I think I appeal to people who are living in the margins because of their identity and who need to feel freedom somewhere.
If you’re a songwriter, you want to write a song like “Oh Yeah” that radically shifts everything. You can definitely retire on that song. You want to have something you can put in your songbook that everybody can recognize, whether it’s a good or bad thing.
I’m a survivor. But I’m also victim, too. Surviving has the connotation that you’ve been through it, you lived through it and that’s wonderful – but a victim is what I was. “Survivor” is the more healing way to look at it.
My philosophy is, “murder the rapist in your mind so you stop killing yourself.” I’ve seen, in my lifetime, that sexual abuse has turned into self-abuse. When I kill the rapist inside of me, I will stop killing myself.
I think that when you are accused of being in bad taste it can be quite positive. You’re challenging the notions of polite society. I’d like to put across the notion that bad taste is actually good for you.
The label of tasteful or tasteless is so often used to silence people and to maintain the status quo. It’s used to shame people for not following the commonly accepted routine, for not aligning themselves with the status quo.
I think I started out okay but with AIDS came a great deal of silence about gayness and this period of lose and morning, but at the same time a kind of feeling like you wanted to get back into the closet because being gay was such a terrible thing at that point.
It’s okay for you to have relationships, but it’s not okay to talk about them. It’s not okay to be out or to be public about it. It’s not okay to be photographed with your partner.
I don’t like catchphrases either. A current one would be, “Bye, Felicia.” It’s used so much that we don’t even know the origin anymore.
I was lucky. I always had really great friends in my personal life, people always just knew who I was. It wasn’t until I was in show business where that sort of changed or shifted at first. I have always had a great support network. I have had a lot of really wonderful, close friends.
I think that reaching out to kids that feel really isolated is a life saving gesture that we have a responsibility as older queers to do.
That it is not the people who really feel that way, but it is people who have the most money to fire up these propaganda campaigns, these like, basically these lies that they are willing to lie to the public in order to manipulate them into doing what they want. And to me it doesn’t make any sense.
My father tried to get me to be around gay people a lot when I was young. He owned a gay bookstore and it had a lot of gay literature and art books and he wanted me to be taken care of by the young gays and lesbians who worked for him.
We must know who we are, so we can know what we want, so we don’t end up wanting the wrong thing and get it and realize we don’t want it, because by then it is too late.
Everything is going to be fine in the end, and if it’s not fine, it’s not the end.
My very presence as an Asian American woman talking about race and sexuality is a political statement.
I just want to love everyone. I don’t care if that sounds stupid. I want to love everyone.
If you’re going to be wrong, at least be hot.
We didn’t get along, but he convinced me we did. He made me think that I had a fear of intimacy, when in reality I just hated his goddamn guts.
I don’t know if I’m a bottom because it turns me on, or if I’m a bottom because I’m lazy.
I have been a longtime perpetrator of hate crimes against myself, and I am turning myself in. I have had enough.