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Quote UnQuote

Compiled by Rex Wockner

Published Thursday, 16-Feb-2006 in issue 947

“I thought it was an opportunity to represent this form of love and to portray homosexual love … as not being a disease or a plague or something that can be cured or a lifestyle choice.”

Brokeback Mountain actor Heath Ledger to the Australian gay newspaper Sydney Star Observer, Jan. 19. Ledger is Australian.

“When Republicans gear up for a big election, one standard tactic is to drag out the homosexuals. Slap them in the public stockade. Reveal their plots and agendas. Stop them before they get married, before they adopt children, before they recruit children, before they claim the top bunks in our nuclear submarines. This supposedly motivates the base, which otherwise would spend election night at home, watching Pat Robertson condemn various cities and world leaders to unholy deaths.”

Mike Thomas writing in the Orlando Sentinel, Jan. 15.

“I finally got to see it on New Year’s Day at the Magnolia, and went with my 13-year-old. I cried several times. It was just an incredible film, one that will hopefully open some people’s hearts and make everyone more tolerant. Love is love, pure and simple.”

Dallas Mayor Laura Miller on Brokeback Mountain, to the gay newspaper Dallas Voice, Jan. 06.

“Elton John and David Furnish are such the face of gay respectability. It is like the dirtier side of homosexuality has to be swept under the carpet. It has become so sanitized and so chocolate box powdery, and that is really frustrating. The diversity of sexuality should be the beauty of it, but now there is so much focus on this new gay royalty and they are all so squeaky clean. Oh, it is so tedious!”

Singer Jimmy Somerville to the Sydney Star Observer, Jan. 12.

“My wife and I took our lesbian daughter to see Brokeback Mountain Friday night. Sorry to disappoint the moral purists, but we had a wonderful evening. A poignantly moving but genuinely sad story of two men who, by following society’s advice, did what was, for them, unnatural. Their wives were ‘sexy’ enough, that was not the problem. The problem was that they pursued a path that was at variance with their natural order. With predictable certainty, these men soon discovered that society’s idea of ‘normal’ was, for them, abnormal. (You can walk an errant path for only so long – nature has a way of re-establishing homeostasis.)”

Guest columnist Kim Clark writing in the Salt Lake Tribune, Jan. 22.

“[P]laying Edna for two years, I felt there was no need to watch my weight at all. The fatter I was, the less fat I had to wear in the fat suit. So in my dressing room at Hairspray, I kept the whole counter covered in potato chips and candy and every bit of good things there are to eat. But when I left Hairspray, I was grand marshalling the Gay Day Parade in New York and I saw the photos on TV. I couldn’t tell where my ass ended and the convertible’s seat began. I said to myself, ‘Cookie, who’s gonna hire ya looking like that?’ I was just too big. So I started doing the low-carb thing.”

Gay actor Harvey Fierstein to Newsweek, Jan. 15.