‘I think the whole bravery thing [when a straight actor plays a gay role] is a sound bite. … The only people I think are brave in relationship to the stories we’re telling are the people they’re based on, and the ‘out’ actors who work on our show. There’s still a lot of homophobia in the world at large and in every industry, the entertainment industry included. … What do I have to be worried about? I’m a straight white male, working on a show playing a gay man. I don’t really think I’m going to be typecast.’ —Actor Gale Harold.
‘George Santayana, F. O. Matthiessen, Lincoln Kirstein, Leonard Bernstein, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Philip Johnson: all of them Harvard men—professors and students—and all of them gay or bisexual. But is that news? ‘The fact that, individually, they were gay is not news,’ said Douglass Shand-Tucci, the author of The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality and the Shaping of American Culture, recently published by St. Martin’s Press. ‘But the Harvard gay experience is more important in the shaping of American culture, because, in so many ways, Harvard is more important.” — New York Times May 29 article titled ‘American Culture’s Debt to Gay Sons of Harvard.’
‘Harvard, of course, has viciously discriminated against gays in the past. Last year a writer for The Harvard Crimson discovered records from 1920 of a secret university court that had persecuted homosexuals, apparently driving two to suicide. But Mr. Shand-Tucci argues that despite harassment, Harvard’s atmosphere was also creatively and intellectually fertile for gays. The biggest factor in the evolution of Harvard’s gay culture, Mr. Shand-Tucci said, was the university’s proximity to Boston, which was the nation’s intellectual capital at least until the turn of the 20th century. ‘ — The Times.
‘Mr. Shand-Tucci points out that three gay or bisexual former Harvard graduate students changed the course of gay history. Alfred Kinsey, who is said to have been bisexual, by asserting in the Kinsey Report that 10 percent of men had homosexual experiences, made it difficult to consider homosexuality a crime anymore, Mr. Shand-Tucci said. Franklin Kameny helped lobby the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the list of psychiatric illnesses. And the historian John Boswell made it more difficult to consider homosexuality a sin, Mr. Shand-Tucci said, by depicting the church’s sanctioning of gay relationships in his book ‘Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.’ — The Times.
‘For Billie Jean King, this was a little bit of justice. Annika Sorenstam at last got some real attention. ‘All of a sudden, everybody’s interested,’ King said. ‘Finally, Annika is a household name that she deserves. She’s finally got the recognition.’ King spoke on ABC’s ‘This Week’ on Sunday, three days after Sorenstam became the first woman in 58 years to play on the PGA Tour. Sorenstam failed to make the cut at the Colonial. King, who beat Bobby Riggs in a landmark tennis exhibition 30 years ago, was joined by Janet Guthrie, the first woman to race in the Indy 500, and boxer Laila Ali, daughter of Muhammad Ali. King said the Sorenstam hoopla highlights a big issue. ‘It just shows that men control the media, that we need people to really go out and support women’s sports,’ she said. ‘We’re very new, you know. Men’s sports have been around, in a professional way, much longer than us.” — May 27 Washington Post.
‘[She will] bring witchcraft and goddess worship into the YWCA. [It will become] a federal cash cow for radical lesbians.’ — Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, in response to the selection of former NOW president Patricia Ireland as chief executive of the YWCA, to Canada’s National Post, May 23. Ireland has openly had a husband and a girlfriend simultaneously. She is still married.
‘I know that a lot of people will watch this show who are not familiar with the gay community and start to reconsider their notions of identity, their own and other people’s. I’m really excited by that.’ — Jennifer ‘Flashdance’ Beals who stars in Showtime’s upcoming lesbian series The L Word, to Windy City Times, May 21.
‘At no time has it been more important to have these [gay] shows on television because we have such a right-wing administration. The propaganda of the media towards conservatism and the right wing is so powerful right now that we’re not given access to any kind of information about other people, including our own population, not to mention Iraqis or people from the Middle East or anywhere else in the world.’ — Beals to WCT.