Gay Senior Quotes

Picture this, Olive. Early two thousands. Preppy, ridiculously expensive all-male DC school. Two gay students in grade twelve. Well, two of us that were out, anyway. Richie Muller and I date for the entirety of senior year - and then he dumps me three days before prom for some guy he’d been having a thing with for months.” “He was a prick,” Adam muttered. “I have three choices. Not go to the dance and mope at home. Go alone and mope at school. Or, have my best friend - who was planning on staying home and moping over gamma-aminobutyric acids - come as my date. Guess which?” Olive gasped. “How did you convince him?” “That’s the thing, I didn’t. When I told him about what Richie did, he offered!

The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us'es, the us'es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone. So if there is a message I have to give, it is that if I've found one overriding thing about my personal election, it's the fact that if a gay person can be elected, it's a green light. And you and you and you, you have to give people hope....

Reporters quickly keyed on the darker force behind the attack: this spooky Trench Coat Mafia. It grew more bizarre by the minute. In the first two hours, witnesses on CNN described the TCM as Goths, gays, outcasts, and a street gang. “A lot of the time they’ll, like, wear makeup and paint their nails and stuff,” a Columbine senior said. “They’re kind of—I don’t know, like Goth, sort of, like, and they’re, like, associated with death and violence a lot.” None of that would prove to be true. That student did not, in fact, know the people he was describing. But the story grew.

I'd heard there were some gay girls in senior year who were dating each other right out in the open. But not any boys. Its different for boys. I mean, everybody knows somebody gay - duh, it's not 1980 or something - but not at school. At school, it was a secret, and you were on your own.

A host of other matters that affect the lives of many LGBTQ people—among them, health care, senior centers, immigration, poverty, homelessness, diet, and education—are currently given short shrift. Even those issues still being partially addressed, like hate crime legislation, are of uncertain relevance (and even potential harm) to much of the queer population.

When dealing with the excessively rich and privileged, you’ve got your two basic approaches. One is to go in hard and deliberately working class. A regional accent is always a plus in this. Seawoll has been known to deploy a Mancunian dialect so impenetrable that members of Oasis would have needed subtitles, and graduate entries with double firsts from Oxford practise a credible Estuary in the mirror and drop their glottals with gay abandon when necessary. That approach only works if the subject suffers from residual middle-class guilt – unfortunately the properly posh, the nouveau riche and senior legal professionals are rarely prey to such weaknesses. For them you have to go in obliquely and with maximum Downton Abbey. Fortunately for us we have just the man.

Near the end of the session, a slight, middle-aged man in a dress shirt approached the microphone. “I’m here to ask your forgiveness,” he said quietly. “I’ve been a pastor with a conservative denomination for more than thirty years, and I used to be an antigay apologist. I knew every argument, every Bible verse, every angle, and every position. I could win a debate with just about anyone, and I confess I yelled down more than a few ‘heretics’ in my time. I was absolutely certain that what I was saying was true and I assumed I’d defend that truth to death. But then I met a young lesbian woman who, over a period of many years, slowly changed my mind. She is a person of great faith and grace, and her life was her greatest apologetic.” The man began to sob into his hands. “I’m so sorry for what I did to you,” he finally continued. “I might not have hurt any of you directly, but I know my misguided apologetics, and then my silent complicity, probably did more damage than I can ever know. I am truly sorry and I humbly repent of my actions. Please forgive me.” “We forgive you!” someone shouted from up front. But the pastor held up his hand and then continued to speak. “And if things couldn’t get any weirder,” he said with a nervous laugh, “I was dropping my son off at school the other day—he’s a senior in high school—and we started talking about this very issue. When I told him that I’d recently changed my mind about homosexuality, he got really quiet for a minute and then he said, ‘Dad, I’m gay.’ ” Nearly everyone in the room gasped. “Sometimes I wonder if these last few years of studying, praying, and rethinking things were all to prepare me for that very moment,” the pastor said, his voice quivering. “It was one of the most important moments of my life. I’m so glad I was ready. I’m so glad I was ready to love my son for who he is.

Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa. I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.

Those who were gay were told they were ‘too close’ to the work, and, according to one former senior clinician, anyone who spoke out was ‘made to feel hysterical’ in some way. ‘The more anxious and worried you became, the more it was framed that you weren’t really someone who could handle it.’ It was ‘a brilliant way to divert it away from what we’re actually doing, which was changing children’s bodies’, they say. It is not credible to explain away the concerns of so many experienced clinicians either by accusations of transphobia or allegations that they are simply not up to the task at hand.

But it was Mike Mullen’s testimony before the committee that same day that really made news, as he became the first sitting senior U.S. military leader in history to publicly argue that LGBTQ persons should be allowed to openly serve: “Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me personally, it comes down to integrity, theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.

