There is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours, but it was labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writers digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour.

The gay rights movement of recent years has been an inspiring victory for humanity and it is in the tradition of the civil rights movement when I was a young boy in the South, the women's suffrage movement when my mother was a young woman in Tennessee, the abolition movement much farther back, and the anti-apartheid movement when I was in the House of Representatives. All of these movements have one thing in common: the opposition to progress was rooted in an outdated understanding of morality.

It is long past time to eliminate bigotry in the workplace and to ensure equal opportunity for all Americans. It is time to make clear that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans are first class citizens. They are full and welcome members of our American family and they deserve the same civil rights protections as all other Americans. It is time for us to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Such discrimination is wrong and should not be tolerated.

And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women - except, of course - those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own rape 'kit 'n' stuff. But for everybody else, it's a win-win. Unless you're a gay woman who wants to marry your partner of 20 years - whatever. But for most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know - actually, I take it back. The whole thing's a disaster.

Any story dealing, however seriously, with homosexual love is taken to be a story about homosexuality while stories dealing with heterosexual love are seen as stories about the individual people they portray. This is as much a problem today for American filmmakers who cannot conceive of the presence of gay characters in a film unless the specific subject of the film is homosexuality. Lesbians and gay men are thereby classified as purely sexual creatures, people defined solely by their sexual urges.

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.

If a bunch of activists want to create the concept of "gay infertility" and then tax all the rest of us to compensate them for the fact that they can't have babies, then that's gonna happen. You haven't missed anything yet. I'm just teasing you as to what's coming. Gays now think it's not fair they can't have babies, so they're calling that "infertility," and it will require mandatory health insurance because of it. Yeah, I know they're not infertile but that doesn't matter; they can't have babies.

I recently realized that I'm gender-fluid - I didn't even know that was a term until recently - but I have a strong effeminate side and identify with women in that way. Because women would make jokes and they were all really funny, but the straight male comics always said "faggot," or they had some really awful gay joke. And so it's like, I'm just going to watch the ladies because they don't - I'm sure there are, but I couldn't even tell you one woman comic that I've ever heard say the word "faggot."

Like the vast majority of Americans, I've opposed same-sex marriage, but I've also opposed unjust discrimination against anyone, for racial or religious reasons, or for sexual preference. Americans are a tolerant, generous, and kind people. We all oppose bigotry and disparagement. But the debate over same-sex marriage is not a debate over tolerance. It is a debate about the purpose of the institution of marriage and it is a debate about activist judges who make up the law rather than interpret the law.

I love '80s happy music. I love Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, and the idea of making music that's about people celebrating fun. I spent my late adolescence in New York and I used to go to a lot of gay clubs. The music there was always just about love and connection and celebrating life. I think, for people going through something really hard, to go to a place where you can let loose and listen to music as a distraction, that's about a better place, a better way of life - that's where all the attraction lies.

Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family. The Mormon Church is especially focused on family, and I'd have hoped, therefore, that the Mormon Church would especially have celebrated how all of these people who might have been lonely and suicidal and childless are now able to lead this other life. I would have thought it would be a cause for immense celebration. Instead it has been, obviously, a cause of great concern to the Church and its leadership.

I've always believed that the great strength of the Internet is that it allows us to communicate with each other, it allows debate. And I think that gay marriage is a huge step forward. But debate is throwing ideas about, and when it becomes sort of a weapon of character assassination, I think that's crazy. I think the situation in America is different from in England, where we have civil partnership, and now the vote on gay marriage has been carried, and whether it will go through Parliament I don't know.

Everything I make is with intention. I'm not very haphazard with my artist work, although I wish I was sometimes. I'm very conscious of the conversations I'm pushing about different threads and themes around landscape and characters that exist - how it's pictured, who's pictured it, who's owned it and who's been able to inhabit certain spaces. I have other interests as well. I'm really obsessed now with going to gay male dance clubs. I find those thrilling. I'm interested in what future characters can come.

Black pride. Gay pride. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant pride. All of these things, you know, they're polarized, aren't they? The red and blue states. Christians, that's the most insidious aspect of it, giving into this great Christian image of America. That's the most frightening thing of all. Whereas in the past they're trying to find things that unite us, to minimize the differences. Whereas today there's this belief in empowerment and entitlement by maximizing differences. I'm not so sure that that's healthy.

