I don't blame younger generations for their lack of awareness. Americans in general are not interested in history.

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.

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 not proud to be gay any more than I am proud to be right handed or to breathe oxygen.

I get to interact with a bunch of young people that are up against despair constantly.

I don't even want to go to the Pride marches anymore. The politics have been removed almost entirely. They're just huge corporate showcases.

Even in my town, even in San Francisco, thousands of gay men were arrested usually using entrapment techniques every single year for sexual behavior between consenting adults. That continued well into the 1970s until it was finally decriminalized in 1976, I believe.