"After seven years I'm resentful and pissed off at the people who were in the closet to start with and then came out when they were famous, got to be even bigger than they were, and those of us that were out from the beginning get ignored. Bit-ter. [She bursts out laughing.] You're not going to see me or Kate Clinton on the cover of The Advocate or Out. You're not going to see Bob Smith with a great big story about his new book. You'll see Greg Louganis. You'll see Melissa, k.d., Ellen, Amanda Bearse, Dan Butler -- all the people who were famous first and then came out. Somehow we love that in the gay community. But if you started out from the beginning deciding you were going to be out, it's kind of like, yeah, OK, whatever.' And that is painful."

--Lesbian comedian Suzzane Westenhoefer to Miami's The Weekly News, Nov. 26.

"I do not believe that God intended them [gays and lesbians] to suffer persecution and discrimination throughout their lives on earth. ... He did not intend them to be mistreated. [My faith] leads me to the conclusion that legal discrimination against them should not be encouraged and is wrong."

--Vice President Al Gore to the Knoxville [Tennessee] News- Sentinel, Nov. 24.

"There is ... some evidence that homosexuality is something of a fad among young people. On a few college campuses, the term 'gay until graduation' is used derisively to describe those who experiment with gay sex. Gay equality has nonetheless become a '90s version of Birkenstock environmentalism for many youths. Even in certain parts of suburbia, gay is becoming more than O.K.; it's cool."

--From a Dec. 8 Time magazine report on gay youth.

"If you don't want people to know you're a lesbian, why in the hell have an affair with me."

--Author Rita Mae Brown (Rubyfruit Jungle) on her decision to out author Fannie Flagg (Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe) in her new book Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary Rabble- Rouser, to Out magazine, December issue.

"I'm now very careful sexually, and I don't think that knowing you're positive does you any good. I'd rather not know and just take good care of myself. ... I can see the medical argument for getting testing nowadays -- there are new drugs which help if you know you're positive early -- but there's still a part of me which says no, I'd rather not know. It means I'm more responsible, and careful about who I have sex with."

--Boy George to London's The Pink Paper, Nov. 28.

"ISO horney poz tops tired of screwing around with 'safer' sex, this attractive, sexually hot bottom boy wants to be a receptacle for your hot loads of charged cum and piss. Let's take sex back to the way it should be...Raw. Bare skin against hot bare skin."

--Posted on the barebacking web site xtremesex. The URL is http://rampages.onramp.net/~tmike/xtremesex/brothers_f.html

"More and more gay people are beginning to realize that it's time to redefine what it means to be gay. Allowing sex-centrism to remain the sole definition of homosexuality is now coming to be seen as the greatest act of self-destruction. There is a growing understanding that we created a culture that in effect murdered us, and that if we are to remain alive it's time to redefine homosexuality as something far greater than what we do with our genitals. [T]his redefinition will require nothing less than remaking our culture."

--Author Larry Kramer in a New York Times opinion piece, Dec. 12.

"Michelangelo Signorile and Gabriel Rotello proved to be worthy for the role of pariahs. Both were heavily promoting books that chastised the promiscuous, drug-using lifestyle of many urban gay men. And both had played a less than honorable role in helping deal with recalcitrant sexclub establishments in New York City that refused to enforce ridiculous public health laws banning virtually all forms of sex as unsafe. Both were quickly labeled 'neo-conservatives.' As it turns out, they were labeled this by none other than a cadre of left-wing activists. The odd thing is that both these men, by their own admission, identify as 'progressives' (buzz word for 'leftist'). But, in my opinion, because these two high-profile progressive voices turned out to be somewhat anti-sex (some would say VERY anti-sex), it became essential to paint them as neo-conservatives. Thus continuing the myth that all conservatives are anti-sex and all leftists are at least open-minded about sexual issues. The end result of all this was divisiveness where it need not have existed."

--"Cruisemaster" Keith Griffith in a commentary running on his www.cruisingforsex.com web site, Dec. 04.

