"My definition of love: Sigourney Weaver, an economy-size bucket of lube and my fist." 

--Comic Lea DeLaria to Los Angeles' Lesbian News, May issue. 

<><><2><><> 

"Now everyone's decided that all lesbians wear lipstick! And they're sweeping us butches under the carpet like we're some dirty secret. I'm over that! Every time I read someone saying something about me like I perpetuate the stereotype of lesbians being butch, I just want to smack 'em. Excuse me, some lesbians are butch!"  

--Comic Lea DeLaria to Los Angeles' Lesbian News, May issue. 

<><><3><><> 

"Moving the time-slot is what killed the [Ellen] show. Not that the show wasn't funny anymore, not that it was 'too gay' -- Chastity Bono can bite my ass! If Ellen is too gay, what the hell am I? If Chastity Bono wants to get a job as a network television executive then she should, instead of working for GLAAD and making those homophobic kinds of remarks as a spokesperson for GLAAD -- it's ridiculous. You gotta say, GLAAD, why is this woman working for you? It really goes up my butt a mile that she hasn't been let go after making homophobic remarks like that in the press -- [it's] supposed to be GLAAD's job to stop those things from happening. It's because GLAAD is so celebrity-obsessed. They put someone like Chastity Bono in charge and that's what happens." 

--Comic Lea DeLaria to Los Angeles' Lesbian News, May issue. 

<><><4><><>  

t [my being gay] was the worst-kept secret in rock 'n' roll. The majority of the media knew. I wanted to share it with the public. ... This was something I wanted to finally get out of my system, mostly for myself. Coming out of the closet, for a gay man, is a freeing moment of truth. To stand on a platform as a successful musician with a tremendous career, it's a success story no matter how you look at it. And it takes me away from the scenario of where's the girlfriend."  

--Rob Halford, former lead singer of the heavy-metal band Judas Priest, to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 10. 

<><><5><><> 

"Gay men who went on disability but never got sick--or got well again--are collecting insurance checks and have their days free to work out. All that extra time, all those cloying International Male ads daring them to be hunky--you do the math. Meanwhile, their doctors are prescribing steroids and testosterone—purely medicinal, mind you--and these men are bulking up faster than Bill Bixby in a bad mood." 

--Columnist Mark King writing in Pittsburgh's Out newspaper, May issue. 

<><><6><><> 

"The AIDS media, propelled by the marketing of pharmaceutical drugs, seem to believe that memorial services are out of style and everyone with AIDS enjoys rock-climbing. Pages of advertisements in gay newspapers and magazines are devoted to handsome, chiseled men with AIDS, happily taking their drugs while keeping up a hectic schedule of fantasy dates and pumping iron. After checking out some of the fine men in these ads, if I didn't have HIV, I'd sure want some." 

--Columnist Mark King writing in Pittsburgh's Out newspaper, May issue. 

<><><7><><> 

"It was never easy being a homosexual. Everybody knew the theater was full of homosexuals, but nobody admitted to being so. ... I was sexually very late-blooming. ... I think people tried to make passes at me, and I didn't know what they were doing."  

--Broadway composer and lyricist Steven Sondheim, 68, in a new biography to be published this summer. Sondheim created West Side Story, Company, Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with George. 

<><><8><><> 

"Certainly it is true that putting people into categories like 'gay' oppresses or at least limits them, but it is also true that it gives them power and political cohesion, that it strengthens their collective resolve to fight back against homophobic campaigns to strip them of their basic civil rights. The queer theorist's quixotic vision of a label-less polymorphous utopia, in which carefree hedonists 'challenge the compulsory male-female binary' and play a dizzying round of sexual musical chairs, changing partners, proclivities, and even genders at will, is a politically inexpedient pipe dream. Such unrealistic visions could potentially jeopardize the gay liberation movement and deal a significant blow to our solidarity, turning back the clock on gay rights to an era in which avoiding labels was a dire professional and emotional necessity, not the arid intellectual pastime of bed-swapping academics who relish the euphoric pleasures of self-erasure while ignoring their dangers." 

--Author Daniel Harris in the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, June issue. 

<><><9><><> 

"It helps [my comic inspiration] to live with a conspiracy theorist. It's a show every morning when she reads The New York Times. So that's certainly been a gift. She is an incredible spotter of trends. She wakes up smart every day." 

--Comic Kate Clinton on her lover, activist Urvashi Vaid, to Chicago's Outlines, May 20. 

<><><10><><> 

"Let's face it, everything filters out from the gay community first. Gay people are always far more along with things than the rest of the world. ... The gay community and the dance community are the ones who really latched onto us and made us who we are. With 'Conga', it was the gay clubs that made it a hit before anyone else and took it to the top." 

--Singer Gloria Estefan to Chicago's Windy City Times, May 21. 

