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.

With the full realization that, in order to earn for ourselves any place in the sun, we must with perseverance and self-discipline work collectively for the full first-class citizenship participation of Minorities everywhere, including ourselves.

The police had a practice of entrapping people. This was done all over the country, but we had a particularly vicious group here in Southern California because of the Hollywood situation. They knew they could get a lot of them. They were shaking down people for thousands in blackmail.

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.

If you look into the history of fashion, you'll discover that Gernreich was the leading name for years and the leading fashion designer both here in the United States and internationally.

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.

The assimilationist movement is running us into the ground.