Gay History Quotes

#1. The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.

Alysia Abbott

#2. Every time we look at the cross Christ seems to say to us, 'I am here because of you. It is your sin I am bearing, your curse I am suffering, your debt I am paying, your death I am dying.' Nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross.

John Stott

#3. I am the Love that Dare not Speak its Name

Alfred Bruce Douglas

#4. I got married a bit late, I agree. In any other period of history I'd have been dead at that age and they'd have assumed I was gay. Like Michelangelo, or Leonardo da Vinci. But I was a late developer. I didn't go through puberty until I was 35.

David Duchovny

#5. I, faggot Wenqing Kang, Ph. D. in History from UC Santa Cruz, do solemnly swear that homosexual relationships between men are more enjoyable and more harmonious than heterosexual relationships.

Bill Gaede

#6. We are better people than what these laws represent, and it is time to discard them into the ash heap of history.

John E. Jones III

#7. In a novel, I think you have a contract with the reader to make the character representative - of a moment in history, a social class ... for instance, I wanted to make the boy in 'A Boy's Own Story' more like other gay men of my generation in their youth and not like me.

Edmund White

#8. Some of our finest writers, organizers, artists, and scholars in the 60s as well as today, have been lesbian and gay, and history will bear me out.

Audre Lorde

#9. There is a history of gay people pretending to be straight. I want to balance the sides. I'm a straight person pretending to be gay. I've had a lot of people to imitate. It's easy when you're British; we're camp by nature, anyway.

Robbie Williams

#10. I have always had a strong interest in history and finding out about the past can be remarkably helpful with working out the future, too.

Peter Gay

#11. Danny and I were sposed to go to his mother's house for Thanksgiving. Now what? What do I tell his mother?
Well, not this. Mothers hate it when you tell them their sons are queer.

Vanda

#12. Coming out as gay was an easy enough matter for me, since I worked in a profession where being gay had a long history of being accepted.

Stephen Fry

#13. You know, the guys there were so beautiful - they've lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.

Allen Ginsberg

#14. The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.

Anderson Cooper

#15. We humans have a long and wonderful history of transcending our beliefs about what's possible.

Gay Hendricks

#16. The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier.

Edmund White

#17. I don't have a problem with these Arizona laws. I have a problem with Chicano, Gay and Lesbian, Asian-American and African-American histories not being taught in American History courses.

M.G. Hardie

#18. We have the history of slavery or inequality to women, and now the civil rights movement of the 21st century is the struggle for equality for the gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people. And I think it's important for Americans to know about the times that we failed.

George Takei

#19. Religiously, we longed for the lively life in Christ, but we did not fully see that we were equally longing for the lively life of the mind - the delights of conversation at once serious and gay, which is, whatever its subject, Christ or poetry or history, the ultimately civilized thing.

Sheldon Vanauken

#20. Few writers in history have ever been 'politically correct' (a notion that rapidly changes in any case), and there's no reason to imagine that gay writers will ever suit their readers, especially since that readership is splintered into ghettos within ghettos.

Edmund White

#21. Justice has often been forged from fires of indignities and prejudices suffered. Our triumphs that celebrate the freedom of choice are hallowed. We have arrived upon another moment in history when 'We the People' becomes more inclusive, and our freedom more perfect.

Arenda L. Wright Allen

#22. Politicians against gay marriage now, are the future villains of our American History books.

Natalie Maines

#23. For decades, this great leader, often at Dr. King's side, was denied his rightful place in history because he was openly gay. No medal can change that, but today, we honor Bayard Rustin's memory by taking our place in his march towards true equality, no matter who we are or who we love.

Barack Obama

#24. Because anyone who thinks there is something wrong with being gay is like those people you read about in History who believed it segregation.

Michael Barakiva

#25. House passes #dadt (don't ask don't tell) repeal. A step fwd on equality 4 gay Americans in military. History will judge those who tried 2 block passage on this.

Frank Pallone

#26. The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it's Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the expansion of women's rights or, now, gay rights, I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties.

James McGreevey

#27. He noticed her giving him the once-over and smiled in a way no gay boy in history had ever smiled at a girl.

Leah Clifford

#28. Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel.

Camille Paglia

#29. On the court, Jason Collins is not a huge basketball star, but he has already claimed his place in civil rights history as the first openly gay athlete to play in one of the four major U.S. sports leagues.

Nancy Gibbs

#30. And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.

Peter Gay

#31. Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things.

Tony Kushner

#32. I filed the first gay rights bill in Massachusetts history in 1972 in the legislature, one of the first in the country.

Barney Frank

#33. History moves fast. It's hard to believe that gay Americans achieved full constitutional personhood just five years after corporations did!

Stephen Colbert

#34. Gay people represent art. Start allowing gay people to be beaten in the street then you allow art to be beaten in the street. History has taught us where that leads.

Robert Black

#35. The Stonewall riot may have been the start of a civil rights movement, but it was not the beginning of our history.

Tom Cardamone

#36. If I was gay, I would be the best gay of all history.

Julio Iglesias