"Hope never abandons you, you abandon it."
"All love is original, no matter how many other people have loved before."
"All who love are conspirators."
"An essential idea is that if you give to some person or endeavor in life, you will make that more important."
"And I've known people who came out with a sense of torture."
"As I said, men value their independence in a weird way, above practically everything."
"But the cure for most obstacles is, Be decisive."
"Coming out to gays is a way of affirming sanity and self-worth."
"Every man wants to feel that his woman would love him apart from anything else."
"Finally, fighting for gay rights, speaking out in various places and making friends, men and women, was great."
"Homophobia is just that: a phobia."
"I am very proud of being the one to have coined the word."
"I didn't grow up with any concept of people being deviants unless they mistreated others."
"I felt like an apostle of the obvious and people imagined that I was doing something daring."
"I try not to deal with people's hostility, though I must if they have something I need from them, as the professors did at Columbia or my landlord did."
"I'm really not an avowed heterosexual. I'm no more proud of it than of being white or tall."
"If every time you engage in a sex act, you go into a confession box, you will never accept your own sexuality."
"Interestingly, the best way to promote intimacy is to demand it."
"It wouldn't have mattered to my mother if I married a black, was gay, lived in a commune or wore a dress."
"Many people secretly think that gays are a lot happier than they are, and want to punish them."
"Men are actually the weaker sex."
"Men spend their whole lives showing that they're strong and silent. They fight for independence the way women struggle to connect."
"My dearest friend in the movement is Jack Nichols. If there were no such thing as gay or straight, we would still talk and share experiences till the end of time."
"My father was a pedant and a bully who cared about nobody, and I was not to see him until I was eighteen."
"My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could."
