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We throw at female artists this expectation that their work has to speak to the female experience. And if it doesn't, you're letting the side down. Throwing this stumbling block in the way of female artists is counterintuitive.

Everybody is bound by some social rules. But I think that artists need some kind of freedom to explore their minds and that some of them tend to take that freedom to live a little more openly or a little more dangerously, sometimes a lot more self-destructively, than other people.

I find it really cool when people have this artist persona they can put on. They can go out and act like this other person; I can't pull that off... I can't censor myself.

There is just a lot of creativity and theatricality in performers who happen to be gay. Maybe there's a success in numbers, so by the law of averages we are going to get these jobs.

It's tragic that you can define a whole movement in music by gender alone. People are like, 'Oh, look, another quirky girl.'

I just feel like we as a human race tend to fear that which we don't understand. It's cause for a lot of bad things and bad behavior to exist on the planet. Artists have a way of touching people and changing minds in a way that sometimes other mediums don't.

The male gay community seems to be very into female singers. I think it could be the songs we sing. They're more open with their feelings. And they have good taste!

Few writers in history have ever been 'politically correct' (a notion that rapidly changes in any case), and there's no reason to imagine that gay writers will ever suit their readers, especially since that readership is splintered into ghettos within ghettos.

When I criticize Joseph Beuys or Francis Bacon, nobody calls those opinions anti-male. Putting female artists or their subject matter off-limits is itself sexist and limiting.