By nature, I'm an optimistic person. No one believes it, but I am.

There’s no question that the gay movement would not be as far along as it is without AIDS. But how can there be any other issue in the face of death, possible extinction?

Religion is such an icky, sticky thing, full of tortuous – well, everything. Why is it so essential for man to be forced, for that is what religion relies on, force, to believe in anything but himself? And this is what John Winthrop should represent for us: the utter disdain he and Puritanism have for the self, for the human, for the human being.

Dangerous, free time on your hands. You can only jerk off so often.

All you want is Love. And if you’ve wanted love so badly, why haven’t you had it? Does not that say something about The Wanter, not his World?

I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don’t like that feeling.

We have the ultimate in freedom – we have absolutely no responsibilities! – and we’re abusing it.

And all analogies to the Holocaust are tired, overworked, boring, probably insulting, possibly true, and a major turnoff.

No matter what any struggle accomplishes, time, life, death bring in their changes, and new oppressions are always forming from the ashes of the old.

Some reporter called me ‘the angriest gay man in the world’ or some such. Well, it stuck, but I realized it was very useful.