Mary Gaitskill Quotes

It took me a long time to realize that being a girl is so much more powerful than being a guy, but I really saw myself as boy for a long while.

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.

As a little kid, I was convinced that I was a guy.

I grew up in a family where many of our close friends were gay couples. As well as that, every man goes through a period of thinking they're attracted to another guy.

In terms of sexual orientation I don't really feel I've changed. I don't feel there was a hidden part of my sexuality that I wasn't aware of. I'd been with men all my life, and I'd never fallen in love with a woman. But when I did, it didn't seem so strange.

You don't walk like other boys. You don't talk like other boys. But at six, you are not thinking about your sexuality.

I was born a girl; it just took me a little while to become one fully.

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.

I spent so many years not understanding my own gender identity and not having the language for it, and not having those conversations, that now I'm so eager to talk about it. Then I learn more about myself and other people.

I originally thought I'd grow up to be a woman. I didn't question that when I was little.

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.

Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you.

I'm not looking for a boyish girl. I'm looking for a boy. And I'm not looking for a girlish boy either.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a boy. I really had gender issues. I really thought I was supposed to be a boy. I used to sneak into my dad's room and put on a suit, drink a cocktail, and pretend to smoke a cigarette.

As a kid, I wanted to be a boy because I equated that with strength. There's a problem with that. It's only growing into my own womanhood that I realize how warped that is that I was attributing strength to male qualities.

I'm very comfortable with being a female now but when I was a little kid I only wanted to be a boy. I didn't want to be a girl. I didn't feel like a man inside... being a boy was just cooler.

Race I've been studying since I knew there was a problem with race and that I was Black and something was wrong. Gender, is very new to me. All I can say is this is something that I'm going to take hold of and pray about it.

I, Binyavanga Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a homosexual since I was five.

Discovering I'm gay just sort of happened much later in life.

I guess I had a suspicion of it my entire life without knowing exactly what it was - knowing that there was something different about me, which I attributed to being an artist. At 11 or 12 I started sort of clarifying for myself. It took a while.

Not only am I physically and emotionally attracted to women, I also wonder what being a woman would be like.

I think we won't be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don't understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality.

I think once I was in high school - I had boyfriends and stuff like that, but I think when I was younger, I went through a period where I looked like a boy, and people thought I was a boy.

We learn our sexual preferences and orientations.

As a result of 50 years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits... the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied.