It is hard to be unhappy in a gay bar where everyone's singing show tunes! In fact, I've spent many a night in those kind of places - in that particular place, actually - Marie's Crisis: it's truly a New York establishment.
Someday, being gay will be a simple fact, free of party hats and blame. But not yet.
There's no such thing as 'sissy bounce.' We don't separate it here in New Orleans at all. It's just bounce music. Just because I'm a gay artist, they don't have to put it in a category or label it.
Just because I'm in favor of gay rights doesn't mean that I'm gay or doesn't mean I'm some kind of 'sissy' or something. That's the language that you hear in locker rooms.
I don't think that one thing defines me, but I know that by coming out the way that I did, sort of almost pioneering it in action sports - to take that stand - that it's always going to be a label that is stuck with me, and I know that I'll always be the 'gay skier,' and it actually doesn't bother me.
I meet a lot of young people in the Midwest, and I saw what a difference a show like In the Life can make to their lives in some of these small towns where, you know, there are probably two gay people in the whole damn town.
Do you know people on the Right who are tolerant of people who are for gay marriage and are pro-choice? I actually do, plenty of them. When there is a disagreement, I see way more people on the Right... more often willing to agree to disagree rather than to de-friend or to smear.
'Sordid' is rather unique. That's why so many gay fans are comfortable to share 'Sordid Lives' with their families. It's not really a gay story. It's just much more a family story that happens to have gay members, which most people do.
I'm sorry I'm not gay or Jewish, so I don't have a special interest group of journalists that support me.
The struggle isn't just about being straight or gay or transgender - it's a human struggle. That's always really been my kind of starting point: If you're out there and you're odd, come over to my house.
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.
If people are going to complain about stereotyping, it's as likely to be Italian-Americans as gay people.
When I was a kid, there were hardly any gay story lines or characters on television that I recall. Then when I was in college, 'Will & Grace' started up.
A gay man can be friends with a straight man. That can happen.
A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.
I think we're realizing that gay people are able to do the type of comedy that we just assumed was for straight people over the years. Whatever old boundaries there were, which were very real and still have an effect on us, in the way we socialize, I think that's slowly becoming less important.
Straight people say, 'You know you're just gay,' and gay people say, 'You know you're just gay.' There is such a thing as bisexual!
I'm gay, and I know a lot of very liberal straight people, and, of course, they're absolutely fine, but they still won't necessarily come and see a film like 'Weekend.'
My own strong feeling was that the gay liberation movement really got national attraction in the truest sense of the word later in the '70s, in the '80s, and especially in the '90s.
What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship.