HomoQuotable - Morrissey

"Obama has mystified me because he doesn’t appear to support black people when they need it most. Ferguson being an obvious example. If Michael Brown had instead been one of Obama’s daughters, I don’t think Obama would be insisting that the nation support the so-called security forces! How can they be called security forces if they make the people feel insecure? Obama seems to be white inside. There is an obvious racial division in America and it’s exploding and Obama doesn’t ever support the innocent black people who are murdered by white police officers who are never held accountable. You would expect him to be more understanding of what it means to be black. But so far, he hasn’t been.​ There’s no point in continually saying that we must support the police when it is obvious to the entire world that the police in America are out of control." - Morrissey, speaking to Alternative Nation.

HomoQuotable - Armistead Maupin

"I'm the only gay man I know who has never been to Fire Island. I have not made a point of staying away -- its charms are legendary, of course -- but the occasion has simply never presented itself. Now, it's quite likely that I will remain forever virginal in that regard. Or at least until these guys are no longer collecting money at the dock. When I coined the term 'A-gay' forty years ago, these were just the sort of creeps I had in mind. It was never intended as something to aspire to." - Armistead Maupin, reacting to this New York Times profile of hoteliers Ian Reisner and Mati Weiderpass. (Tipped by JMG reader Aaron)

HomoQuotable - Giorgio Armani

"A homosexual man is a man 100%. He does not need to dress homosexual. When homosexuality is exhibited to the extreme - to say, 'Ah, you know I'm homosexual,' - that has nothing to do with me. A man has to be a man. I don't like muscle boy. Not too much gym. I like somebody healthy, somebody solid, who looks after his body but doesn't use his muscles too much." - Giorgio Armani, speaking to the Sunday Times.

HomoQuotable - Dan Savage

"Dear Dr. Carson, If being gay is a choice, prove it. Choose it. Choose to be gay yourself. Show America how that's done, Ben, show us how a man can choose to be gay. Suck my dick. Name the time and the place and I'll bring my dick and a camera crew and you can suck me off and win the argument." - Dan Savage, in a posting made Wednesday before Carson offered his flaccid apology. Savage's message has given wingnuts the vapors, with Porno Pete today demanding that the SPLC label him a "hateful extremist."

HomoQuotable - Noah Michelson

"From Grindr profiles that demand 'masc only' to men like [Russell] Tovey who think their masculinity -- however manufactured, however antithetical to who they truly were when they landed on this planet -- is what makes them marketable or desirable, our obsession with what it means to be a man and what it means to fall short of that is keeping us from becoming truly liberated.

"If it weren't for my father, I wouldn't be who I am today. I could have been forced to play football in hopes that it would somehow unleash the man dozing inside of me. I could have been sent to therapy in hopes that I could be reprogrammed, repaired, made whole. I could have ended up with a belt around my neck and swinging from the light fixture in our formal dining room. But I wasn't. But I didn't. I am one of the lucky ones.

"My father died eight years ago. He never got to see the man that I've become and we never specifically talked about everything he did for me -- what he made me -- simply by loving me. Without a son of my own, it's a gift that I can only attempt to pay forward to the thousands of boys and men who come after me -- who brush past me in crowded subway cars or surround me on Facebook or might be reading this now -- by speaking up and saying I am a faggot and it didn't happen by mistake. And if you're a faggot too, I hope you know you don't need to toughen up. You never have to stop prancing. You are not a mistake." - Noah Michelson, writing for the Huffington Post.

HomoQuotable - Russell Tovey

"I feel like I could have been really effeminate, if I hadn’t gone to the school I went to. Where I felt like I had to toughen up. If I’d have been able to relax, prance around, sing in the street, I might be a different person now. I thank my dad for that, for not allowing me to go down that path. Because it’s probably given me the unique quality that people think I have. I get told, a lot, that I’m kind of carving my own path. That there are not many actors who are out and are able to play straight, and gay, and everyone’s OK with it." - Looking star Russell Tovey, speaking to the Guardian.

