"I'm not ashamed, I'm not finished. Not guilty." — Lt. Dan Choi in court March 19 after he was arrested a day earlier for handcuffing himself to the White House fence to protest "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
"When you get arrested, it's difficult because your hands are restrained and the movement is a little bit stymied or halted on the physical level. But it's my hope that the larger movement, even with the chains on, can do nothing but grow to the point where it cannot be controlled by anything but that freeing and that dignified expression of getting arrested for what you know is absolutely morally right. There was no freer moment than being in that prison. It was freeing for me, and I thought of all of the other people that were still trapped, that were still handcuffed and fettered in their hearts. And we might have been caged up physically, but the message was very clear to all of the people who think that equality can be purchased with a donation or with a cocktail party or with tokens—that are serving in a public role. We are worth more than tokens. We have absolute value, and when the person who is oppressed by his own country wants to find out how to get that dignity back—being chained up and being arrested, that's how you get your dignity conferred back upon you. ... We're going to do it again. And we're going to keep doing it until the promises are manifest. And we will not stop. This is a very clear message to President Obama and any other leader who supposes to talk for the American promise and the American people: We will not go away." — Lt. Dan Choi on March 19 after he was arrested a day earlier for handcuffing himself to the White House fence to protest "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
" ( P ) rospective donors who have engaged in heterosexual sexual activity with a person known to have HIV are deferred for one year. At the same time, male donors who engaged in protected homosexual sexual activity with a monogamous partner 26 years ago are deferred for life." — From a March 4 letter by a group of U.S. senators to the FDA urging an end to the ban on blood donation by any man who has had sex with a man even once since the 1970s. The lobbying campaign is being led by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
"I'm against it ( same-sex marriage ) for a very simple reason: In the 60s they all said we had the right to the difference. And now, suddenly, they want a bourgeois life. For me it's difficult to imagine—one of the papas at work and the other at home with the baby. How would that be for the baby? I don't know. I see more lesbians married with babies than I see boys married with babies. And I also believe more in the relationship between mother and child than in that between father and child." — Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld to Vice magazine, March issue.
"In 2000, I pushed Ricky Martin very hard to admit if he was gay or not, and the way he refused to do it made everyone decide that he was. A lot of people say that destroyed his career, and when I think back on it now, I feel it was an inappropriate question." — Barbara Walters to the Toronto Star, March 6.
—Assistance: Bill Kelley
