ON BEING GAY:

"Genetic research may yet lead to the discovery that the gay gene is a disease gene.  . . .  I am a Colin Powell Republican and a gay person who is an ardent assimilationist.  I am an assimilationist in part because I look at a homosexual  orientation as a biological roll of the dice that has all the political importance of left-handedness, i.e., none at all.  For this reason . . . I too would not be opposed to considering genetic surgery."       --Chandler Burr, The Weekly Standard, December 16, 1996. "Conservatives who dislike homosexuality have always hated the concept of a gay gene and argued against it.  But this is because conservatives do not understand what its existence really implies.  The gay gene is a remarkable vindication of conservative ideas about human nature and may offer one of the most devastating efutations of  liberalism we have yet seen. . . . "Ultimately, a moral opposition to homosexuality is above debate."       --Chandler Burr, The Weekly Standard, December 16, 1996. "The time is ripe for us to leave the plantation of liberal government and start acting like what we are--a group of adults who want to live lives as normal and healthy as everyone else in the mainstream.  If we do, I think we will be on the path to my dream--an America in which being gay is no more remarkable than being left-handed."       --John Berresford, The Washington Post, June 11, 1995. ON THE GAY MOVEMENT: "Following legalization of same-sex marriage and a couple of other things, I think we should have a party and close down the gay rights movement for good."       --Andrew Sullivan, in Out Takes (1997). "The notion of sexuality as cultural subversion distanced it from the vast majority of gay people who not only accept the natural origin of their sexual orientation, but wish to be integrated into society as it is.  For most gay people--the closet cases and barflies, the construction workers and investment bankers, the computer programmers     and parents--a `queer' identity is precisely what they want to avoid."       --Andrew Sullivan, The New Republic, May 10, 1993. "The standard political model sees homosexuals as an oppressed minority who must fight for their liberation through political action.  But that model's usefulness is     drawing to a close.  It is ceasing to serve the interests of ordinary gay people, who ought to begin disengaging from it, even drop it."       --Jonathan Rauch, The New Republic, October 7, 1991. "There's a vital truth here for the gay rights movement--namely, that we need urgently to put behind us an ideology that quixotically rejects and ridicules everything      the average American believes in (God, country, capitalism), that touts diversity while condemning any breach of the party line as right-wing heresy, and that sees the Republican party as an implacable foe and middle Americans as unchangeable bigots."      --Bruce Bawer, The Advocate, January 24, 1995. ON AIDS: "We should stop seeing AIDS as anybody else's problem.  The sad fact is that every  gay man who got AIDS by sex got it from another man, and by doing something he chose to do."       --John Berresford, The Washington Post, June 11, 1995. "We brought AIDS upon ourselves by a way of living that welcomed it."       --Larry Kramer, The Advocate, May 27, 1997. "Rotello points out that the extreme promiscuity of some gay men created an `ecological niche' in which the virus passed from infected to uninfected.  This niche       gave rise to the AIDS epidemic, which is what makes it possible for someone like Pat Buchanan to say, `The poor homosexuals--they have declared war on Nature, and now   Nature is exacting an awful retribution.'"       --Chandler Burr, Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Summer 1997. "Nature always extracts a price for sexual promiscuity."       --Larry Kramer, The Advocate, May 27, 1997. "In a culture where unrestrained multipartnerism has produced ecological catastrophe, precisely what is needed is a culture in which people feel socially supported as gay men to settle down with partners for significant periods of time."       --Gabriel Rotello, The Nation, April 21, 1997. "Certainly the specter of AIDS has done much to discredit the idea that gay men have a lot to teach others about pleasure, since we appear to be dying from the very pleasure we wanted to educate the world about."       --Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology, (1997). "Exceptionalists argue that routine testing [without consent] will `drive AIDS underground'--make people avoid the health-care system altogether. . . Ultimately one       must ask whether people who would go underground because of perceived self-interest should dictate policy--and also whether such people would cooperate in disease- prevention efforts under any circumstances."       --Chandler Burr, The Atlantic Monthly, June 1997. ON SEX: "Societies seem to have universally recognized that while many individuals desire sexual variety, sexual license leads to social destabilization and is particularly       disruptive to the process of raising children.  The purpose of encouraging strong families, aside from providing children with a stable environment, has generally been       to clarify inheritance and property rights and to avoid the disruptions and distractions that seem to accompany promiscuity."       --Gabriel Rotello, The Nation, April 21, 1997. "With the police off their backs, many [gay men] simply did what men have empowered themselves to do for centuries:  they became as sexually adventurous and       indulgent as they wanted to be, denying any responsibility for themselves or others in the process."       --Michelangelo Signorile, Life Outside (1997). "Ultimately, to understand sexual ecology is to understand that the gay sexual revolution of the seventies was profoundly anti-ecological.  Gay men can never go back."       --Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology (1997). "How can many lesbians and a great many gay men themselves not throw their hands in the air, rightly disgusted and anguished?  Perhaps most important, what do HIV  prevention leaders do now?  Having found it difficult enough to grapple with men who are `slipping up,' now they have to come to terms with what could be a     significant number of people who are willfully and sometimes angrily defying safer-sex efforts, rebelling against the rest of us, and thereby keeping HIV transmission      thriving, affecting adversely the entire gay world."       --Michelangelo Signorile, Out, July 1997. ON GAY CULTURE: "We don't have a gay culture, I don't believe.  We have our sexuality, and we have made a culture out of our sexuality, and that culture has killed us."       --Larry Kramer, The Advocate, May 27, 1997. "Sadly, I feel myself more isolated than ever from my fellow gay writers.   But then I always did."       --Larry Kramer, The Advocate, May 27, 1997. "It's true that most gay men in urban America are not living a life of enforced heterosexuality, as gay liberationists might call it, with a driveway, a picket fence, and children to nurture.  Many are, however, instead living a life of enforced cult homosexuality, with parties, drugs, and gyms ruling their lives.  Some men have in fact found that there is a thin line between liberation and oppression."       --Michelangelo Signorile, Life Outside (1997). "There are very few social incentives of the kind conservatives like for homosexuals not to be depraved:  there's little social or familial support, no institution to encourage fidelity or monogamy, precious little religious or moral outreach to guide homosexuals into more virtuous living.  This is not to say that homosexuals are not responsible for their actions, merely that in a large part of homosexual subculture there is much a conservative would predict, when human beings are abandoned with extremely few social incentives for good or socially responsible behavior.  But the proper conservative response to this is surely not to infer that this behavior is inevitable, or to use it as a reason to deter others from engaging in a responsible homosexul existence, if that is what they want; but rather to construct social institutions and guidelines to modify and change that behavior for the better."       --Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal (1995). ON GAY MARRIAGE: Legalization of same-sex marriage, [critics] argue, would create a two-tiered gay society in which married couples would be viewed as legitimate, while those who       were unmarried would be considered social outcasts.  This seems wildly exaggerated,  but the core of the objection--that marriage would provide status to those who married and implicitly penalize those who did not--seems essentially correct.  Indeed, that's a  key point."       --Gabriel Rotello, The Nation, April 21, 1997. "If gay marriage is recognized, single gay people over a certain age should not be surprised when they are disapproved of or pitied.  That is a vital part of what makes     marriage work.  It's stigma as social policy.  If marriage is to work, it cannot be merely a `lifestyle option.' It must be privileged. . . It is not enough, I think, for gay people to say we want the right to marry.  If we do not use it, shame on us."       --Jonathan Rauch, The New Republic, May 6, 1996.