off the front pages. You really start to understand how crazy the media are."

--Pop singer George Michael to USA Today, Dec. 3.

<><><17><><>

"I've probably done more with the [my new] 'Outside' video [about cruising and public sex] than I could have done with 10 years of speaking at Stonewall events. I have a problem with activists because I believe in assimilation totally. Almost every Western culture is being attacked by this plague of separatism. I would be ineffective as an activist because I'm too moderate. My arrest brought me into the political arena, and I've said my piece about what the police should and shouldn't be doing. I made a video on the subject. This issue is part of my life right now, but it won't be part of my life next year."

--Pop singer George Michael to USA Today, Dec. 3.

<><><18><><>

"You must realize that neither you nor anyone else was 'born gay.' Unless you are in the minuscule percentage of those suffering from innate endocrinological or developmental conditions, you were intended by Mother Nature to function heterosexually. That is your ancient heritage, which gay militants have tried to deny and hide from you. It is what connects you to the sensory experience of the overwhelming majority of men who have walked this earth."

--Lesbian writer Camille Paglia in her Nov. 25 column at Salon Magazine, responding to a letter from a male reader.

<><><19><><> "Your attraction to men relates to what your father gave or did not give you. Alas, in the marooned household of the middle-class nuclear family, individual fathers cannot supply everything a son needs to secure a stable masculine identity. Male homosexuality today is a quest for that missing term, just as it is also a recoil from the decline in glamour and appeal of female archetypes like mother and wife."

--Writer Camille Paglia in her Nov. 25 column at Salon Magazine, responding to a letter from a male reader.

<><><20><><>

"We know more about family values than most straight people will ever realize. We know what it is to hold a family together when we can't hold hands with our spouses on the street safely, when our partners can't share in our health benefits, when we worry whether our children will be attacked because of the identity of their parents."

--Windy City Times columnist Jennifer Vanasco, Nov. 19.