Emma Donoghue Quotes

As an actor, it was important to me to play gay characters because, growing up, it was something I never really saw done on television and in film, and I was questioning why there weren't more people like me.

As a fan of the franchise, I count myself among the countless LGBTQ fans who have longed to see themselves and our relationships depicted on 'Star Trek.'

Coming of age as a young queer man of color, it was a rarity to see any reflections of myself portrayed in mainstream media. Turning on the television or going to the movies was an escape into the imagination, yet it did not allow me a place of true connection to what I was viewing on the screen in front of me.

The more queer characters I play over my years of working as an actor, and the more I see other young artists stepping up with the same intention I have, to make space for the voices of a generation of people who may not fit the status-quo, the more it inspires me to keep going.

I feel like we need to create more roles that give LGBTQ people the opportunity to be on screen.

I don't think I've ever used the word 'gay rights,' because I don't really believe in rights based on your behavior.

When I was growing up I didn't know what it meant to be a happy, successful grown-up gay person, and now I do. I feel like I'm setting an example for people everywhere.

When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.

The media has gone through lots of things that make it a less foreign thing to have your lead character be gay.

The mainstream needs Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O'Donnell. The mainstream needs RuPaul.

I think there is much more queer visibility than there was when I was a kid. There is marriage, more trans visibility, and many more celebrities who are open about the sexuality. This was so not the case when I was a kid.

What I would love is for a normalization of queer characters on TV.

Shouldn't you be able to tell your stories from your point of view? We're dealing with that with 'Looking' where some queers are like, 'These guys are so boring! They don't represent me!' But no show can represent everything, so is it OK for us, in 'Looking,' to write about these three men and their world?

I personally always have a hard time relating to queer characters in media because I didn't really see myself in them. They were kind of pigeonholed early on as the gay character, and they would naturally end up with the other gay character who would emerge at some point as their love interest.

A lot of queer characters get painted with either a caricature brush, or they're used to teach, in a way.

I hope we see more avenues for representation. More TV shows and films starring queer people, especially QPOC and nonbinary folks, more mainstream press coverage of our artwork and fashion, and more representation of our interests within politics.

After the 'Fallon' set, I had a lot of queer people message me about how much it meant to see a queer perspective on late night TV.

The fact that I'm able to portray these complex, fully realized, queer Asian characters? I never thought it would be in this position. You just never see those types of characters and that type of representation.

I think that there's not always been queer person of color representation in pop and so I'm making the most of it because that is who I am.

Part of my struggle with being gay was that a lot of my homophobia was internalized because of the cues that I was - received. I didn't see anybody like myself in the culture. RuPaul was the closest to a gay, out black man that I had growing up.

I would definitely love to see a queer rom-com because representation matters. It does so much to help normalize things in the mind of society.

So much of what I do is inspired by and for the LGBTQ community and for everyone but, just, being a theater kid and wanting to do stuff that represents us in a positive light.

Without a conscious effort, all of my plays have all featured gay characters. I'm proud of that.

Being 'out and proud' can feel like a real luxury of Western culture, where people are often white and see existing white gay people in their culture. That's a kind of privilege people don't know they possess.

It's important to be able to have representation for black queer women, because I feel like there's not much representation for them in the mainstream.