Queer Narratives Quotes

A lot of artists I like end up being queer. Or maybe it's a subconscious thing that you can identify of, like, 'Oh this person understands the nuances of the romantic narrative of a queer person, or the social narrative of a queer person.' And then you discover, lo and behold that they are a queer person.

It's important to tell queer stories and to show queer relationships in a very normal setting.

I wrote 'Redefining Realness' because not enough of our stories are being told, and I believe we need stories that reflect us so we don't feel so isolated in our apparent 'difference.'

I think that there are all these amazing figures in our history - the Bowies, the Tina Turners, the Chers, the people who are, in many ways, genderless or represent 'the other' - and I want pop music, and other queer artists - Kehlani, Perfume Genius - these people are bringing queer narratives into people's minds.

What I would love is for a normalization of queer characters on TV.

I would like to tell stories through the lens of the gay person, but not just for gay people.

By the time I finished 'Poison,' the New Queer Cinema was branded, and I was associated with this. In many ways, it formed me as a filmmaker, like as a feature filmmaker I never set out to be.

A lot of queer characters get painted with either a caricature brush, or they're used to teach, in a way.

I knew that I wanted to primarily play queer characters.

I hope 'Hellcat' is picked up again in years to come by people who realize just how queer it is: not just in its characters but its sensibility.

It is very, very important that people understand that you can tell different kinds of stories, and they do, related to gay and lesbian issues - especially when you know the people behind them.

Coming of age as a young queer man of color, it was a rarity to see any reflections of myself portrayed in mainstream media. Turning on the television or going to the movies was an escape into the imagination, yet it did not allow me a place of true connection to what I was viewing on the screen in front of me.

I personally always have a hard time relating to queer characters in media because I didn't really see myself in them. They were kind of pigeonholed early on as the gay character, and they would naturally end up with the other gay character who would emerge at some point as their love interest.

A lot of times, gay characters are represented in unrealistic or stereotypical ways.

For me, it's very important that shows about gay people are messy and complicated and are truthful about what we do.

If you were to turn on the TV in 1986, '87, you wouldn't see anybody having, I guess, a low-to-middle-income person of color experience. And you definitely wouldn't have a young LGBT person or their story told. The experience of being invisible in our culture has ramifications that I don't think any of us can really understand.

I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.