I think that a big part of the energy that was going into fighting AIDS was reduced when we saw that more of the new infections were among our black and brown young people. That's a sad truth to have to claim, but I believe it's true.

The sense of urgency has almost completely vanished.

The subset of our population that has not benefited from the advancement of medication is black and brown people.

I was bullied pretty badly especially in middle school. High school was not as bad as middle school, but I was not a macho kid at all. And the kids saw me as different from a very, very early age.

When I was saving pills to kill myself, I thought there was no hope. I thought my life was over because I was a homosexual.

I am old school, I joined the gay liberation movement in 1972. If you had told me in 1972 that in the year 2009 I would be campaigning for the right to join the army or get married I think I would have started dating women at that time.

I go back to the parallels with 1963, 1964 when white America really became aware of the brutality of segregation, the cruelty of the apartheid system which existed in the south. Then white people began to get on the freedom buses and travel to the south and be part of the voter registration drives and they... some of them were beaten and some of them were murdered but they stood with the African-American community and the civil rights movement. It's time for straight people to do that today and it is time for gay people to insist that they do that today.