You know, it's a very treatable disease. You shouldn't feel ashamed. But I'm afraid that's carried on very much so from the first days of AIDS, when it was basically a gay disease. And then, of course, you know, it affected everybody.

I didn't really know what I was until I came to America and I had sex [for the first time] in San Francisco in 1970. It was with someone of my own sex.

Once you have people around you who don't question you, you're in a dangerous place.

Everything I thought I'd hate about having children - the crying, the screaming - nothing fazes me. I love it all and it's relaxed me.

I mean, in some cases with libel laws, you know, they can write things about people who have no course of action, because they can't afford to take legal action against them.

My mother encouraged me and was very great about me being gay, but she always encouraged me to follow my musical dreams, which I'm very grateful for.

We can't keep thinking of gay people as being ostracised; we can't keep thinking of Muslim people as being [ostracised] because of the fundamentalism that occurs in Islam. Muslim people have to do something about speaking up about it. We can't judge a book by its cover.