"[P]olice interest in punishing public sex practitioners is near or at an all time high. The Ramble in New York's Central Park, a patch of land as important to the history of male sex as Bunker Hill is to democracy, is under police siege. Even San Francisco has begun to see crackdowns against park sex and against sex in tearooms at such venerable gay haunts as Macy's. Across the nation, parks and tearooms that were once abuzz with men are now empty or inhabited only by diehards and fear."

--Columnist John Fall writing about the so-called "sex panic" in his column at www.cruisingforsex.com, Dec. 9.

"I could be thrown out the door into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue at any given moment. But at least I'd have a clear conscience of knowing that for the people that I'd lost, I've done everything I possibly can. That's the only thing that keeps me sane. That and a lot of wine."

--White House AIDS czar Sandy Thurman to Windy City Times, Dec. 4.

"Washington [D.C.] has some of the most beautiful young gay men I've ever seen. If I were a young gay man, it's the first place I'd move."

--White House AIDS czar Sandy Thurman to Windy City Times, Dec. 4.

"I knew that if they found out, it would end my TV career, and they did find out, and it did end my TV career."

--Lesbian California state legislator Sheila James Kuehl on her late 50s/early 60s career playing Zelda Gilroy on the TV series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, in a Dec. 7 speech to the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus. Keuhl was appointed the first openly gay or lesbian member of Harvard's Board of Overseers, an alumni group responsible for approving major university decisions and auditing various facets of the university system.

"From the beginning, I said that I didn't want to become a spokesman for gay rights. But here I am. ... There's still a lot more to do. There's a warning label on my show sending a message that there is something wrong with me."

--Ellen DeGeneres receiving the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California's Bill of Rights Award for advancing "the cause of gay rights 100-fold," Dec. 7 in Beverly Hills, Calif.

"Absolutely. If that's what society permits, who am I to be judgmental?"

--Bob Eubanks, host of The Newlywed Game, when asked Dec. 12 by Entertainment Weekly, "If same-sex marriage is legalized, will you allow gay couples on The Newlywed Game?"

"In spite of the fact that there's still no federal written guarantee that we're covered by the 14th Amendment, is it permissible ... to state that we've turned a significant corner and that the struggle for lesbian and gay civil rights is now, with In & Out and DeGeneres and Clinton partying down with the HRC, to be accounted a success? ... A movement succeeds not when everything is perfect but when so much has changed that there's no going back."

--Playwright Tony Kushner writing in the Dec. 23 Advocate.

"The center of gravity for our gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered communities is right where we are. It's in the cities and towns, the states and communities that we call home. We are impacted more by what happens in our own city council or county commission every day than we are by what happens in Washington, DC. The path to our freedom begins at our own front door and intersects with tens of thousands of others who travel the same journey for civil rights for all people."

--NGLTF Executive Director Kerry Lobel in a Dec. 11 syndicated commentary.

"Many of us may ... get a glimmer every now and then that in some profound way we are different than heteros. That maybe the consciousness, politics, ethos, and socialization of homosexuality--which we can call, if we wish, 'gay culture'—may be different from the mainstream glop we see everyday on TV, that is sold to us at every K-mart and shopping mall, and that tries to parade itself in front of us as 'normalcy.' In short, that there is some overriding 'gay consciousness' which we do use to connect with each other."

--Writer Perry Brass in an essay published at the badpuppy.com Web site, Dec. 15.

"I don't at all believe it's been an invasion of privacy. I've had the best six months of my life [since I came out as Ellen DeGeneres' girlfriend]. I think it's important that the country is able to kind of chew apart a thing that's never been seen before. My trepidation was that people would think I was lying. I never wanted people to think that. So I was very quick, and also calculated with my publicist, too, you know, to say, 'Let's do this smartly. Let's tell the truth quickly, and maybe we can help the cause a little bit, make people feel a little more OK with the love that I have and hopefully people can have in the future.'"

--Actress Anne Heche, Ellen DeGeneres' lover, to the Hackensack, N.J., Record, Dec. 14.

"Gays and lesbians are the only minority that have to find our own tribe. Other minorities grow up among their own people, but we have to find our own, and that's part of what makes this community special."

--Guide Trevor Hailey of the "Cruising the Castro" walking tour, to the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, Dec. 15.

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