October 1st, 1997 to October 7th, 1997

Quotelines

by Rex Wockner and Tracy Baim

"IT'S EASY TO tell us apart. I'm heterosexual!" - Roseanne, who has a talkshow starting next fall, on talk host Rosie O'Donnell.
"PEOPLE ASK, 'Are you afraid you'll only be able to play gay characters? [But] nobody says to Marlee Matlin, 'Oh, are you playing another deaf character?' " - Gay actor Bill Brochtrup, 'the gay one' on NYPD Blue, to Out. He's playing gay on ABC's Total Security, but his sexual orientation is played matter-of-factly.
"[ANNEHECHE and I] are having a ball [shooting 6 Days/7 Nights]. I don't have any concerns about people buying a romance between myself and Anne. She was the obvious choice to [director Ivan Reitman] and me. She brings a great spark and wit and life to the part. I've never discussed any of my coworkers' personal lives before, and I don't see any reason to start now." - Harrison Ford on E! Online, according to Entertainment Weekly.
"[Star Trek's] new, potentially queer Borg character-'assimilated ... as a sexless human drone, controlled by the collective mind'-sounds like a lot of gay and lesbian people on earth, particularly in Washington, D.C. OK ... slap me." - E-mail to this column from Robert Bray, former PR man for the NGLTF.
"None of my friends said, 'Gee, why do you want to play a gay role?' It's not an issue anymore." - Kevin Kline on his new film In & Out, to The New York Times, Sept. 10.
"There's a tradition of gay flamboyance that would be shameful to lose. My God, if every gay character has to become the responsible district attorney or the crusading senator, then who will ultimately benefit? Yes, we will prove that gay people can be every bit as dull as everyone else. I guess, on a political level, it could be important to make that point. But certainly not for my entertainment dollar!" - In & Out screenwriter Paul Rudnick to The New York Times, Sept. 11.
"[Manhattan's] East Village [is] one of those neighborhoods that's constantly cusping. Are you punk East Village or performance-art East Village or drag-queen East Village or heroin-addict East Village or dilettante-heroin-addict East Village? It's just too exhausting." - Rudnick.
"The aspect of New York gay life in the '70s that always struck me the most was its combination of randiness and braininess. Whereas now young gay men feel it is enough to have a buffed body, in those days we went to the gym and the opera, had an opinion on the best weightlifting program and the weightiest tome to read." - Edmund White to North Carolina's The Front Page.
"His asshole was busier than his toilet." - Gay author Larry Kramer on gay author Edmund White's new autobiographical book, The Farewell Symphony, as quoted in the Village Voice, Sept. 16.
"Gay men and lesbians -a forced marriage if ever there was one." - Former NGLTF Executive Director Torie Osborn in the upcoming PBS documentary Pride Divide.

"PC ... was the self-deprecating joke that radical dykes coined in the 1970s." - Former NGLTF head Urvashi Vaid writing in the Sept. 16 issue of The Advocate.
"Lesbians in leadership positions play a conventional kind of power politics invented by straight men." - Urvashi Vaid.

"Martina, I just love her. I've had a crush on her since 1980." - Lesbian comic Suzanne Westenhoefer to Florida's Contax Guide magazine, Sept. 3 issue.
"I'm not going to name names, but I find it personally abhorrent that gay people would stay in the closet until they've made all the money, and then they can be multi-billionaires and say, 'Well, I'm gay.' I would never out somebody, because it's a personal decision to come out. But I don't see living a lie. I remember at the beginning of my career the press would almost beg me not to be out because they might have to write about it, and talk about my partner as if we had a heterosexual relationship. It was absurd. When I did Barbara Walters on 20/20 years ago she acted like she had never met or seen a homosexual before, and you would have sworn, listening to her, that she had never even heard the word homosexual before. My philosophy has always been just be honest. You pay a heavier price for lying, for not having your dignity. I was probably lucky that I had a family that said you don't tell lies for any reason." - Actor-playwright Harvey Fierstein to the San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 14.
"Growing up I didn't have that, gay characters [on TV]. Well, Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda were lovers, but they didn't talk about it." - Ellen DeGeneres at the Emmys.
"At this point, I don't want to set a position on that [gay marriage], but I'm in favor of loving relationships of all kinds. ... We need to stop trying to convince ourselves that we can talk kids out of having sex but rather meet them where they are. I understand that parents and administrators don't want students to talk about AIDS and sex because it isn't pleasant, but I think of it as similar to defensive driving. ... I don't endorse needle exchanges because they really sort of break the law. I do support teaching people how to clean needles and educating people on how to start protecting themselves." - Miss America, Katherine Shindle, during this year's pageant.
"About 1972, I wrote letters to Washington's three top law enforcement officials: the chief of police, the United States attorney for Washington, and the D.C. Corporation Counsel. In them, I said: 'I hereby invite, solicit, urge and entreat you to engage with me in an act or acts of sodomy of your choice, as defined by Section 22-3502 (sodomy) of the D.C. Code, in some indisputably private place in the District of Columbia, at a time of our mutual convenience.' I pointed out that, depending on their response, one of two consequences would ensue: (1) If they prosecuted me, than (a) I would utilize the case as a launching pad for an effort in the courts to overturn the D.C. sodomy law (and perhaps all sodomy laws), and (b) in open court, I would solicit the judge for sodomy (and also the prosecutor), thereby involving them (as 'victims') with me in a crime and forcing them to recuse or disqualify themselves, on conflict of interest grounds; that I would solicit the entire D.C. Superior Court bench and, if necessary, our Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court, leaving them immobilized, with no one who could properly conduct the case at any level, and subjecting them to a torrent of well-deserved public ridicule; or (2) If they did not prosecute, then they would have established a major precedent, since if, with impunity and without prosecution, I could solicit the top three law enforcement authorities in the District, then obviously anyone could solicit anyone. There was no prosecution. Arrests of gay men for solicitation for sodomy ceased shortly thereafter (long before the sodomy law itself was repealed), and a little later, the entire section of the vice squad targeting non-prostitutional solicitation was disbanded." - Longtime D.C. activist Frank Kameny, writing in the September issue of the Baltimore Alternative.
"YOU TAKE IT with a grain of salt [criticism that he is homophobic]. People are going to think what they're going to think. I don't think anybody's entitled to be prejudiced. ... The one thing I got that nobody can control [is] my mind." - Boogie Nights actor Mark Wahlberg in the October Out magazine. Wahlberg has previously apologized for making anti-gay comments on a 1993 radio program. Nights is based loosely on the life of "omnisexual" porn star John Holmes, who died of AIDS in 1988.

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