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Saturday, May 17, 2008
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Rex Wockner |
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| International News | |
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SPANISH DEPUTY
PRIME MINISTER: I'M NOT GAY |
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| Quote/Unquote | |
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| by Rex Wockner -
SGN Contributing Writer "Part of me is titillated by the fact that I'm Gay. I remember when being Gay was all very cryptic. You'd sneak into the back door and down the stairs and back around and then you're suddenly in some magical world called Gay culture. It was very exciting and very underworld. I actually kind of miss those days." -Singer k.d. lang to the Toronto Gay newspaper Xtra!, February 1. "I think the Gay community has grown up and evolved. There's a new driver and vehicle to explore and a wider spectrum of existence not focused only on coming out - it's a more expansive culture that is accepting of Transgendered people, Bisexuals and others. Remember when we used to hate Bisexuals? I think society is more open about sexual orientation in general. Look at Larry Craig or the whole Catholic Church scandal. It's not all black and white anymore; even in the Gay and Lesbian community there is a spectrum. And that's very heartening." -Singer k.d. lang to the Lesbian glossy Curve, March issue. "Yes, yeah, I would consider Oprah a friend - Oprah and Gayle, both are just terrific women." -Michelle Obama, wife of presidential candidate Barack Obama, on CNN's Larry King Live, February 11. "[In] the late '70s and '80s, I had Gay boyfriends. I had sexual relationships with guys who had never been with a woman, and have never been with a woman since. See, in those times you didn't have to define yourself. People weren't demanding constantly that you say what your label was, so it didn't seem like such a big deal, and it wasn't so shocking." -Actress Susan Sarandon to PlanetOut.com, February 13. "[H]uman sexuality is much more complex, diverse and blurred than the traditional simplistic binary image of hetero and homo, so loved by straight moralists and - more significantly - by many Lesbians and Gay men. ... In a future non-homophobic society, more people are likely to have Gay sex but less people will identify as Gay. This is because the absence of homophobia makes the need to assert and affirm Gayness redundant." -Leading British Gay activist Peter Tatchell writing for The Guardian, February 14. "Gay identity is largely the product of anti-Gay repression. It is a self-defense mechanism against homophobia. Faced with persecution for having same-sex relations, the right to have those relationships had to be defended - hence Gay identity and the Gay rights movement. But if one sexuality is not privileged over another, defining oneself as Gay (or straight) will cease to be necessary and have no social relevance or significance." -Leading British gay activist Peter Tatchell writing for The Guardian, February 14. "The reason I have always supported the entire Gay community is because they have kept her name iconic. They have been supportive, but what was really interesting, if you went to see my mother's concerts when she was performing, the audience wasn't a Gay audience. It was really after she passed away and what happened at Stonewall, that's when the Gay community took her as their own." -Lorna Luft, Judy Garland's daughter, to London's Pink Paper, January 24. "Don't you find it to be horrendous that we have a president of the United States of America that's sat up on his, I don't know what you want to call it, his throne that he thinks it is, and said that Gay couples shouldn't be allowed to marry? That's insane." -Lorna Luft, Judy Garland's daughter, to London's Pink Paper, January 24. "It's so important for Gay people to come out. It's the young people I've always been so concerned about. When a young person has to hide, then you start having a very strange life. Then you start sneaking around, going to weird places and then you're not safe and you're embarrassed and not feeling good about yourself and you can't have a healthy, safe relationship. It becomes sort of underground and perverse, and it's just no good! It's so important to me to have people be themselves, and it's so important to have more talk about it and have it out in the open." -Actress Bernadette Peters to the Palm Springs Gay magazine the BottomLine, February 1. "I don't know this for a fact but I would bet my life that this is what happened: They went to [U.S. Rep.] Barney Frank and said, 'What do we need to pass ENDA?' Rep. Frank, who has always been pretty squeamish on the trans issue - and I guess I can say these things because I am leaving my job - you know, said, 'Look, the best way to pass ENDA, and the easiest way is to: Let's take out gender identity.' And I don't think the [House] speaker's people thought this through - didn't think it through - and then they said, 'OK, let's do it.'" -Outgoing National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Executive Director Matt Foreman discussing last year's GLBT-community war over the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, on The Michelangelo Signorile Show on Sirius Satellite Radio's OutQ channel, February 12. "Matt Foreman, who announced January 23 that he would be resigning as executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, was many things during his five years at the top of one of the country's preeminent Gay rights organizations. He was an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq. He fought against privatizing Social Security. He stood foursquare against the erosion of abortion rights. But what any of these issues have to do with lobbying for Gay rights - presumably Foreman's job description - is beyond me. His job description, though, was the problem. Foreman, after all, is just a symptom of the larger problem with NGLTF: It's a garden-variety liberal interest group posing as a Gay rights organization." -James Kirchick, an assistant editor of The New Republic, writing at Advocate.com, February 5. "After months of lurid clamor, Senator Larry Craig has been formally rebuked by the Senate ethics committee for his run-in with the vice squad last summer in an airport men's room. The committee concluded that the Idaho Republican brought discredit on the Senate. After all the controversy, the committee acted without holding a public inquiry and it did not levy any punishment. Nothing much results from the rebuke, except for the committee's grave statement of wounded decorum. Senator Craig continues to serve Idaho. The ethics committee disappears once more behind its Oz-like curtain." -The New York Times editorial board writing on its blog, February 20. With assistance from Bill Kelley |
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