Maya Angelou Quotes

I didn't even know what the word lesbian meant until I was called one... and then I had to look it up in the dictionary.

I spent years growing up being told what my sexuality was.

My dad was a very conservative Republican businessman, so obviously I considered it a problem when I realized I was a lesbian.

Lots of women don't realize that they're gay until they're grown up.

We learn our sexual preferences and orientations.

I was a lesbian for a semester at Wesleyan - it was a graduation requirement.

Around 2001, I started analyzing lesbians. I started to realize that even really butch-acting or -dressing women still had a strong female identity that I never had.

As a young girl, there were the obvious messages about what girls could and couldn't achieve. And to compound the limitations I felt being leveled upon me, I realized at the age of nine, that I was gay.

Some women can't say the word lesbian... even when their mouth is full of one.

Someone said to me a long time ago, 'You're a drag queen,' and at the time I was a little like... hello? But then I realized over the years that I actually am.

Since puberty, I've always known there was a possibility of me being with a man. It wasn't anything I felt the need to explore until the time came to explore it.

Me, I'm a lesbian: I find women fascinating.

I think sexuality, especially, is one of those fluid things where oftentimes we find who we are through certain things that happen in our lives.

I was on Instagram or something, and I checked my tagged photos, and I realized that suddenly they were all LGBT artwork. I was like, 'Oh, my God!' I had no idea. It was the first time I realized I was a figure for that community.

Being gay, you're kind of forced to ask, I suppose, very existential questions from a very, very early age. Your identity becomes so important to you because you're trying to understand it, and, I think, from the age of, like, 9, you're being forced to ask questions... that other kids maybe don't have to ask.

You're on Facebook, and you're supposed to know your sexual orientation at 13... Nobody really knows what's going on at that time, and people seem to... know stuff, or they have to act like they do, and they make decisions before they really need to.

I'd go to lesbian parties. I felt like I wasn't hard enough to be butch, but I wasn't wearing heels and a skirt - I wasn't femme - so I felt like I was sort of invisible.

The only thing I have going on at a personal level is just the way I knew I was gay and I knew what that meant inside me, but the gender aspect of who I am came later.

Lesbianism has always seemed to me an extremely inventive response to a shortage of men, but otherwise not worth the trouble.

I think there's a level at which you think that there's a reason that you're being singled out, that you're being chosen. As a kid, I was always mistaken for a girl. Before you reach that age where your sexuality starts to display itself, kids can look very androgynous, and I guess I leaned more toward the feminine. All those things were very hard, growing up, because you're trying to create an identity, and you're feeling shameful about the one that you're making. So, I identified with it a lot.

When I was a kid, I did want to be a boy. I didn't like to play with dolls, and most of my friends were kind of sensitive, sissy boys. But as I got older, the mystique of being a girl began to interest me. It was confusing what sexuality was, and the responses of other people, but it didn't make me feel terrified or vulnerable.

NOW is saying that in order to be a woman, you've got to be a lesbian.

When I was 12 or 13 I already knew that I was gay. And then my interests were not conventional. So I was very different, in every sense of the word. And in an all-boys school, that's tough.

In the 1970s, I identified as a lesbian and wrote about it. In 1991, I met the love of my life, married him.

I am a lesbian, and it was a later in life recognition of that fact.