Because society places a value on masculinity, gay men aspire to it. If you go to a gay club and the doorman says, ‘You do realise this is a gay club, don’t you lads?’ you get all excited because you think, ‘Wow, he thought I was straight!’
Anybody can be unhappy. We can all be hurt. You don’t have to be poor to need something or somebody. Rednecks, hippies, misfits – we’re all the same. Gay or straight? So what? It doesn’t matter to me. We have to be concerned about other people, regardless.
I don’t remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.
I grew up when people were afraid to ‘come out’ as gay. If you asked me how many gay kids I grew up with or went to school with, I would have said none – which of course could not have been true. The truth is I have no idea how many confused and frightened kids I grew up with. They are still out there.
If you’re gay and you can’t hold hands, or you’re black and you can’t catch a taxi, or you’re a woman and you can’t go into the park, you are aware there’s a menace. That’s costly on a psychic level. The world should be striving to make all its members secure.
Looking back, one of the things I love most about my mom was that she never, ever relented. She stuck to her guns right up until the end. She wasn’t abusive, but she was never that thrilled that I was gay.
I’m a sportsman, as good and strong as you, who just happens to be gay.
God love Neil Patrick Harris – how great is that. People grew up with him; they go, ‘Oh it’s him, it’s that little boy and he just happens to be gay. How great for him!’ The more of those kind of examples that happen, the better it’s going to be.
Marriage hasn’t been my thing. But gay people, knock yourselves out!
What we really have to do is stop the adjective before the job title – whether it’s ‘black actor,’ a ‘gay actor’ or anything actor.
There are a lot of myths about gay people.
I think that the longer I look good, the better gay men feel.
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.
I go back and forth, but I never wanted to be the photographer of the gay and lesbian community. I will wave a rainbow flag proudly, but I am not a singular identity. I think a singular identity isn’t very interesting, and I’m a little bit more multifaceted as a person than that.
My American gay audience have continued to dance and sing to the music I make in a way that straight Americans haven’t. I am grateful to them for that.
The writing was so clearly written on the wall about me, but I didn’t see it. I had no role models. I didn’t know there was even a possibility of being gay. I battled with it, but this was the way God made me. If you have a problem with it, take it up with the man upstairs.
I just live my life – but the support from the gay community is always fantastic. It’s really great because they are always the best people to always be around.
Who quick be to borrow and slow be to pay, their credit is naught, go they ever so gay.
Everyone has people in their lives that are gay, lesbian or transgender or bisexual. They may not want to admit it, but I guarantee they know somebody.
A lot of gay men are in delusion if they think they’re super macho.
Gay kids need to stop killing themselves because they are made to feel worthless by cruel and relentless bullying.
No one knew I was gay growing up but I was bullied. I was a cheerleader, fairly popular and considered straight.
I have a half-brother who is very, very, very gay, many cousins, best friends who are all members of the LGBT community, and for me to not say anything would be hypocritical. There is a lot of prejudice. People think it is abnormal. No, it’s just another normal.
I condemn the national gay press for its emphasis on consumerism.
I want to show straight men and gay men alike that self-care and grooming isn’t mutually exclusive with, like, femininity or masculinity.
I pointed out that the Atlanta Olympic bomber – as well as Timothy McVeigh and the people who protest against gay rights at military funerals – are Christians but we journalists don’t identify them by their religion.
The struggle isn’t just about being straight or gay or transgender – it’s a human struggle. That’s always really been my kind of starting point: If you’re out there and you’re odd, come over to my house.
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.
I want to love all the children of God – Christian, Jew, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist – everyone. I want to love gay Christians and straight Christians.
Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples.
These awful middle-class queens – which is what the gay movement has become – are so tiresome. It’s all Abercrombie & Fitch and strollers.
I used to hate myself for being gay. I couldn’t come to terms with it.
I’m not going on a crusade but I’m proud of who I am. I feel I have achieved everything I could ever possibly have hoped to achieve out of rugby and I did it being gay. I want to send a positive message to other gay people that they can do it, too.
Do I support the idea of gay marriage? No, I don’t.
I don’t feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I’m a gay man.
I’m a straight guy and I date women, but I get on really well with gay guys. I’m very comfortable with my sexuality. The weirdest thing for me is when straight guys get really freaked out by gay guys. It’s almost like they’re insecure in their own sexuality. For me, I can be in a room full of gay men and have fun.
When my husband and I first became parents, we joked that our chubby baby was destined to grow into an Alex P. Keaton Reaganite – the most unlikely, and therefore hilarious, course for the child of an interracial gay couple in gentrifying Brooklyn.
As somebody who happens to be gay, I particularly resent that minorities are being encouraged to be fragile and bitter.
There’s a lesbian aesthetic, just as there’s gay camp, but I don’t know if there’s such a thing as ‘lesbian art.’
Sooner or later they are going to live in a New York City where gay marriage is not only legal, but it’s common and they don’t even notice.
Like lots of people, I really love Roxane Gay.
My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too damn short.
Just because you are out doesn’t make you the poster boy for the gay community.
I am gay. I’ve had two boyfriends most of my life.
As I walk around, I have met 70-year-old women who live on the Upper West Side who love the show. And I met a couple in Kansas – a couple of truck drivers who drove around together – who loved it. It’s popular all over the place and definitely in the gay community.
When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.
The old Victorian laws against homosexuality were still on the statute books until the early 1990s. As a gay man living in Ireland, I and people like me found it easy to feel less than citizens.
We live in a world where we have friends, neighbors, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, people we journey with for years who are gay. And we need to love, affirm and all of us together work on the real problems that we have in the world.
My dream is to have a gay son.
Gay guys know how to craft, and they craft really well. Straight guys, forget it.
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.
If you’re gay, that doesn’t mean I want to discriminate against you, belittle or bully you, abuse or offend you. Not at all. I don’t want to go back to the dark days of criminalisation and the imprisonment of gay men and women; of Section 28 and legalised discrimination.
People think they know who I am, because I’ve played so many very, very out gay men on stage, and they think that’s me.
If you’re gay or religious you’re always hearing this word tolerance. It’s a pathetic word. It’s actually just a politically correct word for the term intolerance.
When are we going to stop labeling everyone? How many times have I been referred to as ‘out gay actor?’ Do we say, ‘out heterosexual actor’ when we refer to Tom Hanks?
I would love to be on ‘Glee,’ thus furthering the myth that I’m a gay man.
But when I did think about it and looked at the whole package – the producers behind the show, the writers, the cast I would be working with – I would have been a fool to turn it down just because the role for me was another gay role.
