People who were gay were pitied and ridiculed by my parents - they had no modern sense of people being allowed to be who they were.
There are so many things and so many aspects to gay life that I've discovered and so many things to write about. I have a new life, and I have a new take on dance music because of that life.
I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.
I grew up in a conservative small town, and the gay characters I saw on TV and in movies when I was growing up were all flamboyant and obnoxious and sometimes kind of annoying.
Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.
Gay people got a right to be as miserable as everybody else.
I wanted to represent minorities in the respect of people who had been bullied in school or people who were gay or lesbian or trans or people who aren't blonde haired and blue-eyed. I have short hair, and I am covered in tattoos. I like showing people that it's within their rights to be different.
I know that, as a bisexual, sometimes people who are gay or lesbian look down upon the bisexual community as well and assume that people who are bisexual just don't know what they want or are just playing both sides of the fence, and that's not the case, either.
I think every time there's a show like 'Modern Family' or 'Will & Grace' that portray gay and lesbian characters and is successful, it just further opens the door.
I've heard other gay people say when they were growing up they felt 'foreign.' Growing up, I was able to label these feelings as: 'I'm a Protestant.' It wasn't until I left, I thought: 'Oh, those weren't Protestant feelings.'
Dancehall has always had a homophobic problem, but you go to dance parties in Jamaica, and some of the biggest dancers are kinda gay, just not outspoken about it. Dancehall was the first kind of music I was DJing, and it was always more about the rhythm.
I feel like I've been observed as an individual more than a gay person, or as a filmmaker with a certain point of view rather than a lesbian filmmaker with a gay point of view.
I believe in gay marriage.
I really couldn't come out until after I got my citizenship, because it was a disclaim - back then, it could have been a disqualifier. I could have been denied my U.S. citizenship because I was gay. So I didn't - I stayed quiet.
I endeavour to read more, be more informed on gay rights. Whatever floats your boat is my outlook. It's hard enough to be happy without having legislation against you, too.
Coming out as a gay man, it was very much about finding my own identity and dealing with labeling.
There's no question that the gay movement would not be as far along as it is without AIDS. But how can there be any other issue in the face of death, possible extinction?
I was at Yale from 1953 to 1957, and I tried to commit suicide in my freshman year because I was gay, and I thought I was the only person in the school who was. I was just totally and utterly miserable.
I'm not afraid to tell the world who I am. I'm Michael Sam: I'm a college graduate. I'm African American, and I'm gay. I'm comfortable in my skin.
When you're 17 in the suburbs and know only three gay people, holding hands with your girlfriend is a proclamation.
ISIS itself regularly fuels hatred of gay people and violence towards them. It broadcasts gruesome executions of homosexuals thrown blindfolded from rooftops.
Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the part of gays to resemble their straight neighbours.
Sometimes we look at gay being a bigger sin than being proud or not telling the truth. I don't think God categorizes sins.
Realizing I was gay was a long sort of waking up.
As I got more into gay rights, I got more into equal pay, and you just see that it's all connected. You can't really speak out on one thing and not another without it not being the full picture.
My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me.
In the years when HIV was a killer, any parent of an openly gay person was terrified. I knew my mother well enough that she would spend every day praying that I didn't come across that virus. She'd have worried like that.
Just by the nature of making the choice to be true to who I am, I'm political. Sometimes that's all you need to do: Show up and be black, gay and Christian in America and actually say it out loud. And refuse to let anything or anybody take that away from you.
If somebody says, 'I am a gay person, and I want to get married,' is their own family going to deny them that? Are our own fellow citizens going to deny them that?
It doesn't matter if you're black, white, gay, straight, come from different countries, different language... every single person is significant and is meaningful.
It's not like we wanted to talk about the fact that we're gay all the time, but the world has forced it to be an issue.
We don't really get to see gay characters who are completely open with their sexuality, but it doesn't define who they are.
I sort of challenge people's perceptions of what a gay man is, which is kinda good.
I don't feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man.
'Queer as Folk' is gay gay gay gay gay.
It's not like the right for gay people to marry just happened.
