“I never struggled with it (being gay) or thought about it. It’s something that tends to come up when you hit puberty, but my attendance at junior high and high school was brief and very sporadic. My parents didn’t seem to have any issue with gayness. I had no religious upbringing whatsoever, so I had no concept of it being a sin.”

“I couldn’t win any fight. Anyone could beat me up. So in high school, as a juvenile delinquent hag, basically, I learned that people who would beat you up, if you could make them laugh, they wouldn’t beat you up, and maybe they’d sleep with you!”

“You (gay celebrities) get a lot of baggage coming at you from the gay world – to behave in a certain manner, to say a certain thing and be a certain person. And I’ve always been very lefty, very urban and very downtown in the way that I deliver my message, and that’s very hard on a lot of middle-class, mainstream quote-unquote gay people. I’ve never been one of ‘the gays’ – I’ve always been one of the queers.”

“Under an Obama administration, the United States will lead by setting a strong example, which includes making clear that asylum for persecuted people is a bedrock principle of American and international law. Moreover, Obama will exert diplomatic pressure and employ other foreign policy tools to encourage other nations to address human rights abuses and atrocities committed against LGBT men and women.”