Lgbt People

"I like pleasure! I mean, I'm queer because I find it fun to be queer, not because it makes me feel virtuous to be queer, not because I was "born this way." I don't care at all about why I'm queer; I feel very lucky to have this life, and that's it. Of course, many of us have struggled mightily, and we also have access to such particular pleasures, so many cultural traditions centred around sex and art and beauty and new ways of doing things. As the Pet Shop Boys said, "we were never being boring.""

"And then meanwhile, the AIDS crisis is going on. There's a ton of activism, and some of my friends were a little bit older and were already going downtown to Act Up meetings. So I started doing that and that was really how I came into queer life, through that kind of radical organising. That was a really exciting place, because it was people working together across their differences to make change. It was a coalition: lots of different people working together with a shared enemy. It's a model which is obviously super relevant today."

"It’s hard for me to understand when people are calling some of these trans exclusionary people, "radical feminists" – I really always bristle at that. I don't think they're either radical or feminists. It's a real misnomer from my perspective."

"... we're in a rapidly unfolding global emergency. Why are we talking about this? You know what a pressing feminist issue is? Global climate change. Seriously, excluding trans women from spaces should not be near the agenda. It's obscene."

"I feel really excited to have found a way to have an adult queer life that feels great and rich, really different from what I thought was possible and also specifically queer. Chosen family, kinship, living arrangements, parenting roles, it all feels like, 'So this is one thing you can do and you can do it in a queer way.' And that's kind of amazing. I feel that every good thing that has happened in my life has come from being queer."

"Coolness is a big problem in queer life, always being attracted to the shiny thing and not always necessarily being kind."

"Finding a word that fits right is not my biggest concern, but I think it's a valuable thing and non-binary is useful. For me I say 'trans-ish'. Transmasculine works for me, if trans is a real umbrella term. I've got a number of friends my age or older who have a similar gender situation, who are using they/them pronouns or have switched recently. I'm just really grateful to young people for making that a viable thing. Pronouns have not been a place where I've put my energy and yet I've benefited from other people's energy."

"I love the word queer, because what's useful about it is that it has the potential to be radically inclusive. I hope it signals an interest in, if not radical political thought, at least a destabilising. Destabilising binary ideas of gender and sex. I really struggled with this feeling of not being trans enough, I don’t feel like any of the words really work. I like words that leave things a little unclear. The main thing for me is if you respect people self-determination, and if somebody says they're queer, or they're trans, they are, and it’s not that big of a deal. And I will also say that having been in adult queer life for a number of decades now, most of the time, people who have some vested interest in saying they're queer or trans, there’s a good reason for it."

"My kid's still pretty young, but my partner and I feel strongly about trying to make as much room as possible for liberation in terms of gender and socialisation, so that our kid doesn’t have to essentially have their spirit crushed at this early age. I think there's all these ways in which little kids get boxed in. Maybe it's a gift of being in a queer family, that you get a little more space to just be a person or a creature for longer. And it's all going to come in, we're not bigger than socialisation, we know it. But trying to make that space feels like a part of parenting"

"I tried outlining, tried to understand three-act structure, tried to impose a plot, but kept coming back to my sense that I just needed to follow Paul, that my structure was going to have to be a little queer as well ... I realised my reluctance had to do with my understanding of how people change, how I've changed – really slowly, recursively, making the same mistakes over and over."

"Sex is a part of life. I think pleasure's really important. I feel that our queer and trans cultural heritage is to prioritise pleasure and self-fulfilment, self-knowledge and art and humour – those seem like really good things to me."

"I had never identified as a lesbian; I liked how the word "queer" signalled transgressive desire without gendering me. I hung out with lots of queer men, and found something closer to my reflection in gay male culture, probably because I could identify with the combination of queerness and masculinity more than with lesbian culture (though I was primarily dating lesbians)."

"At 18, 19 queer theory felt really glamorous and the place to get answers, and I feel like I understood about 1% of what I was reading. Barthes really spoke to me, Judith Butler's work felt highly important and I'm sure I still don't really understand it and that's become OK with me over the years. Queer theory was just really cool."

"Fortunately women who have gone before me have made that something I no longer fear."

"The first thing I figure out is the plot, and as it develops, the characters take shape. I believe the characters tell me their own stories."

"Playing with words, making up new ones, gifting your audience with a well written story is nothing short of magic."

"Turning an empty page into stories, making something out of nothing."

"I felt ashamed, because we’re not supposed to, and there’s something unprofessional about it."

"The most meaningful moments were moments when, like on a Friday night at rehearsal, I decided to stop and look around at the people who I loved so much and just make a memory of it. Nothing special — we were all just sitting around, and Mikey [Day] was doing a bit or Alex [Moffat] was doing a bit, and we were catching up and just looking around at the crew. Those are the moments that meant the most."

"This is fresh. It only happened two months ago."

"My biggest challenge will always be my anxiety."

"And while the stage itself isn't scary to me (I've DJ'd to thousands and thousands of people before), when I think about the intimacy of seeing the theatre audience, that feels like a different thing altogether."

