Roger Ross Williams Quotes

I was the first South Asian female to do comedy videos on YouTube. But at the same time, all races face their barriers, and I've learned through YouTube, if it's not race, it will be sexism, if it's not sexism, it will be homophobia. It will always be something, and all voices should be heard.

As a gay man in Hollywood, I certainly understand what it means to be in it but not of it, to be marginalized at times and kept out of certain clubs.

I'm a gay man of colour.

I make pop music. I make music that is pretty commercial. But, at the same time, I'm a minority within a minority and it can be challenging. I feel validated about what I'm doing when I meet fellow black gay men or black gay women.

I never felt welcome in the heteronormative groups.

Part of me looks at the gay movement now and worries that we're losing our individuality.

Personally speaking, growing up as a gay man before it was as socially acceptable as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated and to feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was.

Never, ever, have I felt really accepted in Hollywood.

When we talk about communities, we seldom discuss the margins. But for every person nestled comfortably in the bosom of a community, there is someone else on the outskirts, feeling ambivalent. Ambiguous. Excluded. Unwilling or unable to come more fully into the fold.

I figure this current era of history is the one with the best chance of quality of life for a black, female, disabled, middle-aged, queer person who's most comfortable not fitting in. The odds still aren't great, mind you. But I'll take my chances with the 21st century.

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 was born gay, just as I was born black.

Ironically, when I've asked my straight friends to join me in hanging a rainbow flag, they answer, 'But someone might think we're gay,' not realizing that is exactly the point. To be mistaken for the oppressed is to momentarily become the oppressed.

Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.

I can't tell you how much I love Target and Costco, that kind of culture, because it's something I never felt a part of. I've always felt like a tourist because I have never fit in anywhere.

I do feel like I'm not entirely an insider.

Those fighting to be included in the ideal of equality are not being divisive; those fighting to keep those people out are.

I super strongly identify with marginalized communities. I'm not at all religious, but I feel super, super Jewish. I can't even describe the feeling, but it actually feels really similar to being gay, the kind of kinship that you feel with the LGBTQ people. That same sense of community is there with Judaism.

I didn't quite fit in in any particular, specific way. I was a gay teenager who was into drama.

As an activist, organizer, Palestinian, and a Muslim-American woman, I have faced many obstacles in the industry I work in. I often have to fight for my seat and representation for the communities I represent.

As a gay person, I'm used to speaking on gay issues. As a black person, I'm used to speaking on black issues.

None of us live single-issue lives... That is why intersectionality is a strength, not a weakness.

The marginalization of African-Americans within their own community based on sexuality is a construct that is more complex than the idea that 'blacks just hate gays.'

I saw in my life what pushed a lot of people to drugs was being an outcast to society, so being gay I related to that.

The 'Perez' in me was the outsider, the Latino guy, the homosexual, the person who stuck out, and the 'Hilton' referred to Hollywood, the mainstream.