“Someone needs to stand up for beer bellies, Old Spice, Jimmy Kimmel and the great American breakfast of convenience-store hot dogs and coffee.... My project is called Straight Eye for the Queer Guy, wherein we administer a little redneck rock, Budweiser, wings at Hooters and Monday Night Football to put a little butch back into an impossibly toned, Abercrombie & Fitch-clad, simply ab-fab Bourbon Street boy’s life.”

“The word was coined by a major closet case, William Henry III, a critic at Time magazine who is now deceased. He claimed that some gay journalists — yes, including yours truly — were doing this terrible new thing, revealing gay public figures’ homosexuality, and he claimed that some gay activists had dubbed it ‘outing.’ The word stuck, though some of us hated its violent and special connotation — we preferred simply calling it reporting.”

“If the [Bush] administration and their allies want to make a campaign issue out of amending the Constitution [to ban gay marriage], we will not only stand against it, but we will point out that they’d rather talk about taking away rights and undermining the ability of Americans to live their own lives, to have their own families, than to talk about the miserable economy, to talk about their miserable foreign policy, to talk about their rollback of environmental laws and workers’ rights, education and health care.”