I think it's kind of awkward when everyone knows you're gay but you don't say it. I had been thinking about coming out for almost a year before I did. I thought about it seriously on the plane ride home from the World Cup, while I was casually talking to my friend Lori Lindsey. She said, "Dude, you should just come out." She was right. Everyone in my life already knew. If you want to stand up and fight for equal rights but then won't even stand up for yourself and say "I'm gay" - that just started to feel weird.

You must be respectful and assenting, but without being servile and abject. You must be frank, but without indiscretion, and close, without being costive. You must keep up dignity of character, without the least pride of birth, or rank. You must be gay, within all the bounds of decency and respect; and grave, without the affectation of wisdom, which does not become the age of twenty. You must be essentially secret, without being dark and mysterious. You must be firm, and even bold, but with great seeming modesty.

The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there’s nothing wrong with being gay. I don’t find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason.

Haley and I would talk for hours about which member of 'N Sync we'd want to marry. After long deliberation, the answer was always J. C. Chasez. Joey Fatone's last name was going to be “Fat One” no matter how great he was, and even though they didn't know at their age that Lance Bass was gay outright, they sensed he'd make a better good friend and confidante. As for Justin Timberlake, well, JT was the coolest and hottest, but too flashy, so we couldn't trust him to be faithful. J. C. Chasez was the smart compromise.

I do not believe a person can take two issues from Scripture, those being abortion and gay marriage, and adhere to them as sins, then neglect much of the rest and call himself a fundamentalist or even a conservative. The person who believes the sum of his morality involves gay marriage and abortion alone, and neglects health care and world trade and the environment and loving his neighbor and feeding the poor is, by definition, a theological liberal, because he takes what he wants from Scripture and ignores the rest.

Some playwrights are obvious influences on younger writers. Arthur Miller (realistic, politically engaged dramas) and Christopher Durang (satirical dark comedies) are examples. But August stands apart, ... He has his special way of seeing things. I remember he and I were at one of those fancy benefits the Rep has. The gay men's chorus was singing, and I was very proud to have brought them into a Rep event. And August says, 'You know, I don't see any black people up there.' That was his focus the lives of black people.

V rolled the Aquafina bottle between his palms. "How long have you wanted to ask me the question? About the gay thing." "For a while." "Afraid of what I'd say?" "Nope, because it doesn't matter to me one way or the other. I'm tight with you whether you like males or females or both." V looked into his best friend's eyes and realized… yeah, Butch wasn't going to judge him. They were cool no matter what. With a curse, V rubbed the center of his chest and blinked. He never cried but he felt as if he could at this moment.

Like no other illness, AIDS tests our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes - to empathize with the plight of our fellow man. While most would agree that the AIDS orphan or the transfusion victim or the wronged wife contracted the disease through no fault of their own, it has too often been easy for some to point to the unfaithful husband or the promiscuous youth or the gay man and say This is your fault. You have sinned. I don't think that's a satisfactory response. My faith reminds me that we all are sinners.

As a comedian I don't think they look at me as a sexual person but I can see where with actors it would be a little difficult for them because its part of their mystique, it gives them an easier time to change characters and people aren't going oh we have a gay actor, their gay so I don't know if I'm gunna buy this guy with this girl, its weird, I don't think it's fair; it's only done with us, it seems, like they just accept everyone as straight and go along with it and then its oh their gay and make a big deal out of it.

This is why the terrorists hate us. And it's not the glitter and it's not the pomp and circumstance. We've got black and white, we've got Hispanic and Asian, we got gay, straight, and Guttenberg, all working together for one common goal: to get the mirror ball. And the mirror ball doesn't care what color you are, and it doesn't care how rich your parents are, and it doesn't care what God you pray to. It's an even wooden floor, and may the best man or woman win. And I say God bless Dancing with the Stars, and God bless the USA.

I'm a huge fan of Jonathan Van Ness, but that was the first time that I had met him on the Gay Of Thrones set, and as soon as we sat down, it was clear that just about anything he was going to say I was going to have no idea what it meant. I have literally no idea, so that ended up being a really fun bit to find, like "The old man doesn't know what kids talk about." We started talking about red carpets. I was taught how to stand on the red carpet. Put your hand in your pocket and that's it. That's literally all a guy has to do.

