“Where are all the unstylish, multifaceted, middle-income, co-op-dwelling, herbal-tea-drinking dykes living outside the dominant culture? ... Where are all the people forging their own, distinctly lesbian, ways of being? Where are all the real butches? Where are all the leatherdykes? Hell, were are all my own hockey buddies?”

“If we all take a vow of silence and never mention gay marriage again, do you really think George Bush is not going to raise the Federal Marriage Amendment again? They’re going to use that issue whether we vow never to touch it or not. It’s ... silly ... to believe that somehow our enemies, those who support discrimination, are going to play by the rules, and not raise the issue if we don’t.”

“No! God help me. I don’t want to get married. It’s fine if everybody else wants to, but even if I was straight I wouldn’t get married.”

“I still can’t believe that it [George W. Bush’s re-election] really could have happened. Just look at the facts on the table: He’d gone into a war having misled people – whether deliberately or not – about why he went to war. You would think that would have knocked him out [of the race.] It didn’t. Look at the number of American soldiers who have died since he claimed that the war had ended. And yet it seems this doesn’t make most Americans worry too much. I was teaching in Jacksonville, Fla., [during the election campaign] and I was shocked, because I had naively believed all these many years that Americans genuinely believed in freedom of speech. [But I] discovered there that when you made an utterance that was remotely contrary to what the White House was saying, then they attacked you. For a South African the déjà vu was frightening. They behaved exactly the same way that used to happen here [during apartheid] — vilifying those who are putting forward a slightly different view.”