AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.

I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people would have gotten sick.

I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a very opinionated man who uses words as fighting tools.

Some reporter called me 'the angriest gay man in the world' or some such. Well, it stuck, but I realized it was very useful.

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

I've spent fifteen years of my life fighting for our right to be free and make love whenever, wherever... And you're telling me that all those years of what being gay stood for is wrong... and I'm a murderer. We have been so oppressed! Don't you remember how it was? Can't you see how important it is for us to love openly, without hiding and without guilt?

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were gay, just for starters. They didn't have a name for it, but their primary affections and intellectual attractions were all for other men.