HomoQuotable - Sally Kohn

"I’m gay. And I want my kid to be gay, too. Many of my straight friends, even the most liberal, see this logic as warped. It’s one thing for them to admit that they would prefer their kids to be straight, something they’ll only begrudgingly confess. But wanting my daughter to be a lesbian? I might as well say I want her to grow up to be lactose intolerant. 'Don’t you want her to be happy?; one friend asked. Perhaps he just meant that it’s easier to be straight in a homophobic culture. But this attitude complies with, even reinforces, that culture in the first place. [snip]

"Time will tell, but so far, it doesn’t look like my 6-year-old daughter is gay. In fact, she’s boy crazy. It seems early to me, but I’m trying to be supportive. Recently, she had a crush on an older boy on her school bus. She was acting as any precocious, socially awkward child would, which is to say not very subtle. I confided in a friend who has an older daughter. 'She wants to give this kid a card and presents,' I e-mailed. 'The other kid is so embarrassed. It’s painful to watch. What do I do?' My friend wrote back with a slew of helpful advice, ending with a punch to my gut: 'Bet it wouldn’t bother you so much if her crush was on a girl.' She was right. I’m a slightly overbearing pro-gay gay mom. But I’m going to support my daughter, whatever choices she makes." - CNN commentator Sally Kohn, in a Washington Post column that has rocketed across right wing sites.

HomoQuotable - Matt Moore

"Am I now straight? Am I now normal? Am I now free from same sex desires and attracted solely to women? No, no and no. My heart was changed instantaneously when I trusted in Christ and began to follow Him, but my mind was not. I now have a heart that genuinely loves God and desires to worship Him, but at the same time, I’m still utterly messed up and damaged by sin. The Lord is working in me and renewing my mind day by day, shaping me more and more into the reflection of Him that I was created to be. But it’s been a process. And it will continue to be a process until I receive a new, perfect and sinless body in the age to come. When that day comes, the fullness of what Jesus purchased for me will be given to me: full freedom from every sinful thing that restrains my enjoyment and worship of God. But even now, in this messed up damaged flesh, I have experienced some change in my sexuality over the past four years. I can’t deny that. And the shifting in my sexual desires is a direct result of my grace-given love for God. I’ve grown in my disgust of homosexual relations because I see what a twisting and perversion it is of the image of God." - Matt Moore, writing for Matt Barber's BarbWire.

PREVIOUSLY ON JMG: In August 2014 Moore claimed to have no idea that BarbWire columnists have called for imprisoning and executing gay Americans. In June 2014 Moore declared that transgender kids are possessed by demons. In February 2013 Moore was spotted on Grindr in New Orleans at the same time he was writing vicious "ex-gay" screeds for the Christian Post. After being confronted, Moore confessed that it was a "major disobedience to Christ" to have been cruising for huge uncut cocks on Grindr. He then declared that he had sold his computer and "put a lock on my phone" so that he wouldn't succumb to the delicious temptations of huge uncut cocks. The following week he posted a now-deleted YouTube video in which he declared that he rejects the term "ex-gay" because he's just as attracted to huge uncut cocks as when he found Jesus.

HomoQuotable - Steve Friess

"[G]ay activists are as responsible as anyone for the fact that a large swath of Americans who thought they were OK with gays are finding themselves surprised by their own reactions to what they’re starting to see [on television]. This is, after all, a civil rights movement that aggressively worked for many years to downplay the mechanics of gay sexual behavior. [snip] This is how the fights over the integration of the military and legalized same-sex marriage were won. Every time anti-gay forces tried to gross out the nation by referencing the gritty details of, say, anal sex, gay advocates would reply by accusing them of being secretly titillated by and obsessed with it. Whenever some crusty old military hack would grouse about gays being naked in showers or barracks with straight soldiers, gay activists did everything they could to insist gay people are supernaturally capable of stifling every fleeting sexual thought even when something attractive is before them." - Steve Friess, in a Time Magazine essay on the "preposterousness" of some reactions to comments made by Billy Crystal. Hit the link for more.

