Queer Quotes
“All the evidence would indicate this is the way people are born. We treat disease, not the way people are. The very existence of therapy that is supposed to change people’s sexuality, even for people who don’t take it, is harmful because it implies that they have a disease. There is evidence that the belief itself can trigger depression and anxiety.”
- Dr. Nada Stotland, head of the American Psychiatric Association’s Joint Committee on Public Affairs.
“If you’re gay or a lesbian, it’s a biological error that inhibits you from relating normally to the opposite sex. The fact that you are intelligent, creative and valuable is all true. The error is in your inability to relate sexually intimately, in a loving way to a member of the opposite sex it is a biological error.”
— US radio talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
“But the writer and editor Andrew Sullivan was fully justified, at least for the moment, in declaring last year in the New York Times that we’d arrived at the end of AIDS. He was severely criticized by some gay leaders, especially those worried about continued fundraising: will people still donate to AIDS charities searching for a vaccine if they think the danger has passed? Will young people stick with the onerous rules of safe sex if they think the cure is at hand?”
— Edmund White “Proof Positive” in Australia’s The Age.
Gay Say
“Somewhere, Ellen DeGeneres is grinding her teeth. Two teenage boys kissed Sunday night on That ’70s Show, and as of yesterday afternoon, the world had not ended. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who guest starred as Eric’s cool-new-friend-who-turns-out-to-be-gay, planted a big one on Eric (Topher Grace) in what appears to be the first such kiss — between guys — to air on a commercial broadcast TV series.”
– New York Daily News.
“I don’t like the rise of the Christian Coalition anti-everybody movement. They’d like to get rid of us all, frankly, and that’s very scary. And I think we have to confront this wherever it occurs and do whatever we can. This terrible murder of this boy in Wyoming is a horrifying testimony to what goes on in the name of morality. It’s total bullshit.”
— Singer Judy Collins to the Phoenix gay newspaper Heatstroke.
Queer Voices
“He didn’t like the fact that I was out of the closet in medical school. He worried about what effect being so open would have on my success in life. I had to tell him that I couldn’t not be out. The nicest thing about him is, he’s so supportive and easy to educate, and he eventually saw things my way.”
- Seattle doctor Peter Shalit, on his dad, film critic Gene Shalit, to the Advocate.
“I wanted to produce a magazine that showed positive images of young gays so that people out there in the country who are isolated — which is most people — would see that there were young gay men out there who were having a nice lifestyle, who were happy, who were leading fulfilling lives, and to kind of dispel negative stereotypes that are present in the country about what young gay men are like and what gay people are like. And it’s helped thousands and thousands and thousands of people.”
- Peter Cummings, publisher of XY magazine, to the Contra Costa (California) Times.