Roy Choi Quotes

If what I read doesn't reflect my life - whether I'm gay or Latino or on welfare - doesn't that really mean that my life is not valuable?

Only a straight white person would have no concept of what visibility is. They've never contended with anything but visibility.

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

I come from a place where we feel like we're not represented in the national media.

I always prided myself on being apart from the ruling class. I think it's always important, not just in Washington but in life, to be able to able to balance your sense of belonging with what it's like to be someone who doesn't belong.

I always thought that when I got into this business that I was going to have to downplay my Asianness and downplay my queerness, which is not an easy thing for me to do.

The truth is, for me, when I was a young black girl who knew I was different, was watching TV, I would always be staring at the TV set looking for myself, and I didn't see me. And when you don't see yourself, you start to think that you don't matter, or you start to think that something is wrong with you.

If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.

Intersectionality is an analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power. Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members but often fail to represent them.

There's people who don't want to see bodies like mine or bodies like their own bodies.

Turning 50 can be difficult, sometimes dangerous, for women. The danger is in that blip that can come from the fact that you become invisible, and if you're not careful and don't embrace that, it can trip you up and you lose confidence.

I don't feel like my films are about gender; they are about identity - but a different slant on identity.

Our invisibility is the essence of our oppression. And until we eliminate that invisibility, people are going to be able to perpetuate the lies and myths about gay people.

If you're not at the table, you're on the menu.

There are all kinds of people who continue to be largely ignored by advertisers, whose lives largely go unseen. They deserve their moment.

Writing about identity can be like maneuvering through a minefield, even when considering contemporary figures who have discussed the subject themselves.

We remain the saddest little district of the world, the most miserable people of the world, losing our own persona and not being able to take on anyone else's, torn away and not accepted, alien to all and everyone, including those with whom we are most closely related, but who will not recognize us as their kin. We live on a divide between worlds, at the border between nations, always at a fault to someone and first to be struck. Waves of history strike us as a sea cliff.

The trouble with discrimination is not discrimination per se, but rather that the people who are discriminated against think of themselves as second-class.

Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.

The difficulty of being Afro-Latina, in general, is the lack of acceptance in both communities.

All of my plays are about people who have been marginalized... erased from the public record.

I've been there; I've been in the minority before. It humbles the exalted. But that's all right.

Being attracted to my own sex was as much part of who I was as being short or blonde or drawn to the library, but I was made to grow up feeling 'other.' Most books, films - even advertisements - didn't reflect how I felt, and I often watched the world from the outside.

Just speaking for myself, when I'm complimented for being Vietnamese-American in television - the only one - that doesn't make me feel happy, that makes me feel really lonely, actually.

I think the biggest thing is voice. Whose voice is it? Who gets to control the narrative?