Michael J. Willett Quotes

Honestly, I am hoping to influence young people, and Twitter's a great way to encourage them to lend their voice to the conversation. Any time you can show young people that you support gay friends and that there are gay people in the world who are lovely, happy, singing, and in love, it opens their minds.

My life has been immensely enriched by gay mentors, colleagues and friends, and any discrimination and persecution of gay people is unacceptable.

I, personally, am trying to get more and more involved with the gay and lesbian movement, very much so.

Within a decade, maybe two or three, Christians will come around to treating gays no differently than they now treat other groups whom they previously persecuted — women, Jews, blacks — but not because of some new interpretation of a biblical passage, or because of a new revelation from God. These changes will come about the same way that they always do: by the oppressed minority fighting for the right to be treated equally, and by a few enlightened members of the oppressing majority supporting their cause. Then what will happen is that Christians will take credit for the civil liberation of gays, dig through the historical record and find a few Christian bloggers or preachers who had the courage and the character to stand up for Gay rights when their fellow Christians would not, and then cite those as evidence that were it not for Christianity gays would not be equal

I'm not homophobic and I'm not anti-gay.

Most of my favorite people in my life are gay. It's something I'm super passionate about, because whenever I would see my friends get bullied, or my brother get hurt for his sexuality, I would become a raging lunatic.

Just because I'm in favor of gay rights doesn't mean that I'm gay or doesn't mean I'm some kind of 'sissy' or something. That's the language that you hear in locker rooms.

Certainly our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters need to be supported in living out their call to holiness.

I have close family members as well as lots of close friends who are gay. Many of them strongly support gay marriage.

I think people feel threatened by homosexuality. The problem isn't about gay people, the problem is about the attitude towards gay people. People think that all gays are Hannibal Lecters. But gay people are sons and daughters, politicians and doctors, American heroes and daughters of American heroes.

It's not the '90s anymore. I think the gay community is a lot more accepted these days.

When I first started talking about gay marriage, most people in the gay community looked at me as if I was insane or possibly a fascist reactionary.

I'm not a gay rights activist.

That's my advice to all homosexuals, whether they're in the Boy Scouts, or in the Army or in high school: Shut up, don't tell anybody what you do, your life will be a lot easier.

I condemn the national gay press for its emphasis on consumerism.

I can't take on all the worries of the world, you know. I can only talk about being gay and being an actor. I'll have to leave those other battles to somebody else.

Of course, the majority of us would speak up in the face of outrageous bigotry, but do we speak up in a social situation when someone casually refers to something as 'gay'? If we don't, we are standing with the homophobes whom we are quietly fighting.

If you are for freedom and equal rights, which we hear a lot of talk about these days, then you have to include the LGBTQ community in that. And if you're not willing to put your time where your mouth is, then I don't know quite what you mean by commitment in your life.

I've been a very effective leader in the gay rights movement, though at times I've been controversial.

The death of anti-gay hate speech is no doubt being hastened by the head-spinning speed with which gays as a group - to say nothing of gay marriage - are becoming an unremarkable and even quite traditional parts of American life.

Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.

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.

Gays and lesbians began to gain civil rights when Americans realized that their brothers, cousins, daughters were gay.

I go all around London advocating lesbian and gay rights.

If I was 14 and knew some gay people, I wouldn't nearly have had the struggle I had. Our world is definitely changing.