The moment you say, "We are proud. I'm proud to be this, and I'm proud to be that," what you're saying is we're almost as good as the others. "Almost" always means not quite.

I always say to people, "If you share my dream, why don't we walk together?" And that's my only organizing tool.

Giving votes in exchange for ideological support. To wit: identity politics for homosexuals.

Out of the mists of our long oppression, / We bring love for ourselves and each other, / And love for the gifts we bear, /So heavy and so painful the fashioning of them, /So long the road given us to travel them. A separate people, /We bring a gift to celebrate each other, /’Tis a gift to be gay! / Feel the pride of it!

I knew that I was gay in every bone of my body. So I did the only thing I could do. I started the movement.

I was an older brother. So I had to do a lot of things first. My father was a self-made man, and he would beat me senseless. But he was a Scotsman, and stubborn. I'm his son, and I'm stubborn, too. I go on being stubborn.

Ostracism means you don't exist at all. And that's a very difficult situation to live with. As gay people, we had been chasing ostracism by that point for probably 300 years. You just knew that you should have dropped into your black hole.