Putting measures like gay marriage on ballots for elections only hurts the gay rights cause and elects more conservative politicians.
I think gay marriage should be the national law.
You have to remember, rights don't come in groups we shouldn't have 'gay rights'; rights come as individuals, and we wouldn't have this major debate going on. It would be behavior that would count, not what person belongs to what group.
Rights mean you have a right to your life. You have a right to your liberty, and you should have a right to keep the fruits of your labor....I, in a way, don’t like to use those terms: gay rights, women’s rights, minority rights, religious rights. There’s only one type of right. It’s the right to your liberty.
Imagine that you're a gay man and you're spending all your time with people who believe you are possessed by the devil.
After I read about Uganda's now famous "kill the gays" bill, I wanted to explore the religious forces behind it. As a gay man, I wanted to understand the folks who wanted to kill me and why.
I've been told that I am evil. I've been told that I am behind the persecution of millions of Americans. That I have encouraged hate toward gays. I've received both very brief and obscene messages, and very long and literate messages that tell me a vote for Crash was vote for homophobia.
Won't someone please answer my prayers before I'm old and gray. I've been lonely too long and all my family thinks I'm gay.
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.
Abortion and gay marriage are the political hot-buttons of the day. There are lot of things going wrong in the world, hate is running amok, so why just focus on these two hot-buttons and not everything else?
I think there are [gay players] right now, and if they're looking for a window to just come out, I mean, now is the window. My view on it is, yes, I am a Christian, but to each his own. You do what you want to do.
That isn't how I've always felt. As a congressman, and more recently as a senator, I opposed marriage for same-sex couples. Then something happened that led me to think through my position in a much deeper way.
I’m quite flirtatious with anyone. Some people, because I’m playing a gay character, get quite nervous. And I have to reassure them. I’m like, ‘I’m not gay. I’m not coming on to you. Yet.’
I don't think gay marriage is any threat to marriage. I think divorce is a bigger problem to marriage than anything else.
I was trying to point out I'm not opposed to gays having their partnership. I'm opposed to gays using the term marriage for their relationship.
There are people who were gay and lived the gay lifestyle and aren’t anymore. I don’t know if that’s the similar situation or that’s the case for anyone that’s black. It’s a behavioral issue as opposed to a color of the skin issue, and that’s the diff for serving in the military.
I always knew I was gay. I always knew that somehow it would work out.
I might as well be gay. And not just because I love rhinestones and Barbara Streisand. But because Im a sensitive person who is supportive of gay people the same way Im sensitive to grossly obese people and ugly people.
After the second chapter of Days of Obligation, which is about the death of a friend of mine from AIDS, was published in Harper's, I got this rather angry letter from a gay-and-lesbian group that was organizing a protest against the magazine. It was the same old problem: political groups have almost no sense of irony.
Ridiculous that some people feel superior to the gay minority. They're the only couples you'll ever find poking around for ceramics and candle holders in the winery gift shop and both parties really want to be there.
I am not a romantic leading man anymore so I don't need to nurture that public image anymore. I can talk about it now because I'm not afraid anymore . . . When I grew up, being gay, being sissy or anything like that, was verboten. I disliked myself intensely and feared this part of myself intensely, and had to hide it and became 'Perfect Richard, All-American Boy' as a place to hide.
For an actor to be working at all is a kind of miracle, because most actors aren't. So it's just silly for a working actor to say, 'Oh, I don't care if anybody knows I'm gay' especially if you're a leading man. Personally, I wouldn't advise a gay leading man-type actor to come out.
I like the labels because I think they tell my story in a very concise way: gay, Latino. I think the responsibility that comes with accepting labels is that now I get a chance to break stereotypes. It gives me the opportunity to tell the unique stories of what those labels mean.
The aborigines in Australia, the way they dress is very honest; it's not about: "Oh, you wear a skirt, you're gay."
I started to draw and design clothes that I couldn't find, because everything was all luxury, fashion clothes or very straight. So I mixed all of that together: Who says I can't put a man in a skirt? Who says that a man can't wear lace? Who says that men can't wear Swarovski? Who says that men can't wear makeup? You know what I'm like; for me, straight, gay, women, men, trans, we're all the same. I don't see difference.
