PETER PAIGE

I believe that young kids have agency and can make a difference in the world.

We've all been watching stories about heterosexuals forever... As a gay kid, you are always having to translate. You are always having to pretend like you are one of the other characters. You're not seeing your life accurately reflected.

One of the things we try to do on 'The Fosters' is shine a light on the problems and the people that get pushed to the periphery. From the very beginning of the show, when we told people we were putting foster care at the center of a TV show, even the people who work in the system were afraid.

I'm interested in the ways that we're all broken.

My life's not about being gay - although one could argue I'm pretty professionally gay - but that's not how I experience life. Being gay is a profound part of who I am, but it isn't all of who I am.

There definitely has been this kind of Hollywood swing back from the pendulum of, 'OK, we're gonna do gay people; we're gonna do queens.' And then it's like, 'No, no, no queens. Queen is too much.'

It's a very generational thing: I am not interested in labels. I am who I am. I will love who I love, and that's the way it is going to be.

You live with your family for awhile, and then you move out into the world, and you still have your family; you just don't get to see them every night when you go home for dinner.

There was one family drama on television when we took out 'The Fosters' - 'Parenthood'. Everybody thought it sounded like a great show, but nobody thought there was a home for it.

I was certainly a kid who believed he could make a difference in the world. I was, as a young person, cooking up plans. My hero is Billie Jean King, and the thing that I find so impressive about Billie Jean is that she took something as banal as playing tennis and used it to change the world. She really did.

Something we learned from foster kids after sitting down with them to hear their stories is that so many of them are invested in social justice, and they're all invested in making the system better for the kids behind them.

We, as a culture, use television as at least one of the great arbiters of truth. Even though we know it's fiction, when we see it portrayed, we believe it. We recognize it as part of our culture.

I worked on congressional campaigns when I was a teenager. I did United Way fundraisers when I was a teen. We advocated; we spoke out. I protested the first Iraq War in college.

We prioritize access to guns to such a degree that we are traumatizing an entire generation of children.

I don't think we set out to make it the most intense 'Fosters' finale ever, but I kind of think that's what we ended up with.

Gay adults start as gay kids... Now they've got to figure out how to be with each other and be with family, friends, and the communities at school.

We try to not write stories based on reaction. We try to write them based on character integrity as we understand it and observe it.

Weddings are such a microcosm of norms, of traditions, and in those traditions, there are a lot of things that have been sort of codified: misogyny and ownership and the patriarchy. So what happens when two very, very disparate families come together for one wedding?

There's always hope in 'The Fosters.' These are fundamentally good people who are all trying their best and making some terrible, terrible decisions, but they're trying their best. And there's always hope for those people.

I'm on Twitter every single week. It's sort of like being a playwright standing in the back of the theater.

We always try to go back to character: What do they want? What are they doing? What's in motion that they're dealing with? When things get particularly heavy, we will take a step back and look at who has some room to have some things lighter, funnier, or sweeter happen.

Nothing is ever off the table at 'The Fosters' as long as it's based in reality.

It's a lot harder to write a story that's compelling about identity and sense of self without some villain in the room.

I think effeminacy is something that's really important to talk about in the context of gay media representations and in terms of the gay experience at large.

I think so much of adolescence is about finding your tribe, and what kids today have that we did not have is access to the whole world.