I was born gay, just as I was born black.
I was born in that family. So I don't know the difference between born as an actor's son and not being an actor's son. I never knew whether it was good or bad.
I'm originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, and I just feel like it's something that always been inside of me.
I don't believe being gay is something you can change, no more than you can change the color of your hair or your eyes. Well, I dye my hair, so maybe that's not the best example. But your eyes!
We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we're stuck with it.
I have a relative who is also gay. We can't help it if they were born that way.
Given that sexual orientation is innate and that we are all, in theological terms, children of God, to deny access to some sacraments based on sexuality is as wrong as denying access to some sacraments based on race or gender.
I look like this for a reason. I was born this way. It was God-given.
It's something you're born with, and you realize that you're trapped in the wrong body. It's not like one day you're like, 'I want to be transgender!'
You are born modern, you do not become so.
But, the truth is that everyone is somebody already.
There are all these languages that keep people in place that conform us to a set of terms. It's why I think the whole idea of identity as something that is something of a straitjacket. That most of us like to think of as natural and innate. That we just find and go, 'Yeah, that's who I am.'
Human beings to me are as much a part of nature as trees or birds, and the unclothed body expresses this belongingness directly and powerfully.
I look at my little ones and I love them so much. I think to myself, "By God, if my son is gay, it's not that he was turned or learned into it. My son, his soul, the way he was born ... this is him.
I know that some subjective experiences of sex are very firm and fundamental, even unchangeable. They can be so firm and unchanging that we call them "innate". But given that we report on such a sense of self within a social world, a world in which we are trying to use language to express what we feel, it is unclear what language does that most effectively. I understand that "innate" is a word that conveys the sense of something hired-wired and constitutive. I suppose I would be inclined to wonder whether other vocabularies might do the job equally well.
