I wasn't always this confident. Growing up as the awkward gay kid in a small town in Pennsylvania, you're constantly told, 'Don't be yourself, don't be proud of who you are.'
I could be wrong, but I think heterosexual marriage is threatened more by heterosexuals. I don't know why gay marriage challenges my marriage in any way.
I didn't know what gay was until I lived in New York for 10 years. You know, I was just underexposed in that regard.
I see interracial couples all the time in Nashville. I'm a Jew in Nashville. I'm a gay person in Nashville. It's a non-issue in most of the time. That's a huge leap forward.
There are different ways that kids who are gay take on the rejection and alienation they feel. The way I dealt with it was to say, 'You know what? You're imposing judgments on me and condemnations, but I don't accept them. I'm going to instead turn the light on you and see what your flaws are and impose the same judgmental standards on you.'
I was inadvertently raised in the 'gay community.' I had straight parents, but I spent massive amounts of time at a very early age with gay, theater-hopeful thirty-somethings.
One of the greatest tools you have as a songwriter is anonymity. If someone knows too much about the songwriter, they don't get to insert their own characters. I don't want the audience thinking about the gay guy who wrote the song.
I think about 'Will & Grace,' and I think about 'Modern Family,' and the way that being gay has become sort of middle America... in the way that they show gay people in their specific way.
Outside of the oppressive nature that the South offered to the black people, black gay people, black gay people who happened to be Christian, who wouldn't want to leave? I couldn't wait to get out of there.
It's just making sure that everyone is treated equally. Is that so progressive? I don't think it's progressive, I think it's human. And not just gay people - women's rights, immigrants, people of different ethnic backgrounds.
I've been strongly opposed to racial discrimination and anything like that my whole life. Maybe it's thanks to my parents and where I grew up and that sort of thing, but particularly with gay and lesbian citizens, I've seen that people can be cruel, and it's very distressing.
I was so beat down as a young person - being black, being gay, being unable to assimilate because I could never, ever pull off being butch.
It's not enough for Hollywood to make a bunch of gay movies. That's obviously a big part of the equation, but then gay people have to show up for those movies.
As a gay man, I think the role of culture is central to how you change politics - culture is politics.
If I did the structure and had this thing about a straight character, I would never have a sex scene to prove that he's heterosexual. If I have a gay character in a movie, I need to have a sex scene in it - just to prove that he's gay?
I felt like I was an outsider growing up in the black church, as a gay man, in a poor community.
All socio-political phenomena in the U.K. come laden with the baggage of a class-based theory or two attached to them. In the case of gay Tories, there is one particularly silly variant of the category, which asserts that gayness is bred in public schools and thus fits with Conservatism like hand in glove.
Everyone in the gay community doesn't think alike.
When I came out, I found I hadn't been born with the right genes. It's quite brutal. If you're beautiful and you have the right genes, then the gay scene is a place where you can be worshipped. But if you don't, it's a different ball of wax.
It was my own internalised homophobia. I didn't want to be gay.
I know a lot of very stable gay couples.
I have friends who are black, white, purple, gay, straight, Martian, yellow, old, and young. I have friends who are animals and a few who I believe to be robots. All of them are people to me. In my mind, it's not about what you look like or what you do; it's about who you are inside.
I found out that I was illegal when I was 16. I'm gay. I'm Filipino.
Governing means governing all of the people, no matter what demographic it is, whether it'd be black, white, women, straight, gay, Republican.
Though gay lifestyles have certainly moved into the open, there's little evidence that society has become more open in its basic attitudes or that entertainers should feel cozy in emerging from the velvet underground.
If I don't get a TV show next year because someone looks up my Wikipedia and it says 'openly gay,' then it's worth the risk because I've had so many years being openly gay and proud of myself as a role model.
'Sordid' is rather unique. That's why so many gay fans are comfortable to share 'Sordid Lives' with their families. It's not really a gay story. It's just much more a family story that happens to have gay members, which most people do.
If I hadn't been born a woman, I would have certainly been gay.
From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.
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.
When I was growing up, I kept hoping that I wasn't really gay because I wanted to have children. I went through a long, tortured period, so the fact that I have been able to be true to myself and have a family has been the nicest surprise of my adulthood.
Obama sees himself as such a huge change that he can be cautious about other societal changes. But what he doesn't realize is that legalizing gay marriage is like electing a black president. Before you do it, it seems inconceivable. Once it's done, you can't remember what all the fuss was about.
When I was young, they thought I was from outer space. I was the only gay person they probably knew, and they struggled with that. Everybody knew I was gay. They just didn't want to talk about it.
A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing to protect traditional marriages.
After coming out as gay, I soon felt a lot more comfortable in my life, moment to moment.
I had to try to understand how much of a taboo it was. My mum worked in ballet and theatre when she was younger, and I had been brought up around lots of gay people, so I had never had any issue and couldn't imagine how hard it was to be out.
