"I'd heard of Andy Warhol, but I'd never heard The Velvet Underground until David Bowie talked about them in interviews in the NME, and of course Transformer. I'd rather talk about Transformer than the banana album actually, because Transformer sums up the era. I do believe that Mick Ronson was very instrumental - like a classically trained musician as well as a gorgeous rock god lead guitarist. His arrangement abilities for both Ziggy Stardust and Transformer have not been fully recognised in the history of pop music. I don't think David would've broke through without that. I remember dancing to 'Vicious' in a nightclub called Masquerade in Liverpool - a really eccentric gay bar full of diesel dykes, prostitutes and older gay men with dyed black hair and toupees. It was a strange netherworld hidden up a back alley that embraced a bunch of freaks of my generation like Pete Burns and me, Jane Casey, who wore too much make-up. That was the thing about a gay club, you were safe almost in there. A strange refuge. I suppose in a way, punk kind of helped that. Absolutely. One minute you were queer on the street, the next minute you were a punk. It normalised that sort of behaviour really, you know; ""Oh, they're just punks"", and it was a diversion away from sexuality. Punk was strangely non-sexual. Even the main protagonist John Lydon had something of a 'neither here nor there' about him."

"It’s safe to say that Haigh’s Weekend messed up an entire generation of gay men looking for love. The film wears its heart on its sleeve and does it with such grace. There’s this feeling I get when I break up with someone or meet someone new. It’s this feeling of flux, transition, and tension, of someone either pulling away or pulling you close. It’s the gravitational forces of love. Weekend captures this perfectly."

"I discovered this series at a small gay bookstore when I was living above a hardware store in San Diego in the ’80s. I read the first book in 24 hours straight, no sleep. Then I devoured every other novel in the series — all of them — in one day each. If I had to Sophie’s Choice pick only a couple, I would say the first novel and “Babycakes,” topped only by “Maybe the Moon,” his unrelated tome."

"If Becky wasn't a gay teenage boy with good grammar and a foul mouth in several past lives, then she's absolutely one of the most observant writers in the YA game. New Review (June 2017): Just finished my third or fourth reread of SIMON VS., this time on audio which is narrated by the amazing Michael Crouch, and wow, I love this book more each time. I'm 27 right now and SIMON remains the book I wish I had 10 years ago."