Joe Mantello Quotes

I knew that I was gay, I knew it. I just couldn't see myself as a gay woman, even though that's where my heart was.

I am camp. Lots of gay men can't cope with their campness. They are in denial about it.

I thought about being gay, but it didn't fit.

When I realised that I had feelings for men as well as women, at first I was worried and frightened, and there was a certain amount of 'Who am I? Am I a criminal?' and so on. It took me a long time to come to terms with myself. Those were painful years - painful then and painful to look back on.

Says he, 'I am a handsome man, but I'm a gay deceiver'.

I was a closet straight. I think I wanted to be gay because I thought it was arty and interesting. And also, I was phenomenally shy with girls.

I was a gay kid who didn't know I was a gay kid, which was really challenging because you think there is something wrong with you until you understand what it is.

What love life? I'm not gay, but I might as well be.

Any gay man in America redeals a deck at some point.

Being gay facilitated my capacity for shame. As a child, I carried around this thing that gradually became this big dark secret. When I came out in a newspaper interview at 30 I was expecting the reaction the following day to be like the climax of 'Dead Poets Society,' but actually no one really cared.

As young as 10 I started fancying boys. It's a common experience but I just wished I wasn't gay up until the age of 18 or 19.

My depression at the end of Wham! was because I was beginning to realise I was gay, not bi.

I didn't know what gay was. There was no such thing when I was growing up. I knew I had crushes on boys, but I didn't think there was anything wrong with that until I started to hear about it from the other kids in school.

I'm a lesbian. Yup. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. I remember being in college, and I had fallen in love with this woman, and I remember sitting in my dorm room saying out loud to myself, like, 'You have enough problems. You are not gonna let this happen.'

All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.

I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.

I justified it in so many ways. I had a very, very long and difficult struggle with my sexuality.

What's it like to figure out you're gay and then begin the process of coming out? Well, for most of my life, I felt doomed. I could imagine no path that would allow me to realize my authentic self. I felt the need to lie, even to myself, insisting: I am straight.

Every man goes through a period of thinking they're attracted to another guy.

If I were gay, life would be a lot simpler. I'm kind of annoyed that I'm not.

I'm not sure when I first knew that I was gay.

Finding out that I was gay when I was older was a shock and a disappointment.

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.'

The truth is, I probably would be dead if I had become a star, because at that point I was so closeted and so afraid of people of finding out I was gay. There was no telling what would have happened.

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.