"As a nation, the U.S. is living McLife. There's a Starbucks, a Gap and a Borders Bookstore on every corner and a corporate sponsor for everything from gay pride celebrations to football stadiums to the Creating Change Conference (Nike, Sue Hyde?!). The gay community is no more immune from the homogenization and flattening of American culture than is the rest of the country. After all, we invented clones. We have McGhettos, McMuscles, McLeather and, logically, McElangelo [Signorile] and company. (It's not a life, as that anachronistic liquor ad claims. Not anymore. It's a lifestyle.)"

--Columnist John Fall writing for the World Wide Web site http://www.cruisingforsex.com.

"I don't tell other people to go out and bareback. I tell them, evaluate your situation. Make your own choice. I've checked my own premises and found the advice from the Signoriles and Rotellos of the world to be, well, not applicable to me. I have to say I have listened to them, I like them and respect them, they have also checked their premises and come to their own conclusions. The only thing I disagree with is their trying to tell someone else how to live their life."

--Writer and former porn star Scott O'Hara in an interview with the AIDS magazine Art & Understanding, November issue.

"I have come to the conclusion in my own life--this is not intended to be advice to everyone--that the strictures of safe sex inhibit communication, inhibit connection with other people, make sex an athletic contest rather than a spiritual thing. If I don't feel like it's worth a life or death gamble with someone, well, I don't feel like having sex with them. A condom really does feel like a barrier between people. The longer I've lived with them the more they've seemed like something invented by Jerry Falwell just specifically to put the gay community back into the dark ages, to destroy the sort of trust we've built up over the last two decades."

--Writer and former porn star Scott O'Hara in an interview with the AIDS magazine Art & Understanding, November issue.

"All America loses when any person is denied or forced out of a job because of sexual orientation. Being gay, the last time I thought about it, seemed to have nothing to do with the ability to read a balance book, fix a broken bone or change a spark plug."

--President Bill Clinton in a Nov. 8 address to the gay Human Rights Campaign's national dinner.

"On issue after issue involving gays and lesbians, survey after survey shows that the most important determinant of people's attitude is whether they are aware, whether they knowingly have had a family [situation] or a friendship or a work relation with a gay person. ... So I think one of the greatest things we have to do still is just to increase the ability of Americans who do not yet know that gays and lesbians are their fellow Americans in every sense of the word, to feel that way. I think it's very important."

--President Bill Clinton in a Nov. 8 address to the gay Human Rights Campaign's national dinner.

"An American president kissing up to the wealthiest extremists of the amoral left."

--Andrea Sheldon, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, on Bill Clinton's Nov. 8 speech at the gay Human Rights Campaign's first annual national dinner.

"It's wild for me to be standing here. This has not been an easy journey for me at all. I lived with a sense of shame for a long, long time. Every single interview I did, I dodged that dreaded question 'Are you gay?' I tried to be witty, I tried to find ways to get around it and my answer was always, 'My private life is my private life.' And it is, but my sexuality is as much a part of me as my skin color. ... I tried for a long time to justify why it should be hidden, for as long as I could, and then I finally got to a point where it was more important for me to live my life honestly and to be proud of who I am, than my fame. And, ironically, as soon as I was honest, I became more famous. So much for those people who said that it would ruin my career."

--Ellen DeGeneres as she received the Human Rights Campaign's 1997 Civil Rights Leadership Award, Nov. 8.

"I felt like I was risking everything [when I came out] because I had been warned for so long about what it was going to do, and I was willing to risk all. [But] I got more than I could have possibly even imagined. My life is so good, and I found love, and what's more important than that?"

--Ellen DeGeneres as she received the Human Rights Campaign's 1997 Civil Rights Leadership Award, Nov. 8.

"I hear stories all the time now, you know, it's amazing what it does when you open up: People come to you and I hear stories and I get letters from people who tell me how I've touched their lives in some way. I got a letter from a 76-year-old lesbian who said she can't believe this happened in her lifetime. And me, being new to all this, didn't know that there were lesbians 76- years-old. ... Everywhere I go, I walk down the street -- I've been in New York the past week -- and I have construction workers giving me the thumbs up, I have people screaming out as they pass in the car giving me the thumbs up, I have men and women ... everybody coming up saying, 'thank you,' and 'keep it up' and 'congratulations.' ... I've made a contribution. ... I know when I leave here I've really done something; it feels good. And I never wanted to be an activist, I just wanted to entertain people, I just wanted to make people feel good. But since I've witnessed the discrimination and the double standards and heard about the statistics for gay teen suicides, I had to rethink that. And so if by standing up for what I think is right makes me an activist, I'm an activist."

--Ellen DeGeneres as she received the Human Rights Campaign's 1997 Civil Rights Leadership Award, Nov. 8.