"Telling Lorne was really hard."

"Everyone kept saying it was so brave of me to agree to do a stage production, and I was like, 'Wait, what? Why do I not feel nervous?'"

"Self control is a very complex quality."

"My relationship is just as normal as anyone else’s. I go about my day the same way anyone else would -in the same way, a heterosexual couple would go about their day. I wake up in the morning. I tell my wife I love her. I go to work. I come home. We cook dinner together. This is normal. As any husband would love his wife, or any wife would love her husband -that’s the same way I love LaTaya."

"If everyone had a body like me, everyone would be walking around naked."

"I think if I could give anyone advice – not that you should take mine – it would be to not start getting tattoos at 16."

"When I was younger I tried to be the chefs that I saw and thought were successful, but that doesn’t work. I was young and trying to make a name for myself. I was trying to make their style of food or personality, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t going to get me anywhere."

"I get my inspiration from everywhere, and admittedly mostly from places that aren’t food related. I love going to museums, because art really inspires me. When I look at cookbooks, I tend to like the ones that are super artistic- more art books than cookbooks."

"You have to cook with your heart in order to make your guests feel the soul of your cooking. You can be a great cook and a great chef, but if you don’t have the passion then it is not going to translate to the guests."

"Getting a laugh out of someone is such a empowering feeling."

"I crave nature. When I’m in it, I love it. But I’m not a good camper. I’m good for the day."

"Yeah it’s the same old story of labels being important in terms of fighting for legal rights, but being so inadequate in terms of expressing nuances of existing. And as soon as you choose a label it ends up inflating that part of your identity above other parts that are just as important."

"And being so confused, because I don’t feel like I want to go to the men’s changing room, and I don’t feel like I’m safe in the girl’s changing room."

"All the conversation is focused around pronouns and things like that, and I’m like, however you read me is fine. I know how I read myself."

"Exercise is key for me to just stay connected to the ol’ bode. It’s tough. Even though we know how to feel better. We know all these things. We just don’t do them. Everyone knows if they were on their phone less they’d be happier and more fulfilled. But it’s hard. Everything is designed to keep us distracted."

"It’s so frustrating that so much of identity is about comparison. I just feel like myself. I don’t even feel non-binary. I just wake up, have a coffee and go to work."

"I’d love for us to reach a point where gender didn’t have to be the defining aspect of our identity, but we’re far from that."

"I think it would have been humanly impossible for two people, over a period of eight years, to agree more consistently and thoroughly than Mr. Hull and I have done. There has never been the slightest important difference of opinion between us, and so far as I am personally concerned I think it would be impossible for any man in my position, who has been so closely associated with the Secretary- who has had the opportunity of being associated wuth a man of his extraordinary moral courage and consistency, and I think an almost unique intellectual integrity- to have anything except very deep devotion for him."

"On January 17, 1940, Harold Nicolson heard that there was 'still a group in the war Cabinet working for appeasement and at present in negotiation via the former Chancellor Bruning to make peace with the German General Staff on condition that they eliminate Hitler'. But the chance that the German 'opposition' might play the deus ex machina was long gone. Roosevelt was even less realistic. He continued to act as if a compromise peace might still be concocted on the basis of Munich-style concessions to the dictators; hence the 1940 trips to Europe by the Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, and the Vice-President of General Motors, James Mooney, the former touting concessions to Germany that even Chamberlain and Halifax thought laughable. Only with the fall of France was appeasement finally buried."

"[On a perceived orchestra's retreat to conservative stances after the pandemic] I thought classical music institutions would come back with a new approach, new ways of connecting with audiences. Have we seen that? In some ways I see these organisations trying to go back to the way they used to do it. I'm not saying that what we do — the actual music-making — needs to drastically change, but everything around it does. And it can’t just be, ‘Oh we’re going to include a piece by a woman composer, or a person of colour’. It becomes perfunctory rather than celebratory."

"But, fundamentally, I think goodness is very underrated."

"We could have been programming work by under-represented people for the last 50 years, but the choice was not to. We could have had women on the podium, but the choice was not to."

"To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser — for me that was heartbreaking. I think all women and all feminists should be bothered by that kind of depiction because it's not really about women conductors, is it?"

"There are so many men — actual, documented men — this film could have been based on but, instead, it puts a woman in the role but gives her all the attributes of those men. That feels antiwoman. To assume that women will either behave identically to men or become hysterical, crazy, insane is to perpetuate something we’ve already seen on film so many times before."

"[On the slow growth of the number of female conductors] With women, historically, it's been, you know, "You should be happy for what you have. Don’t push people — they’ve done a lot already!" There’s always this sort of patronising approach."

"[There is] a familiar pattern in minority identity politics in US history: it is often the most privileged elements of a population affected by a particular civil injustice or social oppression who have the opportunity to organize first. In organizing around the one thing that interferes with or complicates their privilege, their organizations tend to reproduce that very privilege."

"So many superficial aspects of Tár seemed to align with my own personal life. But once I saw it I was no longer concerned, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian."

"Well. It will matter, you know. It will always matter."