Quotes About Gay

We've had a culture war roaring away, and the kinds of people who want to abuse and discriminate against gay people who are adults can't really lay their hands on us unless they want to be gay-bashers and go to jail. They abuse us from afar and in the abstract, they abuse us with checkbooks and ballots, but their kids go to school on Monday morning. And there's a gay kid. And they feel they have license to beat that gay kid up in a way that I don't think they did when I was in school. I think it's gotten worse.

I don't buy into the idea that an Irish writer should write about Ireland, or a gay writer should write about being gay. But when I found the right story, I saw it as an opportunity to write about being a teenager and being gay. Most people, whether you're gay or straight or whatever, have experienced that relationship where one person is much more interested than the other.

Pride became this dogma which meant you couldn't criticize anything gay - if you were the least bit critical of gay culture or people or any gay person doing any gay thing, that was an insufficient display of pride. You were suffering from internalized homophobia. As opposed to external homophobia.

Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay.

Because society places a value on masculinity, gay men aspire to it. If you go to a gay club and the doorman says, 'You do realise this is a gay club, don't you lads?' you get all excited because you think, 'Wow, he thought I was straight!'

It's important to stress what I didn't find. I did not prove that homosexuality is genetic, or find a genetic cause for being gay. I didn't show that gay men are born that way, the most common mistake people make in interpreting my work. Nor did I locate a gay center in the brain.

I was still closeted, but from the day I decided to run for office, knowing that I was gay, I decided that I would, of course, still be closeted but that I would work very hard for gay rights. It would be totally dishonorable, being gay, not to do that. So I had that as kind of a secondary agenda.

What has become clear to me is that it is not the inherent nature of being gay that causes such a reduced life; it is, rather, the social circumstances around being gay: the perceptions of it and the cultural norms that it is said to violate. As some of those norms have changed, I have been able to be gay, to have a marriage, to have a family, and to have - if there is wood to knock on - a fortunate and happy life.

Why shouldn't gay people be allowed to be able to marry? Those against gay marriages say marriage should only be between a man and a woman. God, I of all people know that doesn't always work!

Beautiful as sweet, And young as beautiful, and soft as young, And gay as soft, and innocent as gay!

The first gay person I ever met was surely not the first gay person I ever met.

I think dragging someone out of the closet who isn't necessarily engaged in anti-gay activities can have a destructive effect on them and on us. I don't want unwilling gay people advocating on my behalf; I think that's a challenge.

I've had so many interviews where the last question is, Are you gay? I had to find very creative ways to say that I was gay, but that I wasn't going to talk about it.

What is it with conservatives? Seriously, I'm not trying to be partisan but it seems like if they're anti-illegal alien, they have illegal aliens working for them. If they're anti-gay, they turn out to be gay. If they're super Christian, they're a witch.

It is astonishing that gay and lesbian Americans are still treated as second-class citizens. I am confident that, very soon, the laws of this nation will reflect the basic truth that gay and lesbian people - like all human beings - are born equal in dignity and rights.

I've never dated anyone because they were vegetarian, just like I'm gay but don't only go to gay bars. I hang out with people because they are fun, smart, and kind, and if they happen to be veg I'm thrilled.

I'm happy to say I haven't received that much negative feedback. I'm always thrilled when I get feedback from young people, particularly from The New Normal, young gay people - when they say they want that when they grow up, that means a lot to me. As a kid growing up, I didn't really have a lot of gay role models on television, so it's nice to be part of a movement that gives some more of those.

They've said I'm gay, they've said everyone is gay. I personally don't believe in doing huge lawsuits about that stuff. Tom does. That's what he wants to do, that's what he's going to do. You do not tell Tom what to do. He is a force to be reckoned with.

As to whether Marcos is gay: Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.

In entirely unrelated news, there's a new proposal to mandate coverage for gay infertility. The problem is that gay infertility is just biology. Two men and two women are not infertile. They're just not capable of impregnating each other. This isn't a medical problem. It's a mental problem.

I think religion has always tried to turn hatred towards gay people. Religion promotes the hatred and spite against gays. But there are so many Christian people I know who are gay and love their religion...

Social Science, is not a 'gay science' but rueful, which finds the secret of this universe in 'supply and demand' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone. Not a 'gay science', no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, the dismal science

I often refer to myself as a gay man and all my friends are gay and I would like nothing more than for them to be able to be married.

If you're a teacher, for instance, there are ways to have positive representation of gay people in the classroom. Making sure that, historically, people are noted and archived, and that kids are getting just positive images of people who are gay.

Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.