Like, he’s pretty sure he’s straight. He can pinpoint moments throughout his life when he thought to himself, See, this means I can’t possibly be into guys. Like when he was in middle school and he kissed a girl for the first time, and he didn’t think about a guy when it was happening, just that her hair was soft and it felt nice. Or when he was a sophomore in high school and one of his friends came out as gay, and he couldn’t imagine ever doing anything like that. Or his senior year, when he got drunk and made out with Liam in his twin bed for an hour, and he didn’t have a sexual crisis about it—that had to mean he was straight, right? Because if he were into guys, it would have felt scary to be with one, but it wasn’t. That was just how horny teenage best friends were sometimes, like when they would get off at the same time watching porn in Liam’s bedroom … or that one time Liam reached over, and Alex didn’t stop him. He

I’ve recently suggested that Betty and I should do a TV series about two seniors living together in an unlikely pairing of a widow and a naughty gay best buddy. We could call it Friends with Government Benefits.

Knowing what causes differentiation in human skin pigmentation, fascinating though that is, does not furnish a satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon of racism. Similarly, the biological explanation for why one person is right-handed whilst another is left-handed, is of less interest than why, even recently, being left-handed was considered such a stigma (…).Do we need to know what ‘causes’ homosexuality or heterosexuality? (…)Would the discovery of a genetic basis to sexual attraction finally undermine discrimination against non-heterosexual people by establishing that variations of sexual orientation are all equally rooted in nature? Or would it furnish powerful homophobic forces with a new weapon in their drive to undermine and remove the rights of non-heterosexual people, perhaps even the right to life itself? The infamous remarks of a senior religious leader (a former Chief Rabbi) in the UK a few years ago that, if a gay gene could be discovered, he would consider it morally acceptable to test pregnant women and offer them the option of aborting any foetus likely to develop into a non-heterosexual person - homophobic extermination in the womb - indicate that the huge moral and cultural debates around sexuality and human identity will not be solved either way by the biological sciences alone

The answer, they say, is that the parties we perceive are quite different from the parties that exist. To test the theory, they conducted a survey asking people “to estimate the percentage of Democrats who are black, atheist, or agnostic, union members, and gay, lesbian or bisexual and the percentage of Republicans who are evangelical, 65 or older, Southern, and earn over $250,000 per year.” They were asking, in other words, how much people thought the composition of the parties fit the caricatures of the parties. Misperceptions were high among everyone, but they were particularly exaggerated when people were asked to describe the other party. Democrats believed 44 percent of Republicans earned over $250,000 a year; it’s actually 2 percent. Republicans believe that 38 percent of Democrats were gay, lesbian or bisexual; the correct answer is about 6 percent. Democrats believe that more than 4 out of every ten Republicans are seniors; in truth, seniors make up about 20 percent of the GOP. Republicans believed that 46 percent of Democrats are black and 44 percent belong to a union; in reality, about 24 percent of Democrats are African American and less than 11 percent belong to a union.

After all the tears and frustration and hurt, there’s something inside me that remains unbroken. It’s strong and whole; it’s the place where the best part of me resides, and that’s the part of me who is going to walk into the junior/senior banquet with my head held high in front of everyone two weeks after being expelled: the real me—the me who is learning not to hide anymore

Serial killers usually choose vulnerable victim types, such as senior citizens, children, women, or people who live high-risk lifestyles. Dahmer’s victims were different. These were healthy, physically fit young men who only became vulnerable through intoxication and drugging. These men were young, athletic, social, and, in some cases, gay or bisexual, but not people normally perceived as physically vulnerable, and who didn’t perceive Dahmer as a threat. He incapacitated these otherwise capable men by drugging them until they passed out, therefore always creating a completely vulnerable victim.

The last time pot had smacked me that hard was in San Francisco in the summer of 1976, when a lover twelve years my senior told me she was pregnant with my child the very night I had planned to tell her that I was gay.

Aside from the waste, fraud has a terribly demoralising effect on scientists. As we’ve seen, one reason that so many frauds manage to infiltrate the literature is that, in general, scientists are open-minded and trusting. The norm for peer reviewers is to be sceptical of how results are interpreted, but the thought that the data are fake usually couldn’t be further from their minds. The sheer prevalence of fraud, though, means that we all need to add a depressing option to our repertoire of reactions to questionable-looking papers: someone might be lying to us. Nor is it just other people’s papers that require this extra vigilance: fraud can happen on any scientist’s own doorstep. Because papers are rarely authored by lone researchers, a fraudulent co-author can sometimes tarnish the reputation of entire teams of innocent colleagues. In many cases the perpetrator is a junior lab member who drags their senior co-authors’ names through the mud, as in the case of Michael LaCour’s fake gay-marriage canvassing study. Sometimes it goes the other way, with established scientists recklessly jeopardising the careers of their subordinates (the report into Diederik Stapel’s fraud noted, for example, that no fewer than ten of his students’ PhD theses were reliant on his faked data). And we already saw the ultimate cost of reputational damage in the case of Yoshiki Sasai, who took his own life after finding himself involved in the STAP stem-cell scandal.

Bethany Martin, another Hope College senior, put it like this: "If i could have equality and fulfillment with a woman, but I couldn't with a man - then why wouldn't I choose a woman?