HomoQuotable - Frank Bruni

"Ive been called many unpleasant things in my life, and I’ve deserved no small number of them. But I chafe at this latest label: A threat to your religious liberty. I don’t mean me alone. I mean me and my evidently menacing kind: men who have romantic relationships with other men and maybe want to marry them, and women in analogous situations. According to many of the Americans who still cast judgment on us, our 'I do' somehow tramples you, not merely running counter to your creed but running roughshod over it. That’s absurd. And the deference that many politicians show to such thinking is an example not of religion getting the protection it must but of religious people getting a pass that isn’t warranted. It’s an illustration of religion’s favored status in a country that’s still working out this separation-of-church-and-state business and hasn’t yet gotten it quite right." - Frank Bruni, opening an op-ed in today's New York Times.

HomoQuotable - Sara Gilbert

"I think if you're on a show called My Husband's Not Gay, then your husband's gay. But I also think there is a reverse bullying in the gay community where you can't do it a certain way and - I'm sure this is controversial - but I think if a guy is attracted to guys and he wants to try to live a straight lifestyle that is as much his prerogative than somebody who wants to live a gay lifestyle." - Sara Gilbert, responding to criticism of the coming reality show.

Yesterday Truth Wins Out pointed out that the show's cast is "deeply involved" with the "ex-gay" brainwashing movement.

Truth Wins Out today expressed dismay over TLC’s upcoming special, “My Husband’s Not Gay,” set to air Sunday, January 11, which purports to show the lives of Mormon men who have chosen to marry women despite the fact that they are attracted to men. Advertisements for the show depict a curious look into the unique lives of these men, but, as is the case with TLC’s show “19 Kids And Counting,” a much darker agenda lies under the surface. Seven members of the cast of “My Husband’s Not Gay” are deeply affiliated with North Star, a radical Mormon “ex-gay” group. Jeff Bennion, one of the stars of the show, is so extremist that he has written that “it would have been wrong to ordain a black person in May of 1978, even if you knew with a certainty that is changing the next month,” referring to the fact that, before 1978, black men could not be Mormon priests, and that both black men and women were generally prohibited from full membership in the church. Bennion has also written extensively in support of the deeply harmful practice of “ex-gay” therapy.

A Change.org petition which calls on TLC to cancel the show currently has over 90,000 signatures. From the petition:

The men featured in this show deserve to be shown compassion and acceptance. Perhaps even more importantly, TV viewers need to know the horrific consequences of trying to change who you are. Instead, TLC is presenting victims’ lives as entertainment, while sending the message that being gay is something that can and ought to be changed, or that you should reject your sexual orientation by marrying someone of the opposite sex. This message is harmful to both LGBT people and communities of faith, and I call upon TLC to stop spreading such dangerous misinformation by cancelling “My Husband’s Not Gay” immediately.

The show has also been denounced by GLAAD.

VIDEO: Via Gay Star News, here's the discussion about the show on yesterday's episode of The Talk.

HomoQuotable - Robert Oscar Lopez

"With unforeseen success has come, unfortunately, a lot of challenges for which I was not prepared. Due to some of these challenges, and in the interest of protecting contributors and correspondents, we have had to take down and archive the 2,000 posts that were published here; we have warehoused them somewhere safe but cannot leave them as open-source resources to the reading public anymore. We will be publishing the most important essays from English Manif as books. Our goal going forward is to ensure that the work we do here is disseminated with proper contextualization and having gone through as careful an editing process as possible. In a nutshell, English Manif is all grown up now. We have to take our work to the next level, which means collecting essays and publishing them as proper books." - Robert Oscar Lopez, taking down his blog two weeks after describing his students as potential "snipers, spies, saboteurs." (Tipped by JMG reader Str8 Grandmother)

