Janet Mock Quotes

If you never, or rarely, see your experience depicted in art or pop culture then you can begin to feel isolated or separate; Othered. So, representation is super important.

I think it's important for not just me but women of color, trans women, and people who are marginalized to be telling stories of themselves. It's important for us to be behind the lens.

I think a lot of what I've done is about people feeling as if they are part of the world but also not part of it at the same time. I don't know whether that's from being a gay kid, but I definitely think that resonates with me.

I grew up watching cinema in my country that wasn't telling stories about us, and we had to find a way to connect, and our references, our role models had nothing to do with us. And I'm so glad that it's changing.

Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.

I just want different narratives for people of color, especially women of color. I just want something that's different. I don't want us to be put in a box. I want it to be kind of a redefinition of who were are. If I can even achieve that in a tiny way, I'll be good. I'll be good.

'Essence' is political. I grew up on the magazine, looking at the covers. Seeing ourselves on the cover is political.

Let me speak for myself: I think I wanted to see people who looked like me on TV. I wanted to see people who had similar experiences as I had, growing up. There was nobody on television when I was a teenager who I could relate to.

It's hard to accept yourself when you live in a world where nobody is like you, or you feel like nobody is like you because there's no representation.

I am an 'other.' As a queer, biracial man who occupies and embodies many different intersections of 'otherness,' I've spent my entire life seeking reflections of myself in the world around me to connect and relate to.

I liked the fact that there were so many different representations of black women and black men in the movie. It wasn't like we all had the same agenda.

For me, I want to see diversity in storytelling sources because we live in a very diverse society, and the stories are for the whole society. That's really important. For me, as a female filmmaker, when I was out on the festival circuit on 2006, I felt like such a freaking anomaly - an oddity.

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.

When we talk about communities, we seldom discuss the margins. But for every person nestled comfortably in the bosom of a community, there is someone else on the outskirts, feeling ambivalent. Ambiguous. Excluded. Unwilling or unable to come more fully into the fold.

Audiences want great story telling; it's why white people watch my show 'Black in America.' It's why black people watch 'Latina in America.' All of that is statistically shown and proven but it was because it was good story telling about people who were outsiders.

If what I read doesn't reflect my life - whether I'm gay or Latino or on welfare - doesn't that really mean that my life is not valuable?

For me, disability is a physical experience, but it's also a cultural experience and a social experience, and for me, the word 'crip' is the one that best encapsulated all of that.

Socially I never was an outsider. I have never thought of the conflict element before frankly, but perhaps it was wanting to belong, and at the same time wanting to retain one's own personality.

There's drama in everything. That's why I love movies. Like 'Welcome to the Dollhouse.' I'm a 350-pound black man, and I could understand what it was like to be a little white girl.

Just by the nature of making the choice to be true to who I am, I'm political. Sometimes that's all you need to do: Show up and be black, gay and Christian in America and actually say it out loud. And refuse to let anything or anybody take that away from you.

I think Hollywood is so driven by money, the people who are making the decisions are not necessarily reflective of the melting pot, so what stories are you going to want to tell? You're going to want to tell stories about yourself.

I have found that I'm just political just by being who I am.

There is a certain danger in thinking about diversity in its own little box, as something that is somehow separate from 'normal' comic books and comics creators.

I do feel like I'm not entirely an insider.

My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.