Gay Culture Quotes & Sayings

A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere. — Cherrie Moraga

Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction. — Tony Kushner

As a gay man, I think the role of culture is central to how you change politics - culture is politics. — Jose Antonio Vargas

Really, when it comes to gay rights, there's two wars going on. The first war is political. But the culture war is over. — Dan Savage

When straight-identified women have sex with women, the broader culture waits in anticipation for them to return to what is likely their natural, heterosexual state; when straight-identified men have sex with men, the culture waits in anticipation for them to admit that they are gay. — Jane Ward

A lot of what used to be known as gay culture - broadly speaking, homoeroticism and being camp - has been brought into mainstream culture. I think we should be moving to an era where it's just sex. — Neil Tennant

There's a whole gay culture in DC, and there are as many gay Republicans as there are gay Democrats. — Kirby Dick

I don't think there is a 'gay lifestyle.' I think that's superficial crap, all that talk about gay culture. A couple of restaurants on Castro Street and a couple of magazines do not constitute culture. Michelangelo is culture. Virginia Woolf is culture. So let's don't confuse our terms. Wearing earrings is not culture ... — Rita Mae Brown

And I found out about the wonderful world of sign language. I suddenly realized: If we as a society recognize Jewish culture, gay culture and Latino culture, we must recognize that this is a coherent culture, too. I think deafness is a disability for social constructionist reasons. — Andrew Solomon

What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship. — Andrew Sullivan

You look thirty. You act ... well, never mind. You're carrying on like you think you're seventy." Was I? I guess it was no secret I'd been unpleasantly startled to find myself suddenly hitting the big 4-0. You'd have thought the previous thirty-nine years were sufficient warning. I glanced at his profile. "Okay. Maybe I'm a little hung up on the age thing. You have to admit gay culture is youth-oriented. — Josh Lanyon

My best audience and where I'm happiest is in the gay community. That's where I feel the most accepted. It's a community that appreciates pop culture like no other. For me, that's where I'm home and I always want to come home. — Katerina Graham

Gay male and lesbian culture is obsessed with purity of identity as the only basis for figuring out who you can trust or dance with. -Pat Califia — Carol Queen

Gay culture is in a coming-out process of its own. From out of the closets in the '60s, the culture moved onto the disco floors of the '70s and through the hospital wards of the '80s and onwards to the streets. — Lance Loud

We who have the luxury of living in the West have an obligation to stand up for liberal principles. Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture's intolerance. If we do in fact support diversity, women's rights, and gay rights, then we cannot in good conscience give Islam a free pass on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity. And we need to say unambiguously to Muslims living in the West: if you want to live in our societies, to share in their material benefits, then you need to accept that our freedoms are not optional. They are the foundations of our way of life; of our civilization - a civilization that learned, slowly and painfully, not to burn heretics, but to honor them. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what's right and wrong that it's almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It's like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn't like pink because that's for girls, or you'd instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone's born confident, and everything's taken away from you — Kanye West

Companies have to nurture [creativity and motivation]-and have to do it by building a compassionate yet performance-driven corporate culture. In the knowledge economy the traditional soft people side of our business has become the new hard side. — Gay Mitchell

The world has accepted hard-core fans' argument. Batman, this children's character who dresses up in a costume to effect the change he wishes to see in the world via face punching, is serious.
And awesome.
And definitely not gay.
And, most importantly, now and forever, badass.
This is the Batman narrative that now permeates the culture - the narrative that doesn't like nobody touching its stuff and doesn't want any of you homos touching it, neither. — Glen Weldon

Again, as a gay man I look at that and say there's a hopelessness that surrounds it, but as a human being I look at it and say 'Why? Where's this disparity coming from, and why can't we as a culture and society dig deeper to examine that?' We're terrified of facing ourselves. — Zachary Quinto

I think the world is ambivalent about feminism. So I can't blame college students. I think they're reflecting the greater culture's attitude toward feminism. So what I can do is, in ways that are appropriate, advocate for feminism and help the students learn what feminism is about. — Roxane Gay

The gays like 'Project Runway' because it's a fashion, and the gays are into fashion and into design. It's a creative industry, and most of the gays are pretty creative, in general. That's just like the culture. We're not all into politics necessarily. We're more into the creative environment. I also think Heidi is a big draw. The boys love Heidi and think she's so fabulous. I just think it's a glitzy, fun show, and there are also always lots of gay boys on it, and, you know, that's fun. — Christian Siriano

It just seems like the culture war is over, and the gay kissers won. — Bill Maher

Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture's intolerance. If we do in fact support diversity, women's rights, and gay rights, then we cannot in good conscience give Islam a free pass on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

American culture enforces such rigid gender roles for male friendships that they are gay unless they materially resemble a beer commercial. — Thomm Quackenbush