RELATED: Earlier this month Lopez filed an amicus brief with the Eleventh Circuit Court in opposition to same-sex marriage in Florida. In his brief Lopez declares that Good As You blogger Jeremy Hooper has been writing to people with claims that Lopez compares "gay parents to slave-owners." Hooper reacts:

Making shit up about me is something that Robert Oscar Lopez and his crew like to do. But this is a brief. This is a legal document. This is designed to sway a court based on what is supposedly evidence that backs the person's stated position. To deliberately lie in this fashion and in this forum, without putting forth one shred of evidence (because there is none), is the height of intellectual negligence. FROM. A. COLLEGE. PROFESSOR, no less!

PREVIOUSLY ON JMG:  In September, Lopez compared the Human Rights Campaign to the Khmer Rouge. Earlier that month Lopez petitioned the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to stop gay marriage in Texas because he used to be a prostitute. In April 2014 Lopez filed an anti-gay amicus brief in support of Virginia's ban on same-sex marriage. In March 2014 Lopez declared that gay men are turning surrogate mothers into breeding slaves. Last year, in addition to appearing on stage at an anti-gay Manif Pour Tous rally in France that was supported by neo-Nazis, Lopez testified against LGBT equality before several state legislatures and he co-signed an anti-gay homocon brief to the Supreme Court in support of DOMA. You really must read the Media Matters take on Lopez' trilogy of gay erotica.

HomoQuotable - Greg Quinlan

"The [PFOX 'ex-gay'] billboard speaks to the scientific fact that to quote the American Psychiatric Association, 'there still remains no replicated scientific studies supporting any specific biological etiology for homosexuality.' There is zero evidence that a person is born a homosexual. In fact, Dr. Francis Collins of the human genome project with the National Institute of Health, who was appointed by President Clinton to do the project said homosexuality was 'not hard-wired.' The reason we see so much of a proliferation of homosexuality in our society now is because we live in a sex-saturated culture. The first century church thrived in a hyper-sexualized homosexual culture in an age of sexual anarchy. So can the 21st century church. We do not need to compromise our message in order to bring homosexuals into the church or accommodate them. The truth is the truth, and if we love someone, we will tell them the truth that homosexuality is destructive to someone. I know because I watched 100 of my friends die of AIDS." - Former PFOX president Greg Quinlan, in a World Net Daily piece that does not mention that the model on the billboard is not a twin and is in fact proudly and openly gay. Quinlan is currently head of the virulently anti-gay New Jersey Family Policy Council.

PREVIOUSLY ON JMG: PFOX former president Richard Cohen earns national ridicule after CNN broadcasts a demonstration of his "gay cure," which involved Cohen pounding a pillow with a tennis racket while screaming, "Why, Mommy, why?" PFOX files "ex-gay" discrimination complaint with state of Maryland. PFOX kicks Right Wing Watch reporter out of "Ex-Gay Awareness Dinner." PFOX announces "the end of homosexuality." PFOX head Greg Quinlan declares that President Obama and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy are secretly gay. Quinlan says gay men are sexual cannibals. Quinlan says he's gay because he was molested. Quinlan defends the "ex-gay" therapy of Ladybird Bachmann. Quinlan claims gay activist Wayne Besen threatened to inject him with AIDS. Quinlan testifies against New Jersey marriage.  Quinlan attempts to distribute "ex-gay" flyers at public schools. Quinlan demands that FDA cease linking gay sites in harm reduction campaign. Quinlan files SCOTUS brief in support of DOMA.

HomoQuotable - Robert Oscar Lopez

"Nowadays the American Left has so thoroughly drenched our campuses in a toxic ideology, a fascism posing as tolerance, that the pact is gone. There are moments when students come to me and say things that sound like the trustful conversations of old, but too many times now, they are playing some trick on me. Students lay sand traps, misrepresent what I say, march into administrative offices and lie about me. The fact that I am one man teaching 160 students every semester used to feel exciting; it meant I had a broad cross-section of dynamic citizens to interface with. Now I just feel outnumbered. The classroom is another place where I have to worry about death threats, spies, snipers, saboteurs.

