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Quote UnQuote

Compiled by Rex Wockner

Published Thursday, 14-Dec-2006 in issue 990

“Up yours.”

Sir Elton John when asked by Australia’s Seven Network what he would say to Prime Minister John Howard about Howard’s vocal opposition to same-sex marriage and civil unions, Nov. 27.

“[Before I came out,] I’d used that excuse that most people use – that it’s nobody’s business. But when it really came down to it, you don’t hear straight people saying, ‘No one needs to know whether I’m straight or not.’ The only reason you don’t tell people is because you’re ashamed of it. Shame stifles you, whether it’s your sexuality or something else.”

Ellen DeGeneres to the British lesbian glossy Diva, January issue.

“He and I just like each other, and I think we set a good example here in the Senate. He’s a Republican, I’m a Democrat, we work together on issues that are important to the state of Nevada. And I wish other people had the same nonaggression pact we have. It’s not a ‘Brokeback Mountain’ situation.”

U.S. Senate Majority Leader-elect Harry Reid of Nevada talking about fellow Nevada Senator John Ensign, as quoted by The Associated Press, Nov. 15.

“The first time I went to a gay bar I was 17 years old. It was called the Hut and it was in Washington, D.C. Some referred to it as the Chicken Hut, and it was filled with early 1960s gay men in fluffy sweaters who cruised each other by calling table-to-table on phones provided by the bar. ‘I may be queer but I ain’t this,’ I remember thinking.”

Filmmaker John Waters writing in The New York Times, Nov. 19.

“I absolutely think that there should not be two classes of civil rights – one for people who put penises in vaginas and one for people who don’t. That’s ridiculous.”

TV talk-show host Bill Maher to Thestrippodcast.com, Nov. 16.

“In the previous round of outing in the early ‘90’s, everybody wanted to be first to be second. No one wanted to take the heat for starting it, but the blog phenomenon has changed that by lowering the threshold to the point that other media can’t avoid it. What we are now seeing is Outing 2.0.”

University of Southern California Prof. Larry Gross, director of the Annenberg School of Communication and author of Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing, to the Los Angeles Times, Nov. 20.

“A Gay Pride concert in Moscow would be a brilliant idea. [T]here’s a time when you have to step up. I never stood up to the Aids thing because I was in a drug haze – even though my friends were dying left, right and centre – I wasn’t on the front line and I should have been. Maybe we [gay pop-music acts] should, en masse, go to Moscow next year, if they’ll have us.”

Elton John to Britain’s The Observer, Nov. 12. Moscow’s mayor and courts banned last year’s first Pride march.

Assistance: Bill Kelley