Quote

Gay culture is in a coming-out process of its own. From out of the closets in the '60s, the culture moved onto the disco floors of the '70s and through the hospital wards of the '80s and onwards to the streets.

My own strong feeling was that the gay liberation movement really got national attraction in the truest sense of the word later in the '70s, in the '80s, and especially in the '90s.

I think it's great now that we seem to be in an era where it's OK to be gay and I think that the society in North America has had more of a problem with it than any other society.

Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn't take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn't exist. I don't even think the word 'gay' was in existence.

I think we're realizing that gay people are able to do the type of comedy that we just assumed was for straight people over the years. Whatever old boundaries there were, which were very real and still have an effect on us, in the way we socialize, I think that's slowly becoming less important.

A lot of what used to be known as gay culture - broadly speaking, homoeroticism and being camp - has been brought into mainstream culture. I think we should be moving to an era where it's just sex.

The '90s will be looked back on as ushering in an era of comfort.

The gay community just recognizes what their closets are and we straight have to spend years trying to figure out which closet we are trapped in.

The '90s were extremely diverse, almost like a laboratory of the new century. There was much experimenting around, in politics, economics, gender and family structures, and also in fashion. There was a cloud of possibilities which kept us all dizzy.