Ira Sachs Quotes

My brother had the courage to come out in 1978, when equality was still a distant dream.

If you look at the history of the LGBTQ community, from my perspective growing up as I did in the U.K. in the '50s, there was just terrible, terrible discrimination, you know? It was extremely difficult to live your life as you should have been allowed to do.

I now realize that I am a gay man before anything else. Other gays may think they're a Jew first, or black, or a banker, but I'm gay.

It's going to take generations of gay people marrying before these things start to feel natural. We haven't had it long enough to remake it as our own, so it does feel like you're getting dressed up in straight drag to do it.

My kind of gay, meeting a woman and falling in love, is a different experience because it wasn't anything about 'Oh, I've always been gay and I'm breaking the chains.'

Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?

If what you want is a life where your homosexuality is not an issue, move, as many have done.

Imagine trying to be a gay actor, a gay anything in modern Russia? Where to be positively oneself, to be affectionate in public with someone you love of the same gender, or to talk of that love in the hearing of anyone under 18, will put you prison?

When my brother-in-law, BIll Clinton, was elected, he had gay friends. That was a coming out.

I'm on the younger end of Gen X, and for me, growing up gay was not cool.

There are still parts of the country where it's hard: when you realize you're gay, it's like a death sentence.

The term 'new queer cinema' and the films of mine that were associated with that term are from a very, very different time, one almost entirely defined by the AIDS era. It was a very different social and cultural regard for the lives, the experiences, the worth of gay people.

I do have a lot of gays in my family now, but some will never come out.

Early on, I got some criticism from other gay writers and queer theorists for being too 'assimilationist,' probably because my characters are outsiders, even in the gay world.

I grew up in a time where there were no queer digital references.

The thing about gay people is that until we come out of the closet, we're always protecting other people: 'I can't do this, because it's gonna hurt so-and-so.' We're trying to live the lives of other people, and that's the worst thing you can do.

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.

To me, it's mind-boggling to think that homosexuality was forbidden up until 1967.

I knew I was gay since, like, fifth grade.

Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.

Part of me looks at the gay movement now and worries that we're losing our individuality.

I've had letters from people who have read my articles and said, 'I'm a guy, I'm 18, and I've not come out to my mom and dad yet, but it was so nice to hear your story, and you know, I wish your article would have been longer, because you gave me hope for the future.'

It's ridiculous that people aren't allowed to love who they love, have families, and have the same life as straight people. It's infuriating.

When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.

My being gay was something of not great interest to me.