Dee Rees Quotes

The gay community just recognizes what their closets are and we straight have to spend years trying to figure out which closet we are trapped in.

There's so much bullying with young people and them feeling like they can't come out, and they don't know what to do. And it's something that you have to work through. And, you know, for me, it was - I came out, and then I went back in for a minute. And then I came out, and I was like, 'You know what? This is who I am.'

I had everything I'd hoped for, but I wasn't being myself. So I decided to be honest about who I was. It was strange: The people who loved me for being funny suddenly didn't like me for being... me.

My music is really about people connecting with their identities, even if they aren't Jewish.

Nowadays, if somebody in America is feeling alone and wants to find a coming out story, they just search 'coming out,' and they'll find millions of first-person examples of people telling their story.

Realizing I was gay was a long sort of waking up.

Coming out was painful, but life got so much better for me.

I watched a million coming-out videos, and that was kind of how I accepted it myself.

As a child, recognizing my difference from other kids, I went to the local public library to try to better understand my reality. Back then, many library card catalogues didn't even list 'homosexuality' as a topic.

I think if I had seen more people like me who are out and proud, it wouldn't have taken me 45 years to say it - to walk in the truth.

I'm not sure when I first knew that I was gay.

I could always escape into this demi-monde of homosexuality, which I feel really indebted to. It stopped me being a 'mummy's boy.'

I've heard other gay people say when they were growing up they felt 'foreign.' Growing up, I was able to label these feelings as: 'I'm a Protestant.' It wasn't until I left, I thought: 'Oh, those weren't Protestant feelings.'

I was a very quiet, shy child. I grew up in a small town, Louisville, Kentucky, and there weren't too many Hawaiian-Filipino girls, so I stuck out like a sore thumb. I didn't look like everyone else and didn't feel I belonged... But these things only build character and make you stronger. It taught me to grow into the woman I was to become.

My dream was, start young, take hormones, live as a woman, try and become as passable as possible, bury your past, change your friends. Now I've realised that I don't have to be ashamed of my past.

I was journaling in Florence, and I was like, 'Oh, I have to come out of the closet. I have to break up with this guy' - he was my 'roommate.' So that was my awakening moment, when I stepped into my own skin while in a foreign country by myself and had a very stereotypical moment of revelation.

Make a choice: continue living your life feeling muddled in this abyss of self-misunderstanding, or you find your identity independent of it. You push for colour-blind casting; you draw your own box. You introduce yourself as who you are, not what colour your parents happen to be.

I realized so much of my college years were spent not wanting to be gay. I just imagined how different it would be if I were going through that experience in 2016 as opposed to 1984.

In many ways, my decision to come out changed the course not only of my personal life but of my professional one as well.

I was closeted into my mid-twenties and even into my late twenties. It screwed up my relationships; it screwed up things with my family that I've since repaired.

It's important to come out to yourself first and be comfortable with it. After that, I feel it's important to surround yourself with a group of friends who support you and love you for who you are.

The process of coming out was critical to getting where we are today: coming out to our friends, our family, our co-workers, God forbid, to our clients.

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.

The first 10 years of my journey, I was still figuring out who I was, and then I had to redo it all over again when I became bigger. So instead of saying, 'I'm gay and this is me,' I started telling the story through my music.

Being gay facilitated my capacity for shame. As a child, I carried around this thing that gradually became this big dark secret. When I came out in a newspaper interview at 30 I was expecting the reaction the following day to be like the climax of 'Dead Poets Society,' but actually no one really cared.