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| Sayings: Page 4 | |||
| Barney Frank (U.S. Representative, D-Mass.) emerged as the anti-Newt point man within the Democratic minority on the Hill, but that success was eclipsed in the media by reports on "Barney Fag," Rep. Dick Armey's Wildean tongue-trip. In May, Frank got Armey back when Rep. Kika de la Garza (Armey's fellow Texan) inquired if the two men would "kiss and make up." Responded Frank, "You're confused, Kika. I'm gay. Not blind." | |||
| "Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question." - Albert Camus | |||
| "To straight onlookers, the idea that a gay man would be proud of being overweight and possibly sporting hair on his back might seem a little peculiar. Gay guys are, after all, supposed to be trim, muscular, fastidiously groomed and tastefully dressed, fond of shaving semi-private body parts and at all times radiating a fiercely competitive fabulousness designed to make lesser mortals cower and run to the nearest designer store or gym in humiliation. However, not every gay person is built to live up to the cliche foisted upon them. Whereas the leather clone asserts a masculinity as extreme as the femininity of the archetypal sissy, bears are usually more natural and down-to-earth. Of course, there are some burly boys whose dress-sense borders on costuming, and the recent popularity of the bear look has provoked plenty of bear-wagon jumpers." - From Barry Walter's coverage of International Bear Rendezvous '97 in the San Francisco Examiner Feb. 20 | |||
| "I'm a label queen. I like being a lesbian, a dyke, a homosexual, a queer. There was a time in my life when I came out to complete strangers -- bus drivers ('Is this the right bus to Church and Wellesley? I'm a lesbian, you know'), waiters ('This gay girl will have the pasta special') and sales clerks ('I'll be paying with my Visa card, cause I'm a big old dyke'). I'm the first to admit that there are parts of the gay community that I don't like, but if that's the criteria to decide whether or not one takes a label, I wouldn't likely take the label 'human being,' 'white person,' or woman,' either. Finding the label 'gay' limiting is all the more reason to claim it. The more of us who identify ourselves as gay or lesbian, the more it proves that the community is wildly heterogeneous. It's true. Not all of us are gym bunnies, or conservatives, or screaming queens, or whatever the current negative stereotype is. So prove it. Put your label where your mouth is." - Features editor Rachel Giese in an editorial in the Sept. 25 issue of Toronto's Xtra! |
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| "I criticize the effect of the body beautiful on gay men precisely because I have sacrificed myself on its altar, because I have spent untold hours shaping and sculpting and slaving away to make myself conform to the inflated aesthetic standards of physical beauty that mainstream gay culture practices like the most punishingly prescriptive form of eugenics. Perpetually on starvation diets and at the mercy of weight-lifting regimens and cosmetic gimmicks like Pacific-sea-kelp-and-algae astringents and 'Retexturing Whole Egg Masques,' we have imprisoned ourselves in a lifelong fat farm-cum-beauty spa that has become our own internment camp, the jail in which we bow and scrape before the Master Race, the aristocracy of champion thoroughbreds who exert such a tyrannical effect on our self-image. The human body was formed, not at the Chelsea Gym, as gay pornographers would have us believe, but in the black lagoon of the gene pool, that primordial soup of mutating chromosomes that produced, not an anatomically perfect specimen, but a craggy compilation of irregularities, of knobby shoulders set askew and spines that twist and turn up scoliastic backs." - Author Daniel Harris (The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture) writing in the Los Angeles Times, Sept. 29 | |||
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Content © Kalev Hunt (kalev@pobox.com)