On the whole, mental archaeology was a sordid digging proposition. The evil men did endured, the good was infinitely more ephemeral. You could generally find out whether a man had been a horse-thief, or an embezzler or a wife-beater, if you worked hard enough, but acts of kindness, of charity, a gay spirit, vanished without leaving a trace.
I'm not getting married until gay people can get married. Because I'm gay.
I am for gay marriage. Or same-sex marriage. I don't want to say it the wrong way. I think people are sensitive to it. I have been painted as being this right-wing zealot on choice. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Mormon leaders said in a statement they will reexamine their ties to the Boy Scouts. "The church," they said, "has always welcomed all boys to its Scouting units regardless of sexual orientation. However, the admission of openly gay leaders is inconsistent with the doctrines of the church and what have traditionally been the values of the Boy Scouts of America."
Discrimination at any level sends a harmful message to youth, gay or straight alike, and that discrimination has no place in Scouting.
No parent should be denied from their Scouting - their son's Scouting experience simply because those parents happen to be gay.
Not a lot of gay guys end up coming to alt-comedy-ish shows. They like all these '80s shimmer shows, or they like going to drag shows. It is always weird and interesting when I meet somebody at a gay bar who is familiar with my stuff.
Coming out to gays is a way of affirming sanity and self-worth.
I still recall the day when I became known not just as Gay Brewer, but 'Gay Brewer, winner of the 1967 Masters.' The reality of the title – the biggest thrill I've had in golf – is something that can never be taken away.
Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck.
And I used to go the punk clubs such as a gay club in Poland Street that everyone would go to because it was the only place you could go to looking like that without getting beaten senseless.
There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.
But fairness is where we’re heading, at least in regard to marriage, which has emerged as the terrain on which Americans are hashing out their feelings about gays and lesbians. The trajectory is undeniable. The trend line is clear. And the choice before the justices is whether to be handmaidens to history, or whether to sit it out.
I think it’s unfair that people can’t give assets to whoever they want. When I die, my assets can go to my wife. And a gay person — you ought to have a system where maybe you can just say, ‘You can give your assets to anybody you want.’
I'm not naive to the fact that I'm an out gay actor.
With Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion. With Barack Obama we will close the book on the old politics of race against race.
You just can't say lesbianism hurts women's golf. It's more correct to say homophobia does.
I didn't know any gay people in my childhood.
I think it's... I don't want to become a social crusader on this issue, but I think sports, male sports, has traditionally not been an inviting environment for gay men to identify themselves. But eventually... we will get to a place where it is not an issue in sports.
Gay marriage is a complete red herring to distract everyone from the economy and the war and health care and education.
I often laugh and say I should go down to the Department of the Interior and register as an endangered species. I'm a gay man over 60 and I'm alive.
In entirely unrelated news, there's a new proposal to mandate coverage for gay infertility. The problem is that gay infertility is just biology. Two men and two women are not infertile. They're just not capable of impregnating each other. This isn't a medical problem. It's a mental problem.
I got married a bit late, I agree. In any other period of history I'd have been dead at that age and they'd have assumed I was gay. Like Michelangelo, or Leonardo da Vinci. But I was a late developer. I didn't go through puberty until I was 35.
Gay people, certainly gay people of my generation, at least of a certain echelon - middle-class Americans - have binocular vision. We all are raised by straight people and grow up with straight people and in straight families, but we all have this totally other way of looking at things. Increasingly as I get deeper into middle age, that is why I resist plunking for any one camp. Because I have this delicious sort of experience of being able to see things in two ways.
I'm not always comfortable when a man tells me he's gay, I don't understand his world but I do understand that he's part of mine.