"I need my job. I will do what is required of me. You will get the requisite exposure to texts as stipulated by course catalogues and professional rubrics. There is an extra mile I used to take my teaching, but I must forego it now. Teaching is strictly business, no longer for me a sacred calling but a dangerous obligation I have no choice but to fulfill. In the future, I cannot show you who I am, and unfortunately this means you will only know the person described in the libelous broadsides put out by the fascist politically correct despots who keep stuffing your head with the new liberal orthodoxy. You will hate me and I can do nothing about it. I give up." - Robert Oscar Lopez, in an already deleted post now viewable through the Wayback Machine. (Tipped by JMG reader Straight Grandmother)

PREVIOUSLY ON JMG:  In September, Lopez compared the Human Rights Campaign to the Khmer Rouge. Earlier that month Lopez petitioned the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to stop gay marriage in Texas because he used to be a prostitute. In April 2014 Lopez filed an anti-gay amicus brief in support of Virginia's ban on same-sex marriage. In March 2014 Lopez declared that gay men are turning surrogate mothers into breeding slaves. Last year, in addition to appearing on stage at an anti-gay Manif Pour Tous rally in France that was supported by neo-Nazis, Lopez testified against LGBT equality before several state legislatures and he co-signed an anti-gay homocon brief to the Supreme Court in support of DOMA. You really must read the Media Matters take on Lopez' trilogy of gay erotica.

HomoQuotable - Dan Savage

"Look at Marcus Bachmann, Michele Bachmann’s husband. Anybody who has gaydar—anybody who has eyes—looks at him and sees a tormented closet case who has externalized his internal conflict and is abusing other people, doing his reparative-therapy bullshit. It’s so sad and pathetic. A lot of the self-destructive behaviors gay people are prone to drifting into are directed inward, and then you have these shitbags like Marcus Bachmann for whom it’s all directed outward. Marcus Bachmann is the photo negative of the guy on the last bar stool in the gay bar, drinking and smoking himself to death, except instead of destroying himself, he’s destroying other vulnerable queer people in an effort to destroy the queer inside himself." - Dan Savage, speaking to Playboy. Hit the link and read the full piece - I could have pulled at least a dozen other quotes for this post.

HomoQuotable - Frank Bruni

"One of the impediments to consensus is manifest on a plane: There’s little sense of a common good, no rules that everybody follows so that nobody gets a raw deal. Instead there’s an ethic of every passenger for himself or herself. The existence of, and market for, the Knee Defender, that device that prohibits the person in front of you from reclining, says it all. On second thought, no, this does: Immediately following news coverage of a flight that had to be diverted when two passengers scuffled over a Knee Defender’s use, sales of the device reportedly increased. Courtesy is dead. The plane is its graveyard. There’s a scrum at the gate and then another scrum in the aisle that defy any of the airline’s attempts at an orderly boarding process. There’s no restraint in the person who keeps smacking the back of your chair; no apology from the parent whose child keeps kicking it; no awareness that certain foods, unwrapped in a tight space, turn one traveler’s lunch into every traveler’s olfactory reality." - Frank Bruni, writing from the New York Times.

HomoQuotable - Andrew Caldwell

"First of all, I'm delivered. And when I was a homosexual, I never looked at an old man. I would never touch an old man. Like I said, I dated a couple of football players, I dated church people. So I would never ever date a old person. That's not my type. That's nasty. If folks want to know if I'm sleeping around right now and stuff, let me tell you something, I have no tastes for those desires. You know how people were smoking and they stop smoking for years? God took the taste out of my mouth. Trust me, I would NOT ever, ever in my life, touch an old man. Cuz you know why? If you could see me when I was a homosexual, I was a very attractive person. I would never touch - what do I see in an old person? I am delivered, I am set free." - Andrew "I'm Not Gay No More" Caldwell, after being asked if he is romantically involved with the older man with whom he lives. The older man was also on the call.

