“People talked to me about hosting a reality show. I have no interest in hosting a reality show. None. So I said no. And TV people are kind of shocked when you say no. But I have a really swell life in Seattle editing my newspaper, writing my column and hanging out with my family. I don’t want to live in L.A. and do crappy television.”

“When I was a boy, the only role models I had were Liberace and Charles Nelson Reilly. I couldn’t play the piano and I wasn’t much good at Match Game so I felt doomed. Now there are countless more images of gay people on television and I am grateful for every one of them, but they don’t represent that many more options. The message I hear is that it’s OK to be gay as long as you are effortlessly stylish, hysterically funny or both.”

“This [same-sex marriage] is a civil-rights issue. My relative, my aunt, married a white man in the 1950s when their marriage was illegal in half the states of this country. Indeed, my uncle, had he taken his wife across the wrong state line, would have been guilty of a criminal violation. It seems to me that if people want to marry a person of a different race that’s no different than somebody wanting to marry someone of the same sex. And, indeed, we should be celebrating the fact that these people are talking about forming solid relationships, families, because families, in the end, will keep the community stable and are the basis upon which our country has been built and will survive. And so I think rather than allowing the panderers to fear and division to use this as a wedge issue in this election, I think and I believe the American people will rise to a level of saying, ‘Wait a minute, it’s no skin off my back in terms of the law if somebody marries the person they love and that person is of the same gender.’ Civil union falls short. It’s not the same thing. It doesn’t give the same rights.”