Leslie Jordan Quotes

My depression at the end of Wham! was because I was beginning to realise I was gay, not bi.

I spent 24 years in the closet wanting to talk so desperately about who I was and what I am but too afraid to.

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.

I knew I was gay when I was around 13. There wasn't the internet, there weren't support groups, AIDS was everywhere. I mean, it was really dark.

Just as I love women, I love gay men. I always say it: inside me there is a gay man who wants to come out.

And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about.

I got into my first serious relationship with a man when I was twenty-three. I had, before that, sort of a typical, sad history of relatively promiscuous sexual encounters with men I didn't know, because I felt that if I were involved with people I did know, other people would know that I was gay, and it was something that I needed to keep so secret.

When I remember how unhappy I was in adolescence - about the fact that, though I wasn't really using the term to or for myself, I knew that I was gay - I think, "Oh, if someone then could have shown me just an hour in the life that I have now, I would have made it through all of that misery and despair just fine." The pain lay in thinking that I had a desolate future.

I realized I was gay when I was a teenager and I couldn't imagine what it meant to be a gay adult. I just did the next thing that seemed right, and that led me from activism to media to the kind of media I'm in now. But I like where I've ended up.

Honestly, I never needed a mask to go onstage. It was me who was there, and it was always what I felt, based on what I had learned at home, in my religion, and from society. I clung to that: 'This is me, it has to be me.' And if I had an encounter with someone of the same sex, I looked away.

And I was ashamed of myself for feeling like I had to do that in order to look a certain way. I felt misshapen, just not natural anymore. And I think it was a big stimulator of my drug use.

I don't think closeted homosexual morticians have the market cornered on self-loathing or sense of shame.

I had a few problems. I didn't realise it until I started going to therapy. I did it for 10 years, two days a week, and pretty quickly I understood that a lot of my suffering, many of my issues, were rooted in my realising that I was gay when I was a little boy. I knew I was different. That made me very fragile.

And I've known people who came out with a sense of torture.

I've been living with anxiety much, much, much longer than I've been with living with alcoholism, that's for sure. I already knew from the sheer numbers and all the data that I'm not alone. I mean, the biggest mistake I did was spending most of my life thinking I was the only person who felt this way.

I am an alcoholic. It took me a long time to admit that to myself. It took me a long time to admit it to my family, but I am.

For some reason, I was deeply ashamed of the theater early on. I think it had to do with this growing sense I was gay, although I couldn't have put a word to it back then.

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.

Being gay and coming up in New Orleans was not easy. At first I was very terrified and very timid.

I've always been someone who's had to compartmentalize my life because I was in the closet, and I was in fear of outing myself. I always had so much going on in my mind and couldn't share it with anyone, so I actually feel like, now that I'm out, I have less to compartmentalize.

What love life? I'm not gay, but I might as well be.

One of my best friends since I was eleven years old is a gay man, and I knew his struggle. It was a tough life, you not accepting yourself.

I want to continue to use my platform to tell my story to let young people that are struggling with their sexuality or identity know they are not alone, and it will get better.

I was fat and ugly and never 'wanted to hook up - for a gay guy that's unheard of. I was like a monk or a priest.

I think as a gay person, there was no way in my generation to not grow up with shame and a sense of being wrong. It was impossible to avoid. Externally, you might make choices that are very public and very open but internally that was a struggle.