"It wasn't too long ago when I was scared to death to come out. I was scared out of my mind. I mean, the kind of thing that happened to the President [during his speech to this dinner] when people stand up and start screaming at -- I used to fear that when I would do standup. I would come for an encore and people would be allowed to just ask me questions for as long as they wanted, and I would just talk to the audience. And every night when I went out there I feared someone standing up and saying, 'You're gay, aren't you?' It scared the hell out of me and yet I would not come out."

--Ellen DeGeneres as she received the Human Rights Campaign's 1997 Civil Rights Leadership Award, Nov. 8.

"I think when she [Ellen DeGeneres] did that [came out] on television, and you got to see the interplay with her family and her friends who were not homosexual, you got to see all that – I think for many Americans who themselves had never had a personal experience, never had a friend or a family member who's a homosexual -- it did give them a chance to see it in a new light. So I think he [Vice President Gore] was accurate about that [when he said it]. My experience in life -- all I can tell you is what my experience is -- and I'm not talking about as President, I'm talking about as a citizen, as a person -- is that most people's attitudes about how homosexuals should be treated really are determined more than anything else based on whether they have ever known someone who is homosexual. Now ... most people's attitudes about whether the lifestyle should be condoned or condemned is a function, perhaps, of their religious training. But we're not talking about people's religious convictions here. We're talking about how people in the public arena, as citizens, should be treated in terms of their right to education, to jobs, to housing, and to be treated free of discrimination."

--Bill Clinton on TV's "Meet The Press," Nov. 8.

"My purpose in singing now is to share the love and knowledge of Christ. I want gay people and non-gay people and people from every category to like my music, like me as an artist and to believe that I am bringing them, through my music, what I truly believe to be right. That's my purpose for their community and for any other community."

--1970s disco diva Gloria Gaynor ("I Will Survive," "Never Can Say Goodbye") to Atlanta's Southern Voice, Oct. 23.

"When I got into trouble [with my career] in the '60s [due to my anti-war activism], gay men were the ones who kept my career alive. They were looking for my records and the female impersonators constantly imitated Eartha Kitt. They kept my memory going until I returned, and I'm grateful for that."

--Singer Eartha Kitt to Boston's Bay Windows, Oct. 16.

"I was never in the closet. I came out immediately, from the very first time I went onstage as a stand-up. I'm so avant-garde. Actually, it was stupid, but who knew then?"

--Comedian Kate Clinton to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Nov. 13.

"I am not a neocon, or any kind of con. I consider myself a progressive, and any look at my record and my writing will confirm that. I am also not 'sex negative.' I wrote columns in NY Newsday against New York's campaign to ban porn shops, against the harassment of gay discos and bars (which has gone on for years), and in favor of transgendered rights and queer power. I co-wrote the 'Little Black Book' that is used all over the country to advise people of their rights when they are arrested for public lewdness."

--Author Gabriel Rotello in a letter distributed at the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force Creating Change conference's Sex Panic! town meeting Nov. 14 in San Diego. Rotello has been cast by some as a 'neoconservative' because of his new book, Sexual Ecology, which attempts to prove that core groups of promiscuous urban gay men are passing on HIV at a high enough rate to keep the AIDS epidemic alive.

"We have no intention of pulling this nominee [proposed Luxembourg ambassador James Hormel]. It's an absolute outrage that any member of the United States Senate would block a nominee based on his or her sexual preference."

--White House spokesman Joe Lockhart, Nov. 15.

"We're going to see a decision from the Hawaii Supreme Court, possibly as early as December, almost certainly sometime this winter, and at that point, same-sex couples will be able to get married and we will enter into the next phase of this struggle which will be an extraordinarily transformed chapter where we will be in a very different place in our society."

--Evan Wolfson, director of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund's Marriage Project, in a Nov. 15 interview with this column.

"To me, 'In & Out' is all about a guy who has shut off a major part of his circuitry, his physical and emotional life, who is jump-started, sort of jolted, into a reckoning. Because, as much as the movie is about repression and denial, it's about collusion, too. I think the whole town colludes in his denial. I think that Joan knows. But she has rationalized my [character's] gayness because she has her own needs. And the mother, the father, the brother -- they all know. But they know in that place we all know things, and yet collude in the other person's denial, in the other person's need to say, 'This is who I am. This is what I present to the world. Would you please play along?' That's what we all do, that's the compact we make as a society."

--Actor Kevin Kline in an interview with MSNBC Nov. 17.

"If you're overruling that, you're a cocksucker."

--Tennis star Andre Agassi to an umpire during the Las Vegas/United States Tennis Association Men's Challenger tennis tournament at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas Nov. 14. Agassi was fined $1,000 for the outburst.

"I think once he realizes, you know, when I called him that, I was really trying to give him a compliment. I mean, would you take that personally? I guess if you're homophobic, you would, but I meant it as kind of a nice remark."

--Agassi, afterward, to a reporter for the Las Vegas Review- Journal.

-- Rex Wockner's "Quote Unquote" is archived from mid-1994 onward at http://www.qrd.org/qrd/www/world/wockner.html