Dennis Altman Quotes

Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.

Human beings are distinguished by a capacity for experience as well as by their behavior, and homosexuality is as much a matter ofemotion as of genital manipulation ... As we each examine our own sense of identity we realize how much more complex is the question of homosexuality than a mere Kinsey-like computation of orgasms.

While one would expect a liberated society to regard bisexuality as the norm, this view would not mean that all persons would behave bisexually … The nonrepressed person recognizes his bisexual potential, he is not some ideal person midway along the Kinsey behavioral scale. People would still fall in love and form relationships, and these relationships would be homosexual as well as heterosexual. What would be different is that the social difference between the two would vanish, and once this happened we would lose the feeling of being limited, of having to choose between an exclusively straight or exclusively gay world.