Lance Loud Quotes

Being young is hard. Being young and queer is even harder, regardless of how accepting your parents or community are.

When you're a young kid and you're gay, you're out there on your own. And you're trying to figure this thing out. And your parents typically aren't gay.

I've been bisexual for as long as I can remember. I remember being made fun of in junior high for that. It was something that was shameful, and it really shouldn't be.

I have a friend who is around my age, a little younger, and she's gay and came out to her own community when she was younger but not to her family and to the community at large.

I'm gay, and I was born this way.

I wanted so badly to be straight like my friends. But I couldn't change it any more than I could change having brown eyes. And I knew I would never fit into what kids thought was normal.

I'm not saying that being straight is easy, but when you're gay, you don't really have a familial network or support system. You have to find that.

Being gay, you're kind of forced to ask, I suppose, very existential questions from a very, very early age. Your identity becomes so important to you because you're trying to understand it, and, I think, from the age of, like, 9, you're being forced to ask questions... that other kids maybe don't have to ask.

I want to continue to use my platform to tell my story to let young people that are struggling with their sexuality or identity know they are not alone, and it will get better.

The gay community just recognizes what their closets are and we straight have to spend years trying to figure out which closet we are trapped in.

I can't speak for other people, but for me, I feel like gone are the days that you need to come out of a closet. I never felt like I was in a closet. I never did. I always felt comfortable with who I am and the decisions I made.

I think it's always good for gay people to come out, but it's also understandable why people might choose not to do so.

People who were close to me - family and friends - they knew about my sexuality.

I don't feel closeted.

Very few people have the guts to come up to you and say, 'Hey, are you gay?'

Compared to being caught in the wrong body, being plagued by 'dysmorphic OCD thoughts,' being gay is commonplace and mostly accepted. What once seemed unimaginable and shameful has been revealed to be perfectly normal.

I didn't want that 15 minutes of fame moment like, 'Oh, she said she was gay.'

I watched a million coming-out videos, and that was kind of how I accepted it myself.

If I was gay, why would I hide it?

On 'Glee,' we often tackle the tough topics that young people face - in fact, my recurring character, Wade 'Unique' Adams, is a transgender teenager who finds herself navigating a lot of the same problems many young people face around the globe.

I wouldn't want to lose out on my macho action movie just because I told people I was queer.

A lot of straight people think I'm nuts.

It's of very little importance to me that I was born gay. It doesn't make me a better athlete, it doesn't make me a stronger person, it doesn't really do anything to enhance my life. It's just something I was born with, the same as green eyes.

Some people have a desire to be with the same sex. But that's them.

There's so much bullying with young people and them feeling like they can't come out, and they don't know what to do. And it's something that you have to work through. And, you know, for me, it was - I came out, and then I went back in for a minute. And then I came out, and I was like, 'You know what? This is who I am.'