HomoQuotable - Sir Ian McKellen

"California's influence stretches across the world through the imagination of its citizens in films and through the internet. At the same time, its welcome to strangers has meant it has been home to those escaping oppression, many of whom have identified themselves as gay. For both reasons I feel involved in the outcome of voting over Proposition 8.

"I think of Englishmen like the painter David Hockney and the writer Christopher Isherwood who emigrated to Los Angeles and Santa Monica where (far from home) they loved in the way they felt they were born to, with people of their own gender. I think of the gay novelist Armistead Maupin, a refugee from the Deep South who in San Francisco discovered his talent to amuse. These great men (and there are many women like them) deserve society's respect for their honesty and their determination to dream in the American way of being completely themselves, against all the odds.

"The world has turned to a point where any discrimination against gay people in your state, in your country, in our world is unseemly and unnecessarily cruel. If two people wish to declare their love for each other, who are the rest of us to stand in their way? If they wish to marry, as their parents did, who are we to stop them? In the great Californian tradition, Vote "NO" to Proposition 8, please." - Sir Ian McKellen, speaking to the Beverly Hills High School Gay-Straight Alliance.