---Harvey Fierstein
"Art is the most intense form of individualism the world has ever known."
---Oscar Wilde
"The gay label doesn't really bother me, as long as it's just not something that is restrictive....I don't think that sexuality necessarily implies a lifestyle package that comes with it."
---Neil Tennant
"In Canada, where church attendance has plummeted in recent years, acceptance of gay men and lesbians has grown rapidly, whereas in the US, where church attendance and belief in God remains robust, tolerance lags."
---Sean Saraq
"I would rather feel exhilarated about the loves that constitute the fabric of my life than nostalgic for some tame ideal of what it means to be family."
---Catherine Saalfield
"Gay friendships often create an alternative to family, a link more compelling than blood."
---David Bergman
"Whether or not [romantic friendships] had a genital component, the novels and diaries and correspondence of these periods consistently showed romantic friends opening their souls to each other and speaking a language that was in no way different from the language of heterosexual love."
---Lillian Faderman
"Transsexual dressing is a gay contribution to the realization that we're not a hundred percent masculine or feminine, but a mixture of hormones."
---Allen Ginsberg
"It is not gender which causes problems; rather, it is the imposition of gender on an individual by another. When the imposition is removed, polarity of masculine and feminine may remain, but as personal preference rather than imposed imperative."
---Nancy Nangeroni
"Discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people is all of a piece because it is rooted in people's assumptions about what it is to be male or female."
---Kerry Lobel
"Why is it that when we meet someone the first thing we assess in order to relate to them is whether they are male or female? We cling to gender almost desperately, panicking when it is ambiguous or complicated, simply because we are somehow implicated in the confusion."
---Guinevere Turner
"Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?"
---Ernest Gaines
"The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality."
---James Baldwin
"My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror."
---W. Somerset Maugham
"I'm a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community."
---Paul Newman
"To hear two American men congratulating each other on being heterosexual is one of the most chilling experiences---and unique to the United States. You don't hear two Italians sitting around complimenting each other because they actually like to go to bed with women. The American is hysterical about his manhood."
---Gore Vidal