Thom Gunn Quotes

Is the mainstream becoming more queer? Or is it the opposite? That artists like me are mainstreaming queer music?

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.

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

I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.

What I would love is for a normalization of queer characters on TV.

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.

I personally always have a hard time relating to queer characters in media because I didn't really see myself in them. They were kind of pigeonholed early on as the gay character, and they would naturally end up with the other gay character who would emerge at some point as their love interest.

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.

I love St. Vincent. She is like our queer rock goddess and that's so needed.

I think the earnestness of what we're saying and what other bands like us are totally saying - or other queer bands - is 'We exist.'

A lot of artists I like end up being queer. Or maybe it's a subconscious thing that you can identify of, like, 'Oh this person understands the nuances of the romantic narrative of a queer person, or the social narrative of a queer person.' And then you discover, lo and behold that they are a queer person.

It's important to tell queer stories and to show queer relationships in a very normal setting.

The stories I grew up with, whether it came to queer representation or representation of anyone that was different, it was always a story of, like, very sad, usually ended up with somebody dying, and it made the idea of being queer or different really scary, actually.

We need a lot more visibility of queer people in public life. People gotta get used to it.

I hope 'Hellcat' is picked up again in years to come by people who realize just how queer it is: not just in its characters but its sensibility.

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

I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.

Early on, after gay liberation, there was an almost Stalinist pressure from gay critics and even gay readers to write about positive role models. We were never supposed to write negative things about gays, or else we were seen as collaborating with the enemy.

When I was growing up, we didn't have 'Will & Grace.' The one gay character was Monroe from 'Too Close For Comfort' - and he wasn't even gay! At least they didn't say he was. Same with Mr. Furley from 'Three's Company.' You know, these were the characters that people would always make fun of.

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.

It's true that 'Lords of the Sith' has a lesbian character. Her orientation is a characteristic in the same way as is her brunette hair. It just fit with my conception of her.

A lot of queer characters get painted with either a caricature brush, or they're used to teach, in a way.

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.

Drag is never going to be completely mainstream because it's still a queer art form.