<><><11><><> 

"I love seeing the drag queens do me. It's such a compliment. The new album is full of songs the impersonators are going to jump all over. I can't wait to see what they do with 'Real Woman.' They're going to have a field day with it." 

--Singer Gloria Estefan to Chicago's Windy City Times, May 21. 

<><><12><><> 

"Flower boxes are ... a quick and easy way of letting anyone and everyone who passes by know you are a big, raving homosexual—you can take the cheap way out and hang a rainbow flag in your window, which is the gay equivalent of putting a neon Budweiser sign in your living room, or you can hang flower boxes stuffed full of pansies. For this year's selection I installed daisies, great big pink and orange ones, with some little blue flowers I don't have the slightest clue about--it looks good, and that's all that counts."  

--Windy City Times columnist Michael Beaumier, May 21. 

<><><13><><>  

"Gay liberation is truly a mass movement. As the world becomes more gay-friendly, more and more unremarkable people take the plunge and come out. Our ranks are now swollen with the listless and the dull. I am amazed by the sheer volume of our numbers. And I am stunned by the way a critical mass of will-to-conformity can suck the life out of the party. ... Sophisticates don't have to socialize with the bland, but it would be nice if they tried to inspire. This won't be accomplished by sneering at the dull -- they have feelings, too, you know. Being boring is a learned behaviour. Today's bore is tomorrow's belle of the ball. Coming out is not the end, but the beginning. Adopt a bore today, and show them the way -- their future, and ours, is in your hands." 

--Editorial in the May 21 issue of Toronto's Xtra!, written by Publisher David Walberg. 

<><><14><><> 

"During my first year on Melrose, there was a great deal of pressure from the network [Fox TV] for me to out myself as a straight man. The producers of Melrose kept telling me I had to say publicly that I was a breeder. They said too many people assumed I was gay. I know the truth of my life, so I didn't have to play the network game." 

--Actor Doug Savant, Matt Fielding on Melrose Place, to Alberta's Calgary Sun, May 27. 

<><><15><><> 

"It's ironic that much of my family thought that, as a leftist and a lesbian, I wouldn't be able to go far professionally. Yet today I'm a federal deputy, exactly because I'm a leftist, because I'm a feminist, because I'm a lesbian, etc. Because of all those reasons that seemed to be so bad, now I'm a success." 

--Openly lesbian Mexican Congresswoman Patria Jimenez to San Francisco's Bay Area Reporter, May 29. 

<><><16><><> 

"The notion that two homosexuals shacked up in a Greenwich Village loft are the political, legal, societal and moral equivalent of a man and woman bonded in holy matrimony is palpably absurd. It seriously violates the natural law, transgresses the very code upon which this civilization rests, legitimizes perversion and overturns all the Judeo-Christian traditions held sacred through thousands of years." 

--New York Post columnist Ray Kerrison, May 28. Complaints to 
editor@nypost.com. 

<><><17><><> 

"I've never understood people who develop a scorched-earth relationship after they break up, because it seems to deny everything that came before. Terry is still the person I save up good stories for; he's the person whose name you cry out when a car hits you." 

--Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin on his breakup with his lover of 10 years, to the San Francisco Chronicle, May 31. 

<><><18><><> 

"We are soul mates. It came down to my needing solitude, but the love we have for each other is not likely to change." 

--Terry Anderson on his breakup with Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin, to the San Francisco Chronicle, May 31. 

<><><19><><> 

"We have created our own paradise. All we care about is: Do we have a night alone in our house?" 

--Actress Anne Heche, actress Ellen DeGeneres' lover, to USA Weekend, May 16. 

<><><20><><> 

"Dark, angry, bitter. Last night's hourlong Ellen finale was numbingly, embarrassingly bad. Brought back for one last episode after being unceremoniously knocked off the air weeks ago, the show's final bow turned out to be a graceless belly flop." 

--Syndicated Detroit News gay columnist Deb Price, May 14. 

<><><21><><> 

"Would I have liked to have seen a little more balance of the more goofy, funny, old-style 'Ellen' shows? Sure. But that wasn't her vision as an artist. She followed her vision -- and she's paying for it. When Ellen Morgan grew up, I don't think that Ellen DeGeneres found it appropriate to play this 35-year-old woman who's found out who she is with that same light hand. ... You could have had all the exact same story lines, but if they had written it with more of the old-style characterization of Ellen Morgan, nobody would have said it's too gay." 

--Gay 'Ellen' cast member Patrick Bristow to Atlanta's Southern Voice, May 14. 

<><><22><><>  

"You don't need to be 'straight' to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight." 

--Former Sen. Barry Goldwater in a 1993 opinion piece in The Washington Post. Goldwater died May 29. 
 
 

Rex Wockner's "Quote Unquote" is archived from mid-1994 onward at http://www.qrd.org/qrd/www/world/wockner.html