Gay culture is far from 'marginal,' being rather 'intersectional,' the conduits between unlike beings. — Judy Grahn

The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history. — Alysia Abbott

To this culture warrior, gay marriage is not a vital issue. I don't believe the republic will collapse if Larry marries Brendan. However, it is clear that most Americans want heterosexual marriage to maintain its special place in American society. And as long as gays are not penalized in the civil arena, I think the folks should make the call at the ballot box. Traditional marriage is widely seen as a social stabilizer, and I believe that is true. — Bill O'Reilly

We've had a culture war roaring away, and the kinds of people who want to abuse and discriminate against gay people who are adults can't really lay their hands on us unless they want to be gay-bashers and go to jail. They abuse us from afar and in the abstract, they abuse us with checkbooks and ballots, but their kids go to school on Monday morning. And there's a gay kid. And they feel they have license to beat that gay kid up in a way that I don't think they did when I was in school. I think it's gotten worse. — Dan Savage

The gay movement is an evil institution that's goal is to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity in which there's no restrictions on sexual conduct except the principle of mutual choice. — Scott Lively

A text by a minority writer is effective only if it succeeds in making the minority point of view universal. ('The Universal and the Particular')" ... In claiming the lesbian point of view as universal, she overturns the concepts to which we are accustomed. For up to this point, minority writers had to add "the universal" to their points of view if they wished to attain the unquestioned universality of the dominant class. Gay men, for example, have always defined themselves as a minority and never questioned, despite their transgression, the dominant choice. This is why gay culture has always had a fairly wide audience.
[From the Foreword "Changing the Point of View" by Louise Turcotte] — Monique Wittig

With prodigious bravery and eviscerating humor, Roxane Gay takes on culture and politics in Bad Feminist-and gets it right, time and time again. We should all be lucky enough to be such a bad feminist. — Ayelet Waldman

In gay culture hookups are a way of escaping your class. — Hank Azaria

She had me at Sweet Valley High. Gay playfully crosses the borders between pop culture consumer and critic, between serious academic and lighthearted sister-girl, between despair and optimism, between good and bad ... How can you help but love her? — Melissa Harris-Perry

How can we pick and choose which parts of the Bible to follow? One thing is God's will and another is just cultural differences? What if it's all cultural? What if homosexuality or saving yourself for marriage is as outdated as women staying silent in church or Leviticus forbidding tattoos? — Trevor D. Richardson

Freud, Jung thought, had been a great discoverer of facts about the mind, but far too inclined to leave the solid ground of "critical reason and common sense." Freud for his part criticized Jung for being gullible about occult phenomena and infatuated with Oriental religions; he viewed with sardonic and unmitigated skepticism Jung's defense of religious feelings as an integral element in mental health. For Freud, religion was a psychological need projected onto culture, the child's feeling of helplessness surviving in adults, to be analyzed rather than admired. — Peter Gay

A way of life can be shared among individuals of different ages, status, and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be "gay," I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try and define and develop a way of life. — Michel Foucault

Margaret Sanger didn't just introduce the idea of birth control into our culture at large, she freed women from indenture to their bodies. — Roxane Gay

The ability of anyone in the culture to support and honour gay kids may depend on an ability to name them as such, notwithstanding that many gay adults may never have been gay kids and some gay kids may not turn into gay adults. — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

The existence of homosexuality, not as a circumstantial matter of passing sexual whim, but as a shared condition and identity, raises the intriguing possibility of homosexual culture, or at least of a minority subculture with sexual identity as its base. At the very least, by sympathetic identification with cultural texts which appeared to be affirmative, homosexual people saw a way to shore up their self-respect in the face of constant moral attack, and they found materials with which to justify themselves not only to each other but also to those who found their very existence, let alone their behaviour, unjustifiable. — Gregory Woods

Strangely, the subsequent AIDS works that have become iconic in our culture rarely mention the movement, or the engaged community of lovers, but both formations were inseparable from the crisis itself. Now, looking back, I fear that the story of the isolated helpless homosexual was one far more palatable to the corporations who control the reward system in the arts.The more truthful story of the American mass - abandoning families, criminal governments, indifferent neighbors - is too uncomfortable and inconvenient to recall. The story of how gay people who were despised, had no rights, and carried the burden of a terrible disease came together to force the country to change against its will, is apparently too implicating to tell. Fake tales of individual heterosexuals heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue helpless dying men with AIDS was a lot more appealing to the powers that be, but not at all true. — Sarah Schulman

Gulliver was soon being read "from the cabinet council to the nursery". — John Gay

Start as a human being in this culture, toss in madness, toss in mystical states, toss in being gay, toss in being HIV-positive, toss in religion that assures you God hates you for all of that - and then look me in the eye and tell me you can feel ok about yourself. I dare you. I just dare you. — Ken Wilber

