Mary Lambert Quotes

I was raised thinking I'd burn in hell for being gay, but I didn't have a choice. It's just who I am.

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.

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.

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.

The gay thing has always been hard for me.

I came to realize, along with being attracted to girls, I had similar feelings for boys. All the people close to me have known for years who I am. Yet it took time to embrace that other part of who I always was.

I've been uncomfortable dealing with my identity since I was 16 years old.

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 was conveniently bisexual for a long time, and then I went, 'Come on, who am I kidding?' And I have to say, it was the single biggest step I took toward emotional well-being, to stop feeling like I had to hide who I am.

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

In the early '90s, I wrote a play called 'Word of Mouth' in which I played a number of different characters. One was a thirteen-year-old boy who, through a series of diary entries, realizes that he's gay.

Realizing I was gay was a long sort of waking up.

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.

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 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 was homophobic because I obviously didn't know that I was gay.

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.

I didn't happen to be one of those gay kids who knew definitively by the time I was 13.

It was my own internalised homophobia. I didn't want to be gay.

There are a lot of coming out videos of people who are gay or lesbian, and they're so confident. But it made me cry because I'm not that. I don't know who I am 100 percent.

I do wish, when I was younger, that I knew that I was gay. It would have made things a lot clearer for me. Really. Looking back on it, it was so obvious, but it never really dawned on me. Socially, I felt like I didn't know how to be and who to be. If I had known back then, it would have given me more self-confidence.

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 had told one of my friends that I felt like I might be gay or that I just wasn't into girls, and I was abandoned.

When you're young and queer and closeted, you can end up in this place where you regard your straight peers as the enemy.