In ‘Queer as Folk,’ we had three or four sex scenes in every episode, so I got used to doing that very early on. Those kinds of scenes can be challenging. They take a bit of time, and everyone’s a bit nervous.
I do my best to surround myself with queer people. I don’t go to straight bars and it’s quite frankly because I don’t feel comfortable there.
A lot of queer stories revolve around tragedy.
Technology… is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.
In some ways, I value specificity. I think that there’s power in, once you know who your fan base is, being able to speak to them. I hope to cultivate a fan base of black girls and black people and people of color, women of color, queer people, people who are are marginalized in general.
My films might have been queer – because I was – but they were not gay.
I’m queer – and queer, to me, is not being stuck in a binary and being kind of fluid.
I grew up in a town of 30,000 people, and ‘Queer Eye’ was a beacon of light.
The term ‘new queer cinema’ and the films of mine that were associated with that term are from a very, very different time, one almost entirely defined by the AIDS era. It was a very different social and cultural regard for the lives, the experiences, the worth of gay people.
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a form of service journalism. To be successful, I think it has to be a combination of a good story, it has to be funny, and it also needs to be packed with useful information.
Each and every one of us has multiple identities, and this is a fact that should be celebrated. I for example, am a queer black woman who grew up poor in Los Angeles.
I would like to encourage hip hop artists to invite those of us who are in the queer spaces in, so we can have those conversations. I love hip hop. If you bring me in the studio, I know how to act. And we can talk about what’s not cool because, clearly, there’s still homophobia that penetrates in all these areas.
After the ‘Fallon’ set, I had a lot of queer people message me about how much it meant to see a queer perspective on late night TV.
When Man evolved Pity, he did a queer thing – deprived himself of the power of living life as it is without wishing it to become something different.
Queer black characters have been the sidekick for long enough. It’s time for us to finally take the lead.
I am an ‘other.’ As a queer, biracial man who occupies and embodies many different intersections of ‘otherness,’ I’ve spent my entire life seeking reflections of myself in the world around me to connect and relate to.
The fact that I get to play a queer Filipino on television and another queer character in ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ is huge. I never thought I’d have a career being myself. I always thought that being an actor in Hollywood meant that I would have to put that side of me on the back burner.
I had an amazing experience being on a hit show for Showtime, doing ‘Queer as Folk’, and impacting things socially, like helping change hearts and minds. It’s such a big chapter of my life.
I think any time we do drag, especially in 2018, it’s a political statement. Because we’re living in a world where people don’t see drag queens as equal. They don’t see queer people as equal. They don’t see people of any minority as equal.
I was on MTV’s ‘Real World’ at the time when ‘Queer Eye’ came out. I remember, the first time I won an award, I got the award, and they were like, ‘It’s a tie! With ‘Queer Eye!” I never thought that I would one day follow in their footsteps.
When I was growing up, there weren’t that many queer girls of colour making music. So I just wanted to be able to exist, just to be that, without putting too much emphasis on it.
I was just a queer theater kid from New York City.
I want to see some queer politicians, some drag queens and drag kings running for office and shifting the way that policy is made as well.
I love it now that a large minority of people who are handicapped prefer to call themselves crippled. This is all part of the game, like queer theory.
Yes, I would definitely let the ‘Queer Eye’ – I mean, cameras – follow me for my marriage.
I love St. Vincent. She is like our queer rock goddess and that’s so needed.
Drag is never going to be completely mainstream because it’s still a queer art form.
It’s queer how ready people always are with advice in any real or imaginary emergency, and no matter how many times experience has shown them to be wrong, they continue to set forth their opinions, as if they had received them from the Almighty!
I really want to see normalization of queer sexuality – as well as the lack of sexuality.
As much as I think that in the future we won’t need labels, at the moment they’re really important. So I’m making myself embrace that. I truly am proud to be queer. Even watching ‘Queer Eye’ is something that inspired me to say that. So that’s the power of representation.
A lot of queer relationships on television and in films are met with extreme tragedy.
I care more about a 15-year-old queer kid in Iowa who wants to know that there’s anything out there that resembles their experience and life than the hip queer person in Brooklyn.
Queer art is as much about starting conversations as it is about making dramatic statements.
A lot of queer characters get painted with either a caricature brush, or they’re used to teach, in a way.
I think, in general, straight actors should be able to play queer roles just as much as queer actors should be able to play straight roles. I think the reason why the debate is there is because we haven’t had enough queer actors being cast in anything. People are in need of that representation in general.
On ‘Queer Eye,’ I really get to see the way someone lives. They know the Fab Five are coming, but they don’t know when or how, so our producers make sure they don’t clean up so that we can experience exactly how they normally live.
For queer people, the personal is very political, just to talk about it in a public space. It’s very political just to come out and take up that space and be like, ‘This is my narrative. It’s not an outsider narrative, and it’s not a fetish narrative; it’s just my story, and it’s worth being told and listened to.’
I think that there’s not always been queer person of color representation in pop and so I’m making the most of it because that is who I am.
I identify as queer. I just don’t know what any of these labels mean.
My queer black women peers are the ones who make me not feel crazy. The way we act is so instinctive.
In my dictionary, and everyone’s dictionary in the 1970s, the word ‘queer’ did mean strange and unusual. There was no slur to it.
The gay community has had a sometimes tumultuous relationship with non-queer people coming to their shows because it was tourism, like using the queer spaces as a form of comic relief or entertainment.
The way I see queerness now is that, best case scenario, another queer person reflects it back at you. Worst case scenario, which is what happened to me, is having people say, Well, you like Michelle Branch, so you must be gay.’
I do think that for a queer person to speak truthfully without shame about their own experiences is political.
I hope people realize that drag queens and queer people, we’re not just archetypes and stereotypes. We’re human beings with a lot to share. And a drag queen doesn’t have to just be a clown, she can also be like a cooking TV personality or like a DJ, or a talk-show host. We should be able to infiltrate TV everywhere.
A lot of people know me from my character that I play on ‘Superstore,’ Mateo, and I’m not interested in playing straight roles. I’m all about playing queer roles.
What’s great about being gay is that you can celebrate all types of sexualities, because we understand that being queer means you might also be gender nonconforming or bi or whatever.
My favorite job, and definitely the one that means the most to me, is ‘Queer Eye.’
Yes, it’s called ‘Queer Eye’ and there are five gay men on it, but we’re also tackling real issues. The conversations we have on our show would be just as valid if they swapped us out with straight guys. What we do is important, not just because we’re a niche gay show.
California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.
I wonder if there’s space to queer the nomenclature in fitness. Maybe we call a goblet squat a Dannii Minogue instead? Just an idea.
Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.
People in Scunthorpe don’t care what I say. And I’m not camp, either. I’m a geezer. I’m not a raving queer, I’ve got a bit of character. I just ignore people who shout at me in the street. I just stick my head in the air; I’m not interested.
I want to show people out there that there’s such a huge spectrum of people within the queer and Asian community.
You know, being an ‘other’ in this world, you’re walking around in a horror movie at all times, you’re always on edge and wondering when the monster is going to jump out and get you. I feel like that’s the experience of African-Americans and queer people in America.
