Quotes About Stigma

Previously, when I began to write this tale, I set out by saying that Mlle. Claude was a whore. She is a whore, of course, and I'm not trying to deny it, but what I say now is--if Mlle. Claude is a whore then what name shall I find for the other women I know?

For some reason, a lot of folks seem to think that until very recently every Southern politician would go home at night, wait for it to get dark, take a white sheet out of his closet, and then go tearing around the countryside, burning crosses and raising hell.

I think suicide is sort of like cancer was 50 years ago. People don't want to talk about it, they don't want to know about it. People are frightened of it, and they don't understand, when actually these issues are medically treatable.

I would like to take the stigma away. 'Mastectomy' the word seemed so scary to me at first. After doing research and seeing the advancements, the surgery has come a long way from 20 years ago. The results can be incredible.

I graduated from high school in '62 and I didn't know any people who were gay. I'm sure there were people, but I didn't know any. For years and years, I guess, I was very uptight about being a gay actor. I thought it would make me less hirable.

I take Wellbutrin because I'm afraid to go into stores. I'm afraid people are going to yell at me.

We think of our prison inmates as the dregs of society, and we scorn them and push them off to the side and forget about them. We have to remember that they are humans, and they have rights, and yes, they did wrong, but we all have one shot at doing wrong, you know?

Unfortunately, 'chick flick' has become a term to describe most movies that I don't even like. They're these movies that, yes, have women in them but they really don't reflect who women are, and there's something kind of silly or shallow or gossipy about them.

A lot of men just don't understand what it's like to be a woman and how much our bodies mean and what they can be and how much power they can yield, and how much we're shamed for them.

I was the guy from the Jersey Shore, Springsteen country. We don't do yoga there. And we made fun of anybody who did.

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.

When you are intelligent and beautiful you face a lot of problems. If you are beautiful and stupid then it's easy.

A guy friend and I went to California Pizza Kitchen, and a group of pretty girls came over to us and said, 'You guys are gay, right?'

If Adam Sandler does a bad movie, he doesn't bring down the whole white race. But if Tyler Perry does, it's like, 'See what you guys do?' and that type of thing.

As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.

When I was young, they thought I was from outer space. I was the only gay person they probably knew, and they struggled with that. Everybody knew I was gay. They just didn't want to talk about it.

The fact is, in the minds of many, Trayvon Martin received the appropriate punishment for a true crime: He was black, male and dared to walk outside. In life, young Trayvon was just a teenager; in death, he has been transformed into a scary, lurking, suspicious, prone-to-violence spook.

I had never heard of 'young adult novels,' which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something.

I think so much of young adult literature sort of gets ghettoized - the title 'young adult' makes people immediately discount it. And just like with books that get written for adults, there is plenty of young adult literature that is bad. But there is also plenty of young adult literature that is brilliant.

Obviously, breast cancer is very much out there but cervical cancer isn't talked about as much because there's a bit more of a stigma around it. Certainly that's something I want to make sure that young girls know.

I found I was being pushed to one side and I was being ear-marked as being thick, which is a very damaging thing to be told as a young kid.

Mental illness is a disease and organic mental illness of young kids is becoming more and more of a disease... we do need to talk about it.

There is such a stigma on both sides of being a working mother, and you can fall into the trap of what you think everyone else thinks you should be doing instead of what your instincts and standards say you should do.

Public housing officials are free to discriminate against you on the basis of criminal records, including arrest records. And so, you know, what you find is that even for these extremely minor offenses, people find themselves trapped in a permanent second-class status and struggling to survive.