A Quote by Dan Savage

Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.
Faggot never meant "gay" when I was a kid. You kind of knew that you could call a gay person faggot if you were ignorant, but nobody ever called someone a faggot if they were gay.
When I meet gay kids and they know who we are, I remember that's amazing because literally every gay person in every gay story I knew growing up was doomed to die. There weren't any positive gay stories and it's incredible that has changed.
I'm not gay, but I don't think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. I'm also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless, I always identified with him so much.
Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.
To pay for my father's funeral I borrowed money from people he already owed money to. One called him a nobody. No, I said, he was a failure. You can't remember a nobody's name, that's why they're called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable.
The ball scene was never really only gay people. I think people have this notion that if there's a man hanging around a gay man, he must be gay, but that's just stigma. Back in the day, it was the same; there were lots of different people there: gay, straight, whatever. They did not care what they were called because they knew who they were.
God has called us into a place of tenderness, when nobody is looking, when there are no great decisions to make, when it’s just him and me in a hotel room, with no one to pray for, no one to preach to. When it is just two people in a room, that’s where you learn. That’s where you learn his heartbeat. That’s where you learn the presence. That’s where you learn the voice. It’s in the moments when nobody is watching, nobody is evaluating how good you’re doing. When it is just you and him.
For a long time I didn't want to accept that I was gay. Better said: I couldn't accept it because I was too afraid. Homosexuals were discriminated against in Puerto Rico back then, sometimes even killed. I had a friend named José, but we called him Linoshka because he was a transvestite. He was stabbed to death in the street at the age of 19 by a homophobe because he had taken part in a gay-pride parade.
Nobody knew if the pilot would even get picked up because it had two gay lead characters, which has never happened before. And now every show has at least two gay characters, if not many more.
When we have gay characters on TV, they're just, kind of, gay for the sake of being gay. That's their personality. That's their whole backstory, that's their future story, that's their present story - it's just gay. Nobody's just gay.
The essay I had to read was called, "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope. The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in "heroic couplets". If something is called an essay, it should be an essay.
I think Justin Timberlake verges on being gay, he gets gay airplay. Britney gets loads as well. If you're male and you're black you're not going to get much play in a gay club.
In 1998, in Laramie, Wyoming, two guys beat up Matthew Shepard and left him on the side of the road hanging on the fence to die. They killed him, because Matthew Shepard was gay. They killed him, because Matthew Shepard was gay? They killed him.
One time I was doing an interview for a gay magazine and halfway through the journalist found out I wasn't gay. He said, 'Sorry, I can't continue the interview.' Because they only had gay public figures in their magazine. I felt so crestfallen. I wanted to tell him: but I play fundraisers for gay marriage! I'd rather my kids were gay than straight!'
I was part of a show called 'Manifest Equality' in Los Angeles in 2010, and I realized there was a disconnect between people who are gay or have gay friends and are gay-friendly, and people who think they don't know any gay people.
I went on tours with [Bob] Dylan - the big one was in 1975 and called Roaring Thunder Review. I knew him well because I met him around the time he did his second album, in 1963. He recorded one of my songs called Shadows. In the 1970s, it was suggested that we do a duet, because we had the same manager, Albert Grossman, who also managed Odetta and Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan and I respected what each other did, but I just decided not to do it.
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