Guillermo Diaz Quotes

I have straight married friends that other friends think are gay, and I have gay friends who don't throw that vibe at all. I know there's a full range out there, but I feel that gay men who aren't flamboyant are underrepresented on-screen.

I feel like certainly there are people expecting 'Looking' to be representative of everyone that's gay, the entire gay community. And it's a dangerous expectation to come in watching the show expecting that. Expecting that out of any show.

I do think television has really fantasized it to the point where now everyone wants a gay best friend.

A lot of times, gay characters are represented in unrealistic or stereotypical ways.

Will isn't a screaming queen - that's Jack's part. They needed someone to play the part for America. It's just not the same as Britain. To have a gay character as a lead is risky.

When I was a kid, Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O'Donnell were mere blips on the gaydar; and they were both still in the closet.

I grew up in a conservative small town, and the gay characters I saw on TV and in movies when I was growing up were all flamboyant and obnoxious and sometimes kind of annoying.

Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the part of gays to resemble their straight neighbours.

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

I won't do press anymore unless I can talk about the homophobia and let queer people know our ideas are mainstream.

There are sometimes concerns about being respectful with a gay character, and you either end up with a tiptoeing quality or an all-out cliche.

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.

If you don’t like gay marriage, blame the straight people. They are the ones who keep having the gay babies.

Male homosexuality, in particular, seems to possess some quality of being intrinsically subversive when let loose in long-established institutions, especially male dominated ones.

It's not enough for Hollywood to make a bunch of gay movies. That's obviously a big part of the equation, but then gay people have to show up for those movies.

Cogsworth, the character I did on 'Beauty and the Beast,' could be a bit flamboyant onscreen, because basically, he is a cartoon. But they didn't want Cogsworth to become Disney's gay character, because it got around a gay man was playing him.

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.

I spent the first half of my career being accused of being gay when I hadn't had anything like a gay relationship.

I'm not sure sometimes if it was because Will was gay or it was a sitcom. But that combination does make it hard to become the new lead on the 'Sopranos.'

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've had friends of mine say, like, they're tired of 'gayface,' and I was like, 'What's gayface?' They were like, 'It's the gay version of blackface: like, come in and be more effeminate.'

When I started, you couldn't do anything. A gay person trying to write a gay character in 1998 - it was so difficult.

I'd love to do a film on homosexuality. That's on my radar.

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

Gay men are still men.