Michelangelo Signorile > Quotes

“Yoshino distinguishes covering from “conversion” (trying to become straight) and “passing” (staying in the closet), and points out that even after gay people come out, society exerts a “covering demand” on its minority members. I would argue that, by pleading for more magnanimous treatment of our opponents, gay thought leaders were unconsciously applying the covering demand to the LGBT equality movement as a whole.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“She went to the Better Business Bureau, which elicited a response from the spa’s owner stating, “It is our policy to not accept any kinds of abnormal sexual oriented customers to our facility such as homosexuals, or transgender.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“it wasn’t until recently that we saw marriage as a winning issue rather than a losing one.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“They’re using these sort of coded appeals to say to people two things: One, the biggest threat in your life is not concentrated wealth, it’s minorities; and two, government coddles minorities, and all these government assistance programs, it’s all about giveaways to minorities—oppose them—government is taking your taxes and giving it to undeserving minorities.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“in schools where the majority of youth report having learned about LGBT people in the curriculum, only 11% of students report being bullied, which was half the number of students who reported being bullied in schools that do not teach this history.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“It seemed like the military was stalling, and the president wasn’t challenging this tactic out of fear of upsetting conservatives. (Not until Obama’s second term would the administration painfully come to realize the futility of pandering to people who would never meet them halfway.)”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“let’s make them work for us. Let’s keep them busy in committees defending our full civil rights in return for our full support and let them use it as a wedge issue against the GOP. The last thing leading Republicans want to do, after all, is have an open conversation about LGBT equality.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“Then as now, the Christian Right turned anti-discrimination arguments on their heads: instead of African Americans being discriminated against by segregated Christian universities, the universities were being discriminated against by not being allowed to exclude them; instead of public prayers oppressing religious minorities, Christians are being oppressed by not being able to offer them.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“the fact remains that it is the fight itself, standing up against the hate because we dare to demand equality, that changes the culture and brings people to the cause.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“not standing there and taking it, being subservient to and trying to gain the acceptance of the bully. It means fighting back.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“The realities of the lives of many LGBT people, from grappling with HIV to the presence of anti-LGBT violence, are unconsciously covered up as the victory narrative consumes us and as we allow it to happen at our own peril.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“Without defamation, there is no longer slander,”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“another important aspect of the marriage-equality movement that gives us some guidance moving forward is that it was driven not by the Beltway but by average Americans who wanted equality and who worked with visionary legal advocates.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“In May 2014, a gay male couple paying their check after a nice dinner at Big Earl’s Bait House in Pittsburgh, Texas, were ordered not to come back. “We don’t serve fags here,” the cashier, a daughter of the owner, told the men to their faces. “Here at Big Earl’s we like for men to act like men and for ladies to act like ladies, so we want you to never return.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“Well into 2014, HRC was still pushing that narrow employment bill the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, with its dangerous, broad religious exemption that would allow continued discrimination by the very institutions that do most of the discriminating.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“This recalibration of the “victim–oppressor dynamic” is exactly what Christian conservatives, with the aid of right-wing bloggers, put into motion after Brendan Eich resigned as CEO of Mozilla. They cast him as a victim of ruthless, organized gay activist groups that were taking away his “religious liberties”—a claim that could not be further from the truth. Too many gay opinion makers fell right into the trap, accepting this reframing, becoming fearful, and running away, fretting about the “optics” rather than challenging the accusation for what it was: a vicious lie and a deception, part of a plot to recast enemies of LGBT equality as victims while they trample hard-won rights. These LGBT thought leaders spoke for all of us who have been overcome with victory blindness and have impulsively reverted to covering our anger and our conviction. And we can’t let that happen again.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“Reagan and welfare queens, or Newt Gingrich saying Obama is a “food stamp president.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“The violence is still disproportionately impacting people of color and transgender people—nearly 90 percent (yes, 90 percent) of the anti-LGBTQ homicide victims across this country were people of color and 72 percent were transgender women,”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“Yoshino says, “Gays should not rest now but move forward by looking back.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“using the same logic it uses to determine racist and other extremist groups: the FRC promotes defamation and promulgates known falsehoods.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“The logic of incrementalism is that by asking for a little bit at a time and winning a little bit at a time, you can eventually achieve the full complement of your goals.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“It’s hard to guess why that range is not called upon.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“We deserve a marketplace that rejects homophobic bigotry, and covering means accepting something less than that.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“it was impossible not to be amazed, impressed, and heartened by the questioning that Richard Posner, judge of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, a Reagan appointee, delivered to Wisconsin assistant attorney general Timothy Samuelson, who defended Wisconsin’s gay-marriage ban before the court in August 2014.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“a full civil rights bill, something much bigger than ENDA, that encompasses employment, housing, public accommodations, education, and all banking and lending, without a religious exemption any broader than the one in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We must not settle for anything less.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“Kids may be taught misinformation or bigotry at their churches or in their homes, but at school, perhaps before those ideas can solidify, something else is challenging them with facts.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“the right is engaged in a much more organized effort to pose as victims whose religious liberties are being infringed upon.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“An Iraq war veteran and his boyfriend were tossed out of a cab in Tacoma, Washington, on Independence Day 2014. Eric Williams, who had served two tours of duty in Iraq, left a bar and got in a cab with his boyfriend and exchanged what the two described as a “peck.” “[The driver] said, ‘You’re two men, why are you kissing?’” Williams told Q13FOX TV in Seattle. “We said that’s my boyfriend, I’m gay. That’s when the cabby started to get really hostile with us. He pulled off the road and told us to get out of the car, he wasn’t going to serve us.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“Getting those rights is essential. But, as Kenji Yoshino notes in his discussing of covering, winning rights is only one part of the battle. To keep them, we have to change the culture, and that means resisting the demand that we cover and conform.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality

“victim’s avoidance of ‘fighting back’ and the bully’s interpretation of this as a weakness.”
― Michelangelo Signorile, It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, & Winning True Equality