The success [of the X-Men], I think, is for two reasons. The first is that, creatively, the book was close to perfect ... but the other reason is that it was a book about being different in a culture where, for the first time in the West, being different wasn't just accepted, but was also fashionable. I don't think it's a coincidence that gay rights, black rights, the empowerment of women and political correctness all happened over those twenty years and a book about outsiders trying to be accepted was almost the poster-boy for this era in American culture. — Mark Millar

As Rotundo, Donald Yacovone, and other historians have argued, the men involved in such same-sex relationships should not retrospectively be classified as homosexual, since no concept of the homosexual existed in their culture and they did not organize their emotional lives as homosexuals; many of them were also on intimate terms with women and went on to marry. Nonetheless, the same historians persist in calling such men heterosexual, as if that concept did exist in the early nineteenth century. — George Chauncey

I wanted to tell a dream-come-true story about going from a closeted gay kid who loved pop culture to an out adult man making pop culture. I went from being told when I was 21 that I should never go on TV because of my crossed eyes to winding up being a 'Housewives' whisperer and talk-show host. — Andy Cohen

To me, politics is culture. I became a journalist, and later a filmmaker, to get to know my new country and my volatile place in it as a gay, undocumented Filipino-American. — Jose Antonio Vargas

A lot of people in my world - in the acting world - have either lost friends to Aids or live with HIV because its origin in our culture, in New York for instance, was in the gay community. — Emma Thompson

I've played a couple of gay characters onstage, and it's always been something I'm comfortable with. I grew up in a family and a culture that doesn't have stigmas about sexuality. — Seth Numrich

For my group of friends is Lady Gaga eye-opening? No. She's a less dangerous version of what was so cool about pop culture in the '80s. Back then it was so gay and so punk in so many ways. — Beth Ditto

Isn't it interesting how nationalistic attitudes foster the notion that being gay is 'un-(fill in your nationality/ religion/ culture here)'? — Christina Engela

I've had librarians say to me, "People in my school don't agree with homosexuality, so it's difficult to have your book on the shelves." Here's the thing: Being gay is not an issue, it is an identity. It is not something that you can agree or disagree with. It is a fact, and must be defended and represented as a fact.
To use another part of my identity as an example: if someone said to me, "I'm sorry, but we can't carry that book because it's so Jewish and some people in my school don't agree with Jewish culture," I would protest until I reached my last gasp. Prohibiting gay books is just as abhorrent ...
Discrimination is not a legitimate point of view. Silencing books silences the readers who need them most. And silencing these readers can have dire, tragic consequences. Never forget who these readers are. They are just as curious and anxious about life as any other teenager. — David Levithan

I feel that gay people not being able to get married for generations, forever, meant that we came up with alternative ways of recognizing relationships. And I worry that if everybody has access to the same institutions that we lose the creativity of subcultures having to make it on their own. And I like gay culture. — Rachel Maddow

If we generic gay and lesbian whitefolks set as our movement's goal being assimilated into American culture, getting 'our piece of the pie,' we ignore or deny the reality that gay and lesbian people of color will never be assimilated in the same way within this system because it was constituted to exclude them. — Mab Segrest

Pride became this dogma which meant you couldn't criticize anything gay - if you were the least bit critical of gay culture or people or any gay person doing any gay thing, that was an insufficient display of pride. You were suffering from internalized homophobia. As opposed to external homophobia. — Dan Savage

Gay diversity is like the Village People. You can all wear different stupid outfits as long as you sing the same stupid song. — Jack Malebranche

I had a friend write me that our music was being played at Gay Pride in New York, which is a big compliment. In the biggest city in the country with the most culture and the most grit - I love it. — Jennifer Nettles

Gay culture is surviving and thriving. Some activists believe the recent rise in homophobic violence might be a gauge of the success of positive gay images. — Lance Loud

I very much want to inject gay culture into the mainstream. It's not an underground tool for me. It's my whole life. — Lady Gaga

It is said that courage isn't the absence of fear but the fortitude to confront fear. And as long as homophobia continues to be an accepted element of the locker room culture and homophobic language a coach's motivational tool, we can never dismiss the courage it takes for an athlete-on any level-to be openly gay. Bobby Blair may not be a household name, but his journey-from frightened collegiate athlete to empowered advocate-is one that has an important lesson for anyone who believes in the unifying power of sports. — LZ Granderson

You can't have Rosie on The View and Elton John packing Mom and Pop in at Caesars Palace and gay people all over television, and then have these politicians run out there with a straight face and say that gay and lesbian relationships are a threat to the family. We are winning in the culture - which is why we'll ultimately win the political war. — Dan Savage