A lot of people - boys - look at me differently. They think that if they date me, they are gay because they are dating another boy. In instances like this, I feel almost excluded, if that's the right word. I feel like I'm being put on a different shelf.
The most damaging part of pervasive bias, whether it's implicit or complicit because sometimes it can be well-intentioned, is when that bias gets internalized and women start self-centering and stop thinking that they're incapable of achieving what they want and achieve empowerment.
For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.
I have matured as a man to understand where my suspicion of women comes from and how that has everything to do with me and nothing to do with them. I have to deal with that.
I think the word 'twink' is pejorative. There's something endemic about the gay community where we praise masculinity more than anything else.
I didn't want people to know that I was an artist. I was ashamed. I thought artists were weird, crazy people, you know. So I always kind of hid the fact that I was an artist.
I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth.
Don Cornelius gave me an incredulous look regarding my accent. I lessened it; he gave a nod of approval. Instantly, I felt ashamed. I had made my first conscious effort not to sound ethnic.
It’s often said that those who are unduly bothered by gays are latent homosexuals. Isn’t it possible that people obsessed with racism are themselves racist.
The biggest change in my life is that I now have to apologize for being thin.
Whenever a journalist says to me, "Oh, you don't understand, I'm impartial, I'm objective," I know what he's saying. I can decode it immediately. It means he channels the official truth. Almost always. That protestation means he speaks for a consensual view of the establishment. This is internalized.
When I was listening in on the phone call where Andre Leon Talley was saying that he was going to get my fat, black ass on the cover of a magazine. I think that - you know, Andre Leon Talley is fat and black. And it hurt my feelings. It hurt my feelings. But it also was a lesson in this is what they think, and this is what they will always think. And there's no way of being too talented or too pretty or too confident around it. People will still have their opinions.
Things that I now recognise as just part of my personality - willfulness and assertiveness, maybe even a bit of aggressiveness - these are things that I had been raised to think of as masculine features. I always thought there was probably something wrong with me.
I knew everything a woman hated even before I remotely knew anything a woman liked.
I wanted to be pale. I didn't wanna go in the sun, because I was in school with a lot of white girls. I remember one girl said to me, 'You look better pale.' And I was like, 'Well, you're tan!' She was like, 'It's not the same.'
I hate overweight, because it implies that there's a weight standard I should be adhering to.
But you weren't born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.
I thought if I had straight hair and a perfect nose, my whole career would be different.
Obviously I probably have internalized fatphobia about myself and what the world has ingrained in us.
I'm a woman, but I've been a sexist, too.
Bisexual? Me? I don't think so. I'm pretty sure I'm not.
You feel the shame, humiliation, and anger at being just another victim of prejudice, and at the same time, there's the nagging worry that maybe... you're just no good.
I wanted my anger to be valid, and the only way to do that is to be fairly attractive.
There are some professions that culturally and sociologically take a long time to change, and because of that, there's still sexism in comedy audiences. We shouldn't blame them: I do it too. A woman comes on, and I feel slightly anxious. I'm a woman in comedy, and I do that; I think everyone does.
I feel like it's the last frontier: the weight thing with women. I think that so many women, like, even myself, I'm so mean to myself about my body sometimes, or I can be judgmental of other people for their bodies. I don't know how to get over it.
