“Oh, my God, before I played this character, I never realized how important gay rights issues are; I never paid much attention. And then when I started playing this character, it was a personal affront to me. It seems outrageous that the things I and many others take for granted, gay people cannot. I think the marriage issue that gays face is outrageous as well.”

“I support enthusiastically the right of transgender people to live their lives as they wish and to be free from government discrimination. But that question is logically separate from gay rights, and always has been. Many transgender people are heterosexual; most gay people have no internal conflict with their own gender. It remains important to insist that, just because so many in the gay world have been browbeaten into repeating the concept of an ‘LGBT community,’ that doesn’t mean it exists. I don’t really believe there is even a ‘gay and lesbian community’ as such. There are common interests in violating heterosexual norms, but the experience of being a gay man and being a lesbian are often experientially more different than the contrast between many straight women and lesbians or between many straight men and gay men.”

“For those who are not familiar with it, of the four nationally leading [Republican] candidates for president and I count myself as one of those – but also Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani and Sen. [John] McCain and [former Sen.] Fred Thompson – there’s only one of us who’s in favor of a federal amendment to the Constitution to limit marriage to the relationship between a man and a woman. And that’s me.”