Proclaiming a sexual preference is something that straight men never really have to bother with.

It was a pleasure to be a gay eyesore.

If there is a gay uniform, the differences are in how each man coordinates the details: the brand and cut of the jeans, the design of belts and boots, the haircut, the number and size of earrings.

When you've grown sick of reading and bug-eyed from watching TV, when your friends are all visited out, no words can adequately praise the link to the outside world provided by your parents and family.

I wore a woman's antique fur jacket to my high school junior prom.

I am now faced with mortality. Definitely not the most generous move.

As I was coming out of the closet, our car was hurtling over an embankment.

My gayness became quietly accepted and, shock of all shocks, life went on.

Sexuality is a private matter; some believe that broadcasting it destroys the very things that make it sacred.

As anyone who is gay will confirm, being that way is not something you become, it is a set of emotional and physical responses that just are.

Gay culture is surviving and thriving. Some activists believe the recent rise in homophobic violence might be a gauge of the success of positive gay images.

Coming out is a means of redefining oneself, of claiming membership in a lifestyle and a social order with distinct values. Chief among these values is honesty.

Proclaiming a sexual preference is something that straight men never really have to bother with.

My reasons for declaring a sexual preference had to do less with the pursuit of personal freedom than with the lust for pure shock value.

Coming out involves varying degrees of difficulty that are affected by class, race, religion, and geography.

Perhaps there is no agony worse than the tedium I experienced waiting for Something to Happen.

David Bowie and Boy George created a safely contained theatrical expression of gay style.

I had been found in a mud puddle at 4:30 in the morning.

I believed I was invincible.

One result of An American Family was that I became a gay role model.

For the naysayers that claimed 'American Family' revealed us to be vacant, unloving, uncaring morons of the materialistic '70s, this image will be proven wrong when Mom and Dad remarry... Make no mistake. This is not to emphasize the sadness of my demise but rather emphasize the love of my family and friends.

Gay culture is in a coming-out process of its own. From out of the closets in the '60s, the culture moved onto the disco floors of the '70s and through the hospital wards of the '80s and onwards to the streets.

I don't know if hep C is called 'the quiet killer,' but it easily could be, so unnoticeably does it nestle into your body before crankin' up the screws and letting you race to figure out what's going on.

In 1970, television ate my family. The Andy Warhol prophecy of 15 minutes of fame for any and everyone blew up on our doorstep.

Scrawling 'I'm gay' in lipstick on your parents' bedroom mirror may demonstrate a personal signature of the highest style, but is not particularly sensitive to their feelings. Upon hearing me utter those words almost twenty years ago, my own mother did what and self-respecting middle-class mom would do: went directly into a seizure.

The bulk of my learning - if I may call it such - has come within the past three months, after I became a part of the fragile body of patients who make up an AIDS hospice. Here, surrounded by teams of supportive nurses, attentive doctors, and interns, one gently comes upon his own strengths and shortcomings.

Too pop for punk, too 'old school' for the New Wave, Mumps were a '70s era New York rock band, out of time.

As anyone who is gay will confirm being that way is not something you become it is a set of emotional and physical responses that just are.

The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.

If it weren't for women, men would still be wearing last week's socks.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

To a smart girl men are no problem - they're the answer.

We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Athletes as role models and heroes is a hoax, a sick hoax. The men and women who are fighting in Iraq, they are the true heroes.

Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of every industrial area in the whole country.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

There is always a type of man who says he loves his fellow men, and expects to make a living at it.

What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us - Letters that we ought to burn.

Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

When women go wrong, men go right after them.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

To enable men to exercise that power is the object of protection.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.