Audre Lorde Quotes

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 felt very isolated with my identity virtually my entire life, that nobody really got it and that I didn't really have the personal agency to express it.

I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am a nothing because I fit in no category. I can only be me.

Coming out was painful, but life got so much better for me.

I realize it's a cliche, almost, that coming out of the closet is a very healthy and empowering thing to do, but for me, it really has been a truly wonderful thing.

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.'

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.

When I was a kid, dealing with trying to discover myself, I didn't have anybody to talk to. I didn't have any Internet and didn't have any friends. You felt very alone and very frightened.

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.

Gay men have to go through something to own their - who they are. They get beat up. They get ostracized. Whatever they go through, if they survive it, they come out very confident people.

Even though I was manically overachieving and involved in everything, I still never felt like I belonged. That's definitely affected my whole life and why I wanted to become an actor and tell people stories, because communication and feeling like you belong is such an integral part of our social fabric.

I wouldn't want them to feel lonely or outcast ever in any way. And no matter where they were in the world, I'd want them to always feel incredibly confident about who they were and proud.

Nowadays, if somebody in America is feeling alone and wants to find a coming out story, they just search 'coming out,' and they'll find millions of first-person examples of people telling their story.

I knew I was different when I was about six years of age but I just knew that I wasn't like everybody else. I mean I wasn't like the other kids. I didn't know what that was. But I guess it was when I was in seventh or eighth grade, I'm like, 'Hey, something's wrong here.'

I think if I had seen more people like me who are out and proud, it wouldn't have taken me 45 years to say it - to walk in the truth.

I was so beat down as a young person - being black, being gay, being unable to assimilate because I could never, ever pull off being butch.

I wore the hijab - a form of dress that comprises a head scarf and usually also clothing that covers the whole body except for the face and hands - for nine years. Put more honestly, I wore the hijab for nine years and spent eight of them trying to take it off.

Being down makes you think who you are.

I know what it's like to be young and to feel like you don't belong.

Over the years I've realised that there's nothing wrong with me. But there was a long way for me to go to get back to this loud and outgoing kid, and to get to the point where I could say, 'Yeah, I'm gay, so what?'

As someone who was once in the closet, I can tell you it is the most sad, dark, awful, depressing place to ever be.

So my reason for doing drag, at first it was because I wanted to express this thing I had kind of stored deep down inside of me and now that I've let this thing loose, this monster out into the world and I kind of got that out of my system now.

When I first came out, holidays were hard. I reached a point where I didn't go home anymore. I constructed my own, kind of like, family group around Christmas.

Give yourself permission to enjoy being gay. You do have to give yourself permission. You have been told you may not. Give yourself permission to be free.

There is nothing to talk about" she said. "I'm just a freak that's all.