You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.
I went to Berlin for a year and a half, and that's where I learned about culture and art and everything. Before that, I lived in total absence of culture. I come from a house where there was nothing like reading or art.
Growing, up I didn't really have anyone to look up to. There weren't a lot of Mexicans on T.V. except for those in boxing.
I'm so voracious with books, movies, TV, and I'm always interested in the way that different cultural values are presented or, in their absence, are present.
Growing up, I never saw Asian-Americans on TV at all.
When I was in school, I didn't get exposed to Latino playwrights.
When people are deprived of a sense, their other senses get heightened. If you're culturally devoid of something - of weather, of artistry, of interesting architecture, all the way down the line to culture itself - you're either forced to give in and get that car dealership, or you manufacture those things for yourself.
Part of my struggle with being gay was that a lot of my homophobia was internalized because of the cues that I was - received. I didn't see anybody like myself in the culture. RuPaul was the closest to a gay, out black man that I had growing up.
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
I know when I was growing up in New York, whenever I turned on the television, I never saw a face that looked like me. Whenever there was an Asian person on television, it would be a huge event, me calling to my older sister 'There's an Asian person on television!' It was unheard of back then.
I grew up accepting that my nationality was not depicted on TV or film. To be honest, it was something I didn't acknowledge as a kid. But once I realized my love for acting and the possibility of pursuing a career in it, I quickly noticed the absence of Asians in general and thought, 'Well, I'm gonna try to change that.'
We moved up to Oregon when I was eight, and I think the radical absence of Jewish life here might have strangely made me feel more Jewish. It's a contextual thing I guess.
There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics.
Now we're getting a whole generation of kids who have never had a football team in L.A., so they don't miss it and don't ask for it. It becomes self-perpetuating. They don't know what they're missing.
