Todd Haynes Quotes

There were interesting ways that queerness could hide out and get played out pre-Stonewall. It is part of a vast history that is getting forgotten quickly as we trumpet forward into gay marriage and gays in the military and a much different cultural attitude toward gay lives.

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.

When I grew up, there were no songs about gay people.

I think it's interesting: What is the generational effect of the experience of being a gay person in America? For my generation, it was very difficult.

When 'Drag Race' first began, it seemed like a fun window into an underground culture, but over the nine years it has aired, the show has evolved to reflect America's changing relationship to queer rights and acceptance.

I've always been a huge 'Divine' fan. He was so iconic and so ground-breaking, especially for the time that he was around, because he was not only breaking barriers in the regular world, just being openly gay, but in the drag world as well.

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

I think artists are scared to have same-gendered pronouns in their writing, and I don't think it's because they're scared to be out, because gay artists are visible, but they don't want to alienate an audience.

I'm as heterosexual as any person need be. I'm open about my relationships - or lack thereof - in my own life, because I want to make the case that gay isn't contagious. It's not something that you can catch or learn or choose.

Without community events like NewFest, I don't think we'd have a queer cinema in America.

I didn't know Charlie before doing the movie, but I was a huge fan of the British Queer as Folk.

My films might have been queer - because I was - but they were not gay.

The public has always had affection for gay entertainers. The time was right for an out gay entertainer.

Gay culture is in a coming-out process of its own. From out of the closets in the '60s, the culture moved onto the disco floors of the '70s and through the hospital wards of the '80s and onwards to the streets.

Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.

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

Lesbian humor isn't trying to sell anything, it doesn't have to sell out. Coming out as a lesbian onstage is still a very political act; if it weren't, more women would do it.

Part of the new morality of the '60s and '70s is a new attitude toward homosexuality. The homosexual men and women have organized to fight for acceptance and respectability.

Unlike people of my generation, my children and my grandchildren have grown up living with, knowing, people who were outwardly gay and lesbian. And they have learned that they're just like us... And when you see that they're just like us, the rationale for discrimination melts away.

By the time I finished 'Poison,' the New Queer Cinema was branded, and I was associated with this. In many ways, it formed me as a filmmaker, like as a feature filmmaker I never set out to be.

Queerness isn't just Lady Gaga and overpriced drinks and fauxhawks. It's James Baldwin and Bea Arthur and Gertrude Stein and Gore Vidal.

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

As an actor, it was important to me to play gay characters because, growing up, it was something I never really saw done on television and in film, and I was questioning why there weren't more people like me.

Gay Africans must speak up and let everyone know they are there, they have always been there, and that they are not going away.

Shows like 'Empire'... one of the most profound powerful things is that there's a gay male character who is loved. That character is going to save a lot of people's lives. Black families are confronting the idea that a gay black character can be human.