Compiled by Howard Israel
"No human institution is perfect, and it would be foolish to suggest that incidents are always investigated and that abusers who don't happen to be priests are never protected by colleagues or superiors. Still, it's probably safe to say that if a principal was accused of overlooking a child molester in his classrooms or recycling him to other schools, nobody would compare his suffering to Christ's. And nobody would be asking for his views about sex, reproduction, women, homosexuality or health care either. The moral authority granted the Catholic Church in the secular world is for me the most repellent aspect of the current crisis."
– Katha Pollitt, in her column titled "Why Are Pedophilia-Hiding, Child-Abusing Church Fathers Allowed to Write Laws About Women's Bodies?," http://www.alternet.org, April 3.
"There's a whole new wave of lesbians coming out, and it's really interesting for me to watch. We weren't all as free or willing to be so out. Younger women are so much more OK with themselves than the generation before them."
– Andrea Meyerson, in an article titled "Rival parties toast 20 years at the Dinah," about the history of parties at Palm Springs' convergence of golf and lesbians, http://www.latimes.com, April 3.
"For Lindsay Young, a biologist who studies the colony of Laysan albatross, known for their long-term female pair bonding … the existence of so many female-female albatross pairs disproved assumptions that she didn't even realize she'd been making and, in the process, raised a chain of progressively more complicated questions. One of the prickliest, it seemed, was how a scientist is even supposed to talk about any of this, given how eager the rest of us have been to twist the sex lives of animals into allegories of our own."
– Jon Mooallem, in his article titled "Can Animals Be Gay?," about the same-gender coupling by more than 450 animal species, http://www.nytimes.com, March 29.
"Clearly the issue facing the Catholic Church is not about whether gay men or celibacy cause pedophilia. It is, however, about the church's egregious neglect to address the issue of sexual violence by priests against children."
– Irene Monroe, in her column titled "The Pope's Pedophilic Church," http://www.gbmnews.com, April 1.
"There have, it seems, always been celebrities – or friends or co-workers, or aunts or uncles – that we know, in our heart of hearts, are gay or lesbian. They just refuse to admit it, fueling our curiosity with a stubbornness grounded in fear of being discriminated against or damaging an established career. But research shows that people who remain in what's known as 'the glass closet' are fooling only a small slice of the populace, and that human beings have a staggeringly good ability to judge sexual orientation."
– Rex Huppke, in a column titled "Sorry, Ricky Martin. Flying under the gaydar is less frequent than ever," http://www.washingtonpost.com, April 4.
"Discos are almost as old as rock 'n' roll. But the story of 'Hot Stuff' really begins in 1967, when the newly opened Stonewall Inn became the one gay bar in Manhattan that let customers dance together freely. … This early form of disco dancing helped galvanize the rebellion to come; it gave gays an exhilarating sense of strength in numbers."
– From a book review of "Hot Stuff – Disco and the Remaking of American Culture," by Alice Echols, http://www.nytimes.com, April 4.
"People mostly just looked, and then looked again, but few said anything, even when I asked them if they liked my new shirt. Riding the bus, I didn't have to worry about anybody sitting next to me. In the (mall) food court, right after school got out, a girl made an ugly face and pulled her friend back so I wouldn't walk too near. I was scared only once, at a gun show the day after I got the shirt. I had no trouble parting the huge crowds of people, many with knives and guns already on them … . Some in the crowd held conversations about me, loud conversations, as if I weren't there, conversations that (the newspaper) obscenity policy prohibits me from recounting in full here."
– Tony Brown, writer, Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper, in a column titled "AIDS Taskforce T-shirt aims to spread stigma of HIV too thin to hurt," about his experience wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "HIV-Positive," http://www.cleveland.com, March 25.
"Would you support or oppose having an openly gay person serve in any of the following roles? 50 percent would approve of an openly gay President. 55 percent would support a gay Supreme Court Justice. 56 percent would support a gay Secretary of state. 61 percent would support a gay Commissioner of baseball. 62 percent would support a gay Super Bowl quarterback."
– From a Vanity Fair and 60 Minutes poll, http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine, May 2010 Issue. The poll was conducted among a random sample of 967 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone between Feb. 26 -Mar. 1.
