“The trouble was that, by definition, you had a gay male subculture in which there was nothing to moderate the utterly male values that were being adulated more religiously than any macho heterosexual could imagine, right down to the cold, hard stares of the bathhouse attendants. Promiscuity was rampant because in an all-male subculture there was nobody to say ‘no’ - no moderating role like that a woman plays in the heterosexual milieu. Some heterosexual males privately confided that they were enthralled with the idea of the immediate, available, even anonymous, sex a bathhouse offered, if they could only find women who would agree. Gay men, of course, agreed, quite frequently.” – “And the Band Played On”
“If I criticize the gay community, then I’m part of the establishment. I sold out, rather than just having a different opinion. There’s no room in the gay community for people of good intention having different opinions. Either you have the opinion or you’re nothing.” – New York Times: April 30, 1993
“The gay community didn’t want me to write about things like bathhouses that made gays look bad. But to me that was like going to one side of a burning building and covering the firemen trying to put out the fire, and then ignoring the guy on the other side who's dumping gas on it.” – Los Angeles Times: October 09, 1987
“The politically correct line, emerging from a handful of ‘AIDS activists,’ maintained that talking about the gay community’s prodigious promiscuity was part of a ‘blame-the-victim mentality.’” – “And the Band Played On”
“I hate to be the one to say it, but I don't think our gay leaders are going to tell us. The fact is that we're not in the middle of the epidemic, we're at the beginning…I don't think that civil liberties are the most important thing. The gay political leadership is misguiding us by always talking about civil liberties. The most important thing for most gay men in the next five years, particularly in urban areas, is going to be just keeping sane in the face of all this suffering, because what I do know is going to happen is that we are going to be facing an incredible amount of untimely death…We need to begin gearing ourselves for it psychologically as human beings.” – Au Courant: 1987