Jenna Wortham Quotes

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

Although drag has a long cultural history in America, it remained largely underground till the late 1980s.

What we do is provide a suggestion. We say, 'We're queer. We're going to do this; we're going to open up the space to queer thought.' People don't have to show up, but they do.

Pop music has a pretty good track record of embracing queer culture.

There are a lot of queers starved for entertainment from their own community.

I have put gay dating on the map.

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

One result of An American Family was that I became a gay role model.

It's not being marketed as a gay show by a gay person. It's just Ellen DeGeneres.

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.

'The L-Word' was such a great show because of the amazing writing and characters, but maybe because it was such a new concept, people couldn't pick up on it, but I think it was down to the dynamic characters and how well done it was.

I will talk to people who say they loved 'Tales of the City' or 'Far and Away' or 'Love and Human Remains' or 'Barcelona.'

I'm really into gay stuff getting funded: having it be on TV and having a show.

Everyone who passes through 'Drag Race,' and especially the people who are able to have really big careers after the show, has a responsibility to the queer community to do a good job of representing queer people across the board to be kind and loving.

Sometimes you have to see the thing to know that it exists. Maybe there's a queer person in a town, but they don't feel comfortable or safe coming out, frankly, and the only representation they feel that they have or connection they have is on television or in a movie, and that's really powerful.

I love that drag is political. For me, one of the reasons I started doing drag was reading about how in the past, drag performers were able to organize the queer community and move us forward.

People often ask me why I choose to primarily play queer characters, and my answer is that as a queer man, I choose to align myself with projects in which I can be of service for a purpose greater than myself: to be for an audience of queer people of color, something I didn't have the privilege of seeing as a young man.

After the 'Fallon' set, I had a lot of queer people message me about how much it meant to see a queer perspective on late night TV.

We encrypt 'Drag Race' with the secret language that kept gay people linked for many years before the '80s.

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

Historically a publicly unaccepted but incredibly rich culture, queer love was only able to exist privately for a long time, expressed in society through coded art forms.

The audience of 'Drag Race' and the fans of drag queens are often very surprising.

Unfortunately, a lot people still don't understand queer culture.

I'm not like a gay icon or America's gay sweetheart. I'm just America's sweetheart, and I'm just an icon.