Andrew Solomon Quotes

I graduated from high school in '62 and I didn't know any people who were gay. I'm sure there were people, but I didn't know any. For years and years, I guess, I was very uptight about being a gay actor. I thought it would make me less hirable.

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

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.

I feel very fortunate that while I had a little bit of personal panic or maybe a little internal struggle as a teenager, really coming to terms with the fact that I was gay, and also knowing I was going to have to tell my family. And, how was that going to affect things? And would it affect things? And ultimately, it did not.

For some reason, I was deeply ashamed of the theater early on. I think it had to do with this growing sense I was gay, although I couldn't have put a word to it back then.

I used to be scared of people thinking I was gay but now I'd be shocked if they didn't.

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.

For me, as a kid, I always felt like being gay was something that was going make people turn on me.

If I was gay, there would be no closet. You would never see the closet I came out of. Why? Because I'd have burned it for kindling by the time I was twelve... If I was gay, at this stage of the game?age 37, aging alternative icon?I'd be taking out ads.

I remember stepping off and thinking that it might not be a good idea to let anyone know that I'm a homosexual, which is hilarious because I'm probably the gayest man I know. I had these huge dreams and they came to fruition so quickly.

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.

The most important thing for me was to never, ever, ever deny it. But I didn't really have the courage to talk about it. I was thinking, The people who need to know I'm gay know.

All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy.

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 had a few problems. I didn't realise it until I started going to therapy. I did it for 10 years, two days a week, and pretty quickly I understood that a lot of my suffering, many of my issues, were rooted in my realising that I was gay when I was a little boy. I knew I was different. That made me very fragile.

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'm gay, and I was born this way.

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

When I was I younger I didn't want to be gay. Not because I was scared of the sexual thing; I didn't want to be a clone. Now this was in the late '70s.

I've always had tremendous support from my parents. I think there's a myth that gay people have lousy relationships with their parents. Maybe there are logical reasons for a gay person not to have a great relationship with their parents - not because there's a parent who made him gay, but just because it may be difficult to understand everything.

Maybe there are logical reasons for a gay person not to have a great relationship with their parents - not because there's a parent who made him gay, but just because it may be difficult to understand everything.

As a young girl, there were the obvious messages about what girls could and couldn't achieve. And to compound the limitations I felt being leveled upon me, I realized at the age of nine, that I was gay.

If I remember back to when I wasn't open about my sexuality, I spent a great deal of time worried about it.

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.