Just because you're gay, I won't turn you away. If you stick around, I'm sure we can find some common ground.
Back in 1998, he [Tom Hanks] gave the maximum amount of money that he could to Bill Clinton's defense fund. This is a man who was against gay marriage, as was Hillary Clinton.
For some reason, President Obama is being heckled about "don't ask, don't tell," which may be revoked. The president wants gays to be allowed to serve openly in the military.
The Clintons opposed gay marriage. They did don't ask, don't tell. They did the Defense of Marriage Act.
The compelling argument is on the side of homosexuals. We're Americans. We just want to be treated like everybody else. That is a compelling argument. And to deny that, you've got to have a very strong argument on the other side. And the other side hasn't been able to do anything but thump the Bible ... I support civil unions, I always have. All right, the gay marriage thing, I don't feel that strongly about it one way or the other.
My tact is that you don't change the definition of marriage for one group, homosexuals, because you have to change it for all the groups. So you don't do it, particularly if people in California vote on it, don't want it, they think that the heterosexuality is a societal stabilizer.
Unlike abortion nobody gets hurt when gays marry but it does have deep implications for what kind of society we want to be. Therefore, individual states should decide the question.
I've got nothing against gay marriage, it's not my issue. All right, I want homosexual Americans to be happy and to pursue happiness.
The gay marriage thing to me, I don't understand why it's so important for the secular progressives in this country, the people who want to change America fundamentally and every way, why this is the lead issue. The L.A. Times, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe. These people are going, 'Oh, my God, what are you doing? How can you not see the civil rights aspect of this?'
I've been saying that all along, that if you open the door for gay marriage, then you have to have the polygamists and the triads and the commune people and everybody else, right?
The fight around climate change, which I've spent my life on, is somewhat more difficult than gay marriages because no one makes trillions of dollars a year being a bigot, and that's how much the fossil-fuel industry pulls in pumping carbon into the air. But the principle is the same, I think.
I don’t believe in involving the government in enforcing or encouraging the lifestyle of gays and homosexuals.
It just seems like the culture war is over, and the gay kissers won.
Is it like gay men go into the priesthood because they figure, Well, this'll solve my problem. I can't be a homosexual in the priesthood; it'll just go away. Maybe I'll try it with the Republican Party.
What is with this campy fixation on all things Ronald Reagan? They talk about him the way gay people talk about Barbra Streisand. I think they want him on a stamp so they can lick his ass. I think they wanted to name airports after him so they can say, "I'm coming into Reagan!"
New rule: Tulips aren't flowers. They're some kind of gay onion.
New Rule: There is no devil, so stop blaming your screw-ups on him. Last week, one of the biggest evangelical leaders in America, the Reverend Ted Haggard, was outed for drugs and extramarital gay sex with a male prostitute. Or as Fox News reported it, 'John Kerry hates our troops'.
Most recently, the president's reluctance to offend Senator Rick Santorum - a Catholic theocrat who believes that states should have the power to arrest gay lovers in their bedrooms, or even to criminalize couples who use contraceptives - was an occasion to wonder what, exactly, Mr. Bush was born-again into.
If you listen to the debate, [Barack Obama] and [John] McCain said the same thing about gay rights.
Even there, [Barack] Obama's generals, his Pentagon, they're telling him what to do. And the force for gay rights is inevitable. And you can say Obama will help us, and maybe he will, but only if we have something on the ground that will make him help us. Frankly, the gay movement on the ground has been one of the great propulsive things that has made politicians do what they do.
Every religion you are, every ethnicity you are, every sex you are, if you're gay or straight. You should be considered as equal as anybody else. That's super-simple, but apparently we have to still march for it.
My daughter loved All About Steve movie, because she's 6 feet tall and she's different. And I got a lot of great e-mails from people who are different. I'm a gay icon. I'll just say it. That's what they say to me, so I'll accept it. I got so many e-mails saying that it meant so much to those people. My daughter said, "They didn't like it just because she didn't get the guy! If they had lived happily ever after, people would have liked that movie."
I think if the world were a fair and just place, there wouldn't even need to be a gay label.
You don't pigeonhole yourself, people pigeonhole you. If the world is not at a place yet where it can just be like, "This music is gay and it's music," then it's not my fault that it gets pigeonholed, it's not the people in the band's fault, it's because people won't just let music be music, people who need to put a name on something or to critique something.
We were a small group of weirdos and baby punks and gays and free spirits who had to use our imaginations a lot. We only saw pictures and read zines, so we could only interpret the aesthetic and message of punk scenes around the world. We were basically the duck-billed platypuses of punk.