There is also somehow the idea that this gay thing is all just about indulgence in carnal pleasure. When I was twenty and felt that nobody could know I was gay, I was having sex with strangers in public parks. I don't think it was evil exactly, but it wasn't so great either. There was nobody particularly benefiting from it, except, I suppose, to the extent that it gave some pleasure to me and perhaps whomever I was with.

Feeling so gay, feeling so gay.

Who cares if it's a campaign strategy, and who are other people to say it's ridiculous? I'm not gay, but I strongly support gay marriage. What if someone told you you couldn't marry the one you love? I think it's about time! Let people who love each other that are the same sex get married. They deserve the right to be happy also.

If people do not organize in the name of their interest, the world will not take them as being serious. And that is the chief reason that every person who is gay should join some gay organization. Because he must prove to the world that he cares about his own freedom.

You know, when you don't go on TV and talk about how many women you sleep with, some people in Hollywood, that are supposedly 'in the know,' start whispering that you're gay. If I were gay, I wouldn't be ashamed to admit it, but I'm not.

Yeah, I had gay friends. The first thing I realized was that everybody's different, and it becomes obvious that all of the gay stereotypes are ridiculous.

I couldn't imagine a book with many characters in it and one of them not being gay. It would have felt like a glaring and problematic omission for me. But I also wanted to write that character as a person, not just a gay person.

So often, I have seen really, really talented performers never quite relating to material. I mean, there's a lot of gay actors, for example, that are obviously gay. They're not going to be able to do some of the material. Some of them they can, some of them they can't.

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.

I have many gay friends who don't support gay marriage either.

Of course, I have a different vested interest in the gay community, because I am gay, and I would certainly enjoy the tax advantages that straight people have, and the inheritance advantages, and things like Social Security, but I've always been a civil rights advocate across the board. That's how I was raised.

We are wide open and vulnerable and in all likelihood an activist judge will strike down our Defense of Marriage Act, our state law against gay marriage, this year. And in all likelihood, we will have gay marriage in 2004 in Minnesota , if we don't get this amendment on the ballot for November.

Gay culture is surviving and thriving. Some activists believe the recent rise in homophobic violence might be a gauge of the success of positive gay images.

Historically different groups find different things in each comics, as with *X-Men*. Gay readers find parallels to living a closeted lifestyle or choosing to come out and be openly gay. Black readers find a relevance to their lives growing up in America as a black guy. Picked-on brainy kids find a metaphor for being an outsider. It's a simple enough, and direct enough metaphor that it has different shades for different people. And so each reader to some degree gets out of it what they bring to it. That's one of the things I think that makes *X-Men* such a strong property.

There are lots of big books that have gay characters - or, more commonly, a gay character - in secondary roles, but seldom are their lives, and especially their sexual lives, on center stage.

We need to have profound compassion for the people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life, and sexual identity disorders. This is a very real issue. It's not funny, it's sad. Any of you who have members of your family that are in the lifestyle-we have a member of our family that is. This is not funny. It's a very sad life. It's part of Satan, I think, to say this is gay. It's anything but gay.

I do think that if the Church can see its way to greater tolerance, Church members will have greater exposure to gay people, and the lives of those gay people will be better.

As a gay writer and someone who began by writing autobiographical fiction, it's hard to get away from chatter of "You're just a narcissist," "You're just a gay man," "You're just looking for yourself in somebody else," "Why does your boyfriend look like you," a kind of baggage that you already have to create in the face of.

Reverend Ted Haggard's followers still think he's not gay. I'm not kidding. In their world, there are no gay people. There are just straight people who are sinning. They don't want to do it, but the Devil makes them! He targets people like Reverend Ted. That's how it happened. The Devil got hold of Reverend Ted, and Ted said, 'Get thee behind me, Satan! And put it in, gently'.

And I found out about the wonderful world of sign language. I suddenly realized: If we as a society recognize Jewish culture, gay culture and Latino culture, we must recognize that this is a coherent culture, too. I think deafness is a disability for social constructionist reasons.

There is no reason to not trust your process, no reason to get frustrated, no reason to criticize, or judge others, nothing wrong with getting old, or not being able to get pregnant, or being handicapped, or being short or tall or gay, or injured, or divorced or married to an idiot, or with Christianity or Judaism or Islam, or indigenous beliefs, or pollution, crime, war, Bush, etc. When this understanding grows, we realize where we're at now is just as perfect as wherever we could possibly get to.

I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people, and I should stick to the issue of racial justice.

Sooner or later they are going to live in a New York City where gay marriage is not only legal, it is common, and they don’t even notice.