Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.

I now realize that I am a gay man before anything else. Other gays may think they're a Jew first, or black, or a banker, but I'm gay.

Mr. Do-Nothing Obama will say today, 'Lets think of all the poor dead people' - or 'let's honor all the dead' instead of fighting for the living. He has been really useless in terms of both HIV and gay issues. He is simply not a leader. He may be president, but he is not a leader.

I don't mind about the dead ones. They're dead. The worst of it is, they cling to the living and won't let go.

AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.

The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there--all throughhistory we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organise ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed.

This is always history's greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.