Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman Quotes

I had no interest in being your basic vanilla girl. I've been lucky enough that I haven't had to play that.

I think it would be a lot easier if I said, 'I feel like a dude,' but I was raised by a southern mom, so I know how to put on lipstick and walk in heels and rock that look. It's exactly that juxtaposition that confuses people.

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

I was born and raised in Manhattan; I didn't realize that I, in all my androgyny, was a freak to the rest of this country.

In school, I really felt like I didn't fit a type. I think everybody had a hard time putting me in a category. They all sort of realized, 'Hmm, you don't really look like a soprano. You're not really a character belter.'

Everyone is being told by society to talk this way, to dress that way, to be this person or to be that person, and it's so important to just maintain a sense of self.

I couldn't put into a capsule one thing that represents me, I don't think.

I wholeheartedly rejected anything remotely feminine but was not enthusiastic about anything masculine, either. I did not want to cook and have babies, and I did not want to be an engineer or a baseball player or a soldier or a politician or any of the myriad careers open mostly or solely to men. I wanted to be a poet.

I just wanted to kind of break down those gender stereotypes and just say everyone's equal, everyone's their own person, everyone's their own individual.

There's something to be said for any boy growing up among lots of other boys who like to play basketball and football, while all I wanted to do was put on musicals. Mentally, I was always in my own world.

The people that have inspired me the most were dancers and choreographers. Even growing up, if I dealt with any pressure to be a certain way, I knew that as an artistic lane, dancing was the one that was a little more freed up - like, no one in my family is really doing that; I can be that person.

Embrace what makes you unique, even if it makes others uncomfortable.

I was just very into things that were the opposite of what other people liked. I didn't want to listen to music that I could find at a friend's house. My identity was really forged around that, and you know, eventually that kind of identity gets dismantled and fed to the vultures. But I was somehow on my own mission.

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

I wasn't interested in going to the school dances. I wasn't interested in going to the football games. What I wanted was to be in my room painting my walls and doing weird stuff. That's what I wanted and I got to do what I wanted, so that, to me, is my high school experience.

It's been helpful to have so many opportunities to look different so people stop pigeonholing you.

In my planet, fashion, I'm the only straight man.

I've noticed that most people tend to go through life preserving their differences from others.

If you act weird, people are going to treat you weird, but if you're just yourself, people respond to that.

I grew up with my cousins, who were as close as brothers, and frankly, I didn't like what girls were expected to do. I liked horseback riding, playing football, going to rodeos. I wanted to be in jeans all the time, and I couldn't figure out why I was supposed to conform to a certain standard, so I didn't.

Normality is to be different. Every person is a different person. And one day you need to be aware of your difference. Aware that you are not the same as the others. That is to be normal.

I want to be remembered as somebody that tried to respect her integrity as an artist and as a person. And I don't want to be in any box. I don't want to be one thing.

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

I'm feminine, but I wouldn't say that I'm girly in any way at all.