The above interview was posted yesterday on YouTube by the website Pimp Preacher, which has also published a multi-point refutation of the apparently spreading rumor that Caldwell was paid for his "ex-gay" performance at last weekend's COGIC convention. Included in the post is a declaration of the "truth" about Caldwell's May arrest for insurance fraud:

Truth About The Arrest - A local pastor was invited to Andrews church to preach and lay hands, but Andrew became alarmed when he noticed who the pastor was (because Andrew knew the man to frequent gay bars). To prove his point Andrew tried to get a picture of the man leaving the bar and when the man noticed Andrew trying to get pictures of his car he swerved the car in Andrews direction - thus running over his foot. A police report was filed and Andrew tried to sue the man’s insurance - but the insurance company sided with their customer under the grounds that “Andrew was stalking him.” As a result Andrew was arrested and charged with filing a false insurance claim with specified injuries. Andrew will receive a plea to a lesser charge with 80 hours of community service (non felony) – and this incident will not appear on his record as a felony. This Case was closed today at of 11:10 am cst.

The author of the above-linked Pimp Preacher post goes on to declare that he does not support COGIC, noting that "for four consecutive years I have been their number one critic."

HomoQuotable - Andrew Sullivan

"If you run a public accommodation and use it to refuse service to a minority, you’re on the wrong side of the law (at least since the Civil Rights Movement). So why am I concerned by the latest case of a lesbian couple suing a family business that refused to rent out their property for a same-sex wedding? Simply because they got married elsewhere, with no problems, and because it makes sense to me – as someone interested in a civil society – not to press conflict on culture war issues when a less aggressive and counter-productive strategy is perfectly possible. Also because you deny the New York Post and the victimhood-right a chance to crow about gay suppression of religious freedom. We are winning the argument; we are winning the culture. There’s no point on forcing our opponents to lose face as well as losing the debate. Magnanimity, restraint and gradual progress. It’s gotten us a very long way already. We should trust this strategy to the end." - Andrew Sullivan, writing for his blog.

HomoQuotable - Michelangelo Signorile

"The Benham brothers have attributes and just a general vibe that, for years, have translated as 'gay.' But obviously there are a lot of straight men, even homophobes, who now exhibit these characteristics, seemingly free to act on their creative instincts, more comfortable about it -- precisely because of the queer movement's challenge to conventional ideas about masculinity. Some of these men might be bisexual, openly or not. But a few years ago straight men who were something like this were labeled with the (dreadful) term 'metrosexual,' except metrosexuals were straight guys who were secure in being fashionable in part because they completely accepted homosexuality and supported gay rights. The Benhams decidedly do not. So have gay men actually liberated many straight men to the point that they can appropriate 'gayness' even while still being virulently anti-gay? And is that a good thing or a bad thing?" - Michelangelo Signorile, who found the Benhams "a bit flirty" during a recent interview.

HomoQuotable - Matt Stolhandske

"As a gay man, I should hate Melissa and Aaron Klein. They’re the Portland-based Christian bakery owners who, in 2013, refused to make a cake for a lesbian couple’s wedding. And despite their insistence that they’re only morally opposed to gay marriage, not gays, they make their disdain for equality quite clear: 'I didn’t want to be a part of her marriage, which I think is wrong,' Aaron Klein recently said of one of the women he rebuked. I’m also an evangelical Christian. I can’t understand why Klein or any other Christians twist the words of Jesus Christ to justify this behavior. To me, it’s a deeply harmful and embarrassing bastardization of our faith. But I don’t hate the Kleins. In fact, I’m raising money to cover the $150,000 punitive fine they received from Oregon. [snip] To them I say: this is what an olive branch looks like. I am not rewarding their behavior, but rather loving them in spite of it. It is time for these two communities, which both cite genuine love as our motivation, to put aside our prejudices and put down our pitchforks to clear the path for progress." - Matt Stolhandske, writing for the Washington Post.