James McGreevey Quotes

When you're a young kid and you're gay, you're out there on your own. And you're trying to figure this thing out. And your parents typically aren't gay.

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

I started to realize I wasn't like every other boy.

'Different' is such a good word. For me, ever since I was little, I always felt that something was off. And I just didn't have the resources to - I just didn't know what it was.

As a child, recognizing my difference from other kids, I went to the local public library to try to better understand my reality. Back then, many library card catalogues didn't even list 'homosexuality' as a topic.

When I was 14, I felt very rundown; I had a home to go to, but I felt like I was 60 or something, older than I feel now. And I don't know if it's something that happens at 14, or whether it was adolescence or whether I was gay, or closeted gay, or whatever it was, I felt that.

I'm interested in telling a story about a gay man and what he's going through as an artist and as a lonely, single gay man. I want to reveal what I know about loneliness.

I came out at 17.

One of my best friends since I was eleven years old is a gay man, and I knew his struggle. It was a tough life, you not accepting yourself.

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 a lot of fear about coming out as a kid.

I was 15 years old when I came out.

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.

Even if I turned myself in, it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't make me one of them. I knew that when I got my powers, but really I knew it before then. I learned it as a child on my first day of school, on the warm rainy streets of Bangkok, and in college. If you're different you always know it, and you can't fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.

When I was 12 or 13 I already knew that I was gay. And then my interests were not conventional. So I was very different, in every sense of the word. And in an all-boys school, that's tough.

I guess I had a suspicion of it my entire life without knowing exactly what it was - knowing that there was something different about me, which I attributed to being an artist. At 11 or 12 I started sort of clarifying for myself. It took a while.

I came out when I was 17 - coming out in middle or high school is one of the most difficult things that anyone could experience. I wouldn't wish it on my enemies.

In my work with young Jewish adults in the gay community, I hear their stories of discrimination, of struggling for acceptance, of feeling invisible not for what they have done but simply for who they are.

I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am, and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self, but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.

I know growing up as a young gay person how much you hate yourself, how much you already think you're different.

Coming out involves varying degrees of difficulty that are affected by class, race, religion, and geography.

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.

There's so much bullying with young people and them feeling like they can't come out, and they don't know what to do. And it's something that you have to work through. And, you know, for me, it was - I came out, and then I went back in for a minute. And then I came out, and I was like, 'You know what? This is who I am.'

You don't walk like other boys. You don't talk like other boys. But at six, you are not thinking about your sexuality.

I've always been someone who's had to compartmentalize my life because I was in the closet, and I was in fear of outing myself. I always had so much going on in my mind and couldn't share it with anyone, so I actually feel like, now that I'm out, I have less to compartmentalize.