October 29th, 1997 to November 4th, 1997

Mick Jagger is the cover boy for the November Out magazine, and he talks about, among other things, his turn in the new film Bent (about gays in the Holocaust), showing at the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Film Fest Nov. 7. Says Jagger about his early years of "malleable sexuality": "In America it was very hard. A violent reaction was the thing: 'I'll punch you out.' I never quite understood that one. In England, there seemed to be this instinctive knowing that it had all sort of happened before. They knew that even though it was something interesting, it was also somewhat humorous."

"Leave the lesbian chic to Ellen and Anne; Lea [DeLaria] is lesbian cheeky." - Reviewer Ed Siegel in the Boston Globe.

"You are not to make comments, announcements or statements to students, staff members or parents of students regarding your homosexual orientation or lifestyle. If students, staff members or parents of students ask about your sexual orientation or anything concerning the subject, you shall tell them that the subject is private and personal and inappropriate to discuss with them. A violation of these requirements may jeopardize your job and be cause for termination." - A memorandum to Wendy Weaver, the high school girls volleyball coach at Spanish Fork High School in Utah.
"In all my years of service to the school district, I've never done anything to deserve this. I'm not ashamed of my sexuality and I believe they are discriminating against me because of that." - Weaver [see page 12 for details on the case].
"She's the best thing that ever happened to Spanish Fork athletics. There was no reason to fire her except for her personal lifestyle, and I think that's pretty lame. People who know Wendy know she would never do anything." - Helen Hjorth, a 1994 graduate who now plays varsity volleyball at Brigham Young University, to the Associated Press.
"I am going to attend the Sex Panic! Summit in San Diego [which coincides with NGLTF's Creating Change conference]. A group of men (and a few women) seem angrier about the right not to be able to fuck in public toilets-and parks-than about the fact that in this country we do not have the right to work, to choose to marry, to serve in the military, to adopt, etc. I believe there is a difference between sexual liberation and sexual addiction. ... We are not just a movement from the waist down. This is not a movement about crotch politics. This started as a movement about 'the right to love.' Of course there are these attacks on [so- called 'neo-con' writers] Mike [Signorile] and Gabe [Rotello] and Larry [Kramer]. Have you ever tried taking a needle away from a heroin addict! Addiction is a disease of denial. ... To say that 'liberation' means 'anything goes' and we get to do anything, anyone, anywhere we want, is not courageous nor daring, nor innovative. If you kill someone while driving drunk, it is murder. If you kill someone because of unsafe sex, it is also murder. We can pop Prozac, drink, do drugs and fuck. Or, we can become healthy, and allow ourselves feelings. Self-esteem is the essence of any revolutionary movement." - Lesbian comic and event producer Robin Tyler, in an e-mail interview with this column.
"Equating monogamy with love is a terrible, terrible mistake. Confusing the two reveals a profound misunderstanding of love and freights sex with an unsustainable meaning and profundity. Love is not a sentiment nor emotion. Love is a decision to respect another's needs and desires on a par with one's own, a commitment to treat another with honesty and compassion. Love values freedom and celebrates another's happiness. Jealousy and possessiveness do not, as imagined by romantics, signal love. Just the opposite -they mean that love is not present. The jealous suitor who wants to possess his love object as his exclusive sexual property denigrates the freedom that is the basis for real love." - From an editorial in the October issue of the Boston-based gay publication The Guide.
"[The ongoing 'neo-con'/Sex Panic! debate] is a germane manner of a community coming out of its adolescence and wondering in which direction to grow. I think Signorile/ Kramer/ Rotello/Sex Panic! are each sides of the same coin. They all want us to be better people, but some of them want to force us to grow up, i.e. stop thinking with our dicks, while the others want to make us believe that everyone wants to be sex renegades rather than whitepicket- fencers. It's time to acknowledge that we are more than the sum of our organs, but also to acknowledge that our sexual dynamic-often exciting, sometimes out of control-still serves to teach this Puritanical society a needed lesson." - Jay Blotcher, director of media relations for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, in an e-mail interview with this column.
"On the beach where I live [in central Florida] non-intellectuals fail to grasp arguments about libertinism in sex. Instead they complain about slim pickings, declaring that only the nearest big town offers reasonable respites from the awful drought. The Neo-Cons vs. Sex Panic! armchair feud, is, I fear, lost on them and appears to be a media creation fueled by a coterie of current celebrity authors armed with their mainstream columns and pushing romantic but unworkable ideas their new books celebrate. These include green lights for marriage and monogamy and red lights for sex freedom and promiscuity. Do they really think their books will affect this centuries-long rupture? Neo-puritans assume that monogamy is the norm. Let them read Adam Phillips' new book Monogamy, to be disabused of this fantasy. Their energies could then be better spent creating a more palatable condom or finding a cure for AIDS." - Jack Nichols, author of The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists, and editor of the World Wide Web site Badpuppy's GayToday, in an e-mail interview.
"Gay men tend to go out and meet people and have sex with people, whereas the lesbian pattern follows that old U-Haul joke [What does a lesbian bring on a second date? A U-Haul.]. Lesbians go to the bars until they meet Ms. Right, and the next date is dinner, and then they move in together and nest, and aren't seen again until they break up." - Pamela Robin Brandt, co-author of The Girls Next Door, to the Miami Herald, Sept. 25.
"All the straight men I've told [that I'm a lesbian] haven't been in the least bit surprised. Most of the gay men were gobsmacked. I suspect that the straight men realize that you are not flirting with them; gay men, bless them, don't notice." - Newly out British Member of Parliament and Junior Environmental Minister Angela Eagle, to London's The Independent.
"Sex is a waste of time. If we stopped talking about it, it would go away." - Gay author Quentin Crisp, 89, in a performance at Highways in Santa Monica, Calif., Sept. 13.
"When Rosie O'Donnell (whom I liked as a stand-up comedian but whose work as a schmaltzy talk-show host I find brittle and fake) recently called for a one-year boycott of the tabloids by readers who want to honor Diana, I was so outraged that I immediately bought copies of both the Enquirer and Star in protest. O'Donnell was hypocritically using Diana's tragic death to grind her own axes: Omitted from her histrionic appeal was the inconvenient fact that the prior week's splashy Enquirer cover story (with just a small inset photo of Diana on her Mediterranean vacation) was about the motorcycle-straddling O'Donnell's alleged affairs with two lesbian lovers. Sugar-sweet, all-American Miss Rosie has a shadowy closet the size of Greenland. And folks, backstage she bites." - Camille Paglia in her online advice column, "Ask Camille."

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