Since I spent eighteen years of my life as a child, and nine years of that life as a pretty sexually active gay child, my complaint against the current attitudes is that they work mightily to silence the voices of children first and secondarily ignore what adults have to say who have been through these situations. One size fits all is never the way to handle any situation with a human dimension. Many, many children-and I was one of them-are desperate to establish some sort of sexual relation with an older and even adult figure.

It is easier to talk about issues; it is easier to say you're a feminist because it's actually awesome to be one. The panopoly of people identifying as feminists is really excellent now that we've come to a point where all these really interesting voices are rising up and saying they're feminists - women of color, trans people, gay folks, everybody. It's an exciting time to actually define as that because it means that people are really feeling like their voice is what's the most important thing in the movement, and I love that.

In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement - the number restriction (two and only two) - is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.

Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.

I would say except when I have been attacked the black community has seldom seen fit to even mention the gay aspect. And since when I have been attacked I have usually been defended by the black community, I would say that the black newspapers have played it very straight. If I was attacked they simply published that I was attacked, if I was defended they simply said I had been defended. But I don't think they have taken any effort at maligning me or maligning gays or making any effort to give to people anything that wasn't news.

Heterosexual women ask questions that are a lot to do with what I did to my body and what that was like to lose all that weight and so on. To me it just reveals that that's a preoccupation of theirs. Or gay women have been really keen on knowing how I felt about playing a gay character and have often wanted to talk about their own experiences with children. Straight men have often shown some sense of relief, that they get to experience the philanderer as a woman and not have to judge her in the same way. That's fascinating to me.

Men in America were terrified that if women got an equal say in society, the system would collapse and their lives would be valued less. Whites in America were scared that if blacks obtained their freedom and equality, the system would collapse and their lives would be devalued. Heterosexuals are terrified that the psychotic institution of marriage will collapse if gays are given their right to marry. And humans are terrified that if animals are liberated and no longer viewed as inferior subordinates, human life will be valued less.

Look at the Metropolitan Community Church today, the gay church, almost accepted into the World Council of Churches. Almost, the vote was against them. But they will try again and again until they get in, and the tragedy is that they would get one vote. Because they are spoken of here in Jude as being brute beasts, that is going to the baser lust of the flesh to live immorally, and so Jude describes this as apostasy. But thank God this vile and satanic system will one day be utterly annihilated and there'll be a celebration in heaven.

I can assure you that gay people getting married will have zero effect on your life. They won't come into your house and steal your children. They won't magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster. They won't even overthrow the government in an orgy of hedonistic debauchery because all of a sudden they have the same legal rights as the other 90 percent of our population ... you know what having these rights will make gays? Full-fledged American citizens just like everyone else, with the freedom to pursue happiness and all that entails.

If you are a woman, if you're a person of color, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are a person of intelligence, if you are a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world. And it's going to be really hard to find messages of self-love and support anywhere. Especially women's and gay men's culture. It's all about how you have to look a certain way, or else you're worthless... For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution, and our revolution is long overdue.

I'm certainly not going to tell other people what they should do with their own personal lives. I think it's certainly easier for a director to be out. The public is not going to see a movie because the director is gay or straight. It's maybe a little harder for an actor or actress because of, you know, the love roles and stuff. But gay people have been impersonating heteros in the movies for years. So, hopefully, that is becoming less of an issue. I think it would have been really great if a gay person had played a gay person. That's brave!

Making photographs that dealt with the understanding of who I am as a gay man and dealt with the process of accepting that, and also accepting what I'm into sexually, what sexually arouses me. So I was making these images not necessarily knowing what they were about, but just putting it out there - that mode of thinking or consideration of my own desires, and also the much larger conversation around images that deal with ideas of sexuality and how those images are distributed and then accepted or understood by whoever is viewing those images.

I don't think that on a daily basis, people need to be so concerned with others think. When someone comes forward and is an individual, such as a Lady Gaga or a Katy Perry, people respond to them because there is that sense of innocence. It's obviously dress up and theatre. I never lost that I think part of that is growing up gay and part is growing up overweight. You never lose that, and I never want to lose touch with that whimsy, that sense of innocence. I also love the reaction it elicits in people. I like that it makes other people happy.

