Quotes About Acceptance

Since 1993, I have had the rich satisfaction of knowing and working with many openly gay and lesbian Americans, and I have come to realize that 'gay' is an artificial category when it comes to measuring a man or woman's on-the-job performance or commitment to shared goals. It says little about the person.

My performance at Rio gave me closure. I did my best and could not have done any more.

I was really beating myself up about performances and how I looked and this and that.

I went on Ellen once, and even then, I was just a bad performer. It was nerve-racking at first playing in front of all her fans who really wanted to see her. Her fans are so young and accepting to new people, and it helped that they knew 'Marvin Gaye,' too.

I want to change how people perceived me when I came over here, change how the people perceive South-East Asians or Middle Eastern or Muslim or Hindu or whatever their identity is. I want them to just let that go and treat the performer as a performer.

My experience started in the gay nightlife/drag life. I was just as consumed in ignorance about what is offensive to transpeople because at that time I hadn't found myself. I was living as a drag performer only.

It's hard for performers to grow old gracefully, but I'm trying.

LaGuardia High School is a place of acceptance. You have every type of kid there, performing. The outcast girl would not have been made fun of in my high school.

When I first started performing, the only community that truly got what I was trying to do was the LGBTQ community.

Before I left for Germany, I had gotten accepted to the performing arts high school in New York, which was a big dream of mine. And having to leave that was very sad for me.

I grew up with gay family members, and I went to a performing arts high school. So I grew up in children's theater, musical theater, and all of my life has been around the LGBT community.

I always felt like a girl. My parents in New Jersey weren't exactly encouraging, but my grandmother was very open-minded. She had lots of costume jewelry and a big chest of purses and things, and she would let me play with all of it - even her makeup and perfume. She just didn't care.

I was adopted without the benefit of papers. They used to hide adoption in the forties; I don't know why. Perhaps it was shameful. I could have been kidnapped - there are all kinds of crazy things that people have done - but I got over dealing with that a long time ago.

I wanted to be mayor, but my party didn't want me. I was perhaps too liberal.

Our old age was in some respects the happiest period of life.

I don't have problems with nobody, period.

I grew up in a family where many of our close friends were gay couples. As well as that, every man goes through a period of thinking they're attracted to another guy.

But with period clothes, people know less so they accept the pretty drawing that I give them.

I look at Rafa Benitez in his time at Liverpool, he had difficult periods and the same goes for Brendan Rodgers in the same job now. These difficult periods come and you have to accept that. I did as well as I could at Newcastle.

I go through long periods of time when I don't write, and I'm fine.

By the time I enrolled in the military at 20, I had spent years in denial about who I really was. I was openly gay and would go through periods of cross-dressing, and had even thought about transitioning, but I was in such complete denial.

I thought perhaps if I tried something that was so masculine perhaps that's what I would become. Sadly, that wasn't the case... sad in the sense that maybe it would have made some of the darker periods in my life a bit more manageable.

She was a patron saint of the peripheral.

My favorite book is 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower' by Stephen Chbosky.