Randy Harrison Quotes

I was very surprised that for a while I could only get cast as straight. It was that way for a few years.

When I came out publicly, some photo editors had a field day searching for pictures of me with a limp wrist or some other stereotypical gay signifier - as though, after decades in the public eye, they'd suddenly come across a trove of shots where I looked like a Cher impersonator.

I think younger players probably just think they are who they are-they don't think about coming out. Unless you're number one in the world, nobody cares, usually.

A guy friend and I went to California Pizza Kitchen, and a group of pretty girls came over to us and said, 'You guys are gay, right?'

I've been trying to get cast as a lesbian for years.

I wouldn't want to lose out on my macho action movie just because I told people I was queer.

When I was a kid, and I was odd, the default assumption was that I was odd, not that I was gay. Now when a kid is odd in a Greensburg, gay or straight, the default assumption is gay.

A lot of straight people think I'm nuts.

Americans don't want cowboys to be gay.

If you play a gay role, it sticks more than it does if an actor were to play a murderer or a psychopath.

Being a young actor in the industry, I had a lot of people who strongly advised me to stay quiet. That was hard to live with. But I've never played a gay role before, and I didn't want to be limited by some strange perception.

When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said - and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded - 'It's like hair color. It's nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It's not a subject.' This was a very healthy attitude.

I don't think there is a guy that played more gay characters than I have done in my life.

That was very difficult for me on 'American Idol' to feel like I had to be a certain way. It wasn't that the producers were saying that you shouldn't be gay or whatever, but there was this unspoken energy around saying you have to appeal to Middle America, and Middle America at that point was not ready for all that.

I feel like I've been observed as an individual more than a gay person, or as a filmmaker with a certain point of view rather than a lesbian filmmaker with a gay point of view.

After that, I was offered lots of lesbian roles, but I didn't want them because I'd already played the best there was.

I don't think any gay dude is gangsta, period.

I think it was hard for people to cast me as an ethnic, as an Asian American woman.

My sexuality has never been a problem to me but I think it has been for other people.

It is a little scary to go across the whole country, and basically the world, and be like, 'What's up? I'm gay, and you should let me get married everywhere.' I don't feel like I'm a spokesperson. I just sing what my experience is.

Even now, there are young actors who want careers as romantic leading men, and the best thing is not to reveal you're gay.

Coming out involves varying degrees of difficulty that are affected by class, race, religion, and geography.

I wanted so badly to be straight like my friends. But I couldn't change it any more than I could change having brown eyes. And I knew I would never fit into what kids thought was normal.

I grew up in a conservative small town, and the gay characters I saw on TV and in movies when I was growing up were all flamboyant and obnoxious and sometimes kind of annoying.

It's of very little importance to me that I was born gay. It doesn't make me a better athlete, it doesn't make me a stronger person, it doesn't really do anything to enhance my life. It's just something I was born with, the same as green eyes.