The only gay people who remain in the closet are those who choose to, who don't want to publicly declare their sexuality, which is true of heterosexual people as well. I don't walk around with a button or a T-shirt that says "I am a heterosexual." I don't think sexuality defines a person. It's one small part of who you are, in my view. You are many things, and I never felt that people were defined by their sexuality solely. Although God knows, as a minority, gay people have taken serious lumps for their sexual preferences. As has every minority.

Liberals claim to love gays when it allows them to vent their spleen at Republicans. But disagree with liberals and their first response is to call you gay. Liberals are gays' biggest champions on issues most gays couldn't care less about, like gay marriage or taxpayer funding of photos of men with bullwhips up their derrieres. But who has done more to out, embarrass, and destroy the lives of gay men who prefer to keep their orientation private than Democrats? Who is more intolerant of gays in the Republican Party than gays in the Democratic Party?

There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

You know, you hear about these movements for women, and for children, and for people who are any race but white, and you think that it's about time that men got a movement. Think about it. Guys can't play the piano, or dance, or sing. We can't cry, or be too happy, or show any emotion for that matter. The only thing we have left to us is anger, and even that we have to bottle up. Boys should be able to express what they feel and not have to endure people laughing at them, forcing them to wonder if they're gay or not, just because they like to paint.

When we, hijras, started our activism, we had to tell people, "We exist, we are humans. Please give us nothing but our basic dignity." The biggest misery in the world, I believe, is the feeling of being unloved, and that this community faces a lot. You're not even considered to be human. You're considered transparent. We were ignored until we started organizing, when HIV first became a factor. Even in the HIV world, people could not believe that hijras have sex. And then also we were put in the category of men having sex with men, the gay community.

My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren’t they? I know they didn’t invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves.

I think people sometimes get the wrong impression when they're like, Oh, well, so-and-so was straight and then she was gay, and now she's straight again, you know? But it's like, how many times do I have to kiss a woman before I'm gay? Everybody wants to label people. Sometimes you just fall in love with somebody, and you're really not thinking about what gender or whatever they happen to be. It think that if I happen to fall in love with a woman, everyone's going to make a big deal out of it. But if I happen to fall in love with a man, nobody cares.

Legislators in Kansas, Arizona and 23 other states who are properly determined to protect religious freedom can begin by asking themselves: Does any religious conviction justify denying lesbians and gays a basic legal promise of non-discrimination in hiring, public accommodations, and housing? Surely the answer to this question is no. Correcting that inequity would begin the process of recognizing that both sides - gay couples and religious objectors - have rights and that reasonable accommodation is possible only when both sides have something to gain.

I support, defend, and admire prostitutes, gay or straight. They do important and necessary work, whether moralists of the Left and Right like it or not. Feminists who think they can abolish the sex trade are in a state of massive delusion. Only a ruthless, fascist regime of vast scale could eradicate the rogue sex impulse that is indistinguishable from the life force. Simply in the Western world, pagan sexuality has survived 2000 years of Judaeo-Christian persecution and is hardly going to be defeated by a few feminists whacking at it with their brooms.

i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any--lifted from the no of all nothing--human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

I go back to the parallels with 1963, 1964 when white America really became aware of the brutality of segregation, the cruelty of the apartheid system which existed in the south. Then white people began to get on the freedom buses and travel to the south and be part of the voter registration drives and they... some of them were beaten and some of them were murdered but they stood with the African-American community and the civil rights movement. It's time for straight people to do that today and it is time for gay people to insist that they do that today.

IAGO: She that was ever fair and never proud, Had tongue at will and yet was never loud, Never lack'd gold and yet went never gay, Fled from her wish and yet said 'Now I may,' She that being anger'd, her revenge being nigh, Bade her wrong stay and her displeasure fly, She that in wisdom never was so frail To change the cod's head for the salmon's tail; She that could think and ne'er disclose her mind, See suitors following and not look behind, She was a wight, if ever such wight were,-- DESDEMONA: To do what? IAGO: To suckle fools and chronicle small beer.

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