Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman Quotes

I've been trying to get cast as a lesbian for years.

I can't tell you why I keep getting asked to play gay characters, but I never really considered 'gay' as an adjective, as a playable thing. Maybe it's an element of the character, but it just describes a preference.

At first I was always cast as the girlfriend. It was a long time before I got to play characters who were people.

A lot of the scripts I read and the characters I get are 'the girl' in romantic films, and I don't know how comfortable I am, or the world is, with me being that.

Let's call a spade a spade: when people look at me, they say, 'Oh, she's the androgynous one.' I'll tell you what type of character I would never be offered out there: The femme fatale. Or the white-trash, heterosexual hillbilly.

When we talk about LGBT characters on TV we're talking about the entire rainbow, and that includes trans people, and that includes non-binary people, people of color, women, differently-abled people. There is so much opportunity for storytelling there, and I hope that we continue to see more of that.

I think, almost, the film industry thinks that by making gay characters super masculine, it's an attempt at saying being gay is OK if you act like straight people. I don't think we should just have gay characters who are 100 percent femme, either. I just think it's about that mix and creating more diverse gay characters.

I'm not getting into rooms for cis roles. I started my career auditioning for those roles, and then I went to play trans roles. And now, I feel boxed in.

It's a good thing to be typecast, isn't it?

I've had friends of mine say, like, they're tired of 'gayface,' and I was like, 'What's gayface?' They were like, 'It's the gay version of blackface: like, come in and be more effeminate.'

A homosexual man is a man 100 per cent. He does not need to dress homosexual.

I think we have a perception of transvestites all being the same, as one block. It's not one mass or tribe. Everybody's got a different story.

I would like to do a nice comedy/drama feature with a good part, but nobody's asked me to do a film. Maybe it's because they don't know what to do with a guy in a dress.

Being a young actor in the industry, I had a lot of people who strongly advised me to stay quiet. That was hard to live with. But I've never played a gay role before, and I didn't want to be limited by some strange perception.

I think when kids are younger, they don't have these preconceived notions of what a transsexual person is.

It would be easier for people to grasp that gender, sex, and sexual orientation are different things if we had as much imagination in real life as we do when we are making our movies.

I leave it very open because, at the end of the day, it's one of those things where I shouldn't have to reinforce and state, 'No, I'm a heterosexual' - because that's all nonsense.

Now that I'm out there and it's known that I'm trans, I think that sometimes might hinder my opportunity in snagging a big cis role.

After 'Champion,' I got like 20,000 psychopath roles! And they wanted me to strip and show my body in every film. But I have tried to balance my roles.

The thing is to convince people that a part not written for a Latina woman - or maybe not even written for a woman at all - is a female part. You convince them you can do it.

It's tough advocating for trans visibility and not being pigeonholed as just a trans actress.

I was on Instagram or something, and I checked my tagged photos, and I realized that suddenly they were all LGBT artwork. I was like, 'Oh, my God!' I had no idea. It was the first time I realized I was a figure for that community.

I do think television has really fantasized it to the point where now everyone wants a gay best friend.

In my early 20s, I set out to kind of find myself. At that time, if you were different or if you ever questioned your gender identity or sexual orientation, society kind of put you in the gay club.

I knew I had to be the gay stereotype that was on the front of the papers every day. And I did my job well. I played the game.