Lgbt People

"Our current relationship to the Earth is based on a worldview of domination that supports an extractive economy."

"Social media makes photography available to the world so quickly that immediacy has become more important than quality. Not many people appreciate the quality that comes with experience and most are happy with seeing something now. Consumption makes it all come and go very fast, so there’s no need to elevate things."

"I have the same choices over my life and body that I would want for every single person on earth. I’m not trying to make a statement about what a woman is, I just want to be one. I don't really care if someone thinks that is biologically impossible; I've got near enough to be wholly satisfied. I am happy."

"My view is that despite the law being very clear, actually, a few very determined transphobes have crawled their way to the heart of the law like maggots in an apple."

"Look, I can't speak for all trans women, but I just want to live my life the way I always imagined it. I have become the version of myself I wanted to be when I was four."

"The publishing world tends to focus more on the “young”, less on the “adult”. But I spend lots of time with teenagers and they’re truly the broadband generation. They’ve been online all their lives and seen things that would make milk curdle: beheadings, graphic violence, hardcore porn. Shielding them is never going to work. What makes this book YA is that it tackles issues in a non-judgmental way. We know these things exist, so let’s talk about them…"

"I was desperate to write a trans character for whom it wasn’t really an issue. After you come out, after the initial makeover and being on hormones for a few years, what happens next? That’s a story nobody tells…"

"Brands have to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to diversity…Don’t hire a black woman or a trans woman or a disabled woman and then get cross if they have opinions about their colour or their gender or their disability. The danger is if you’re hired just to be pretty but then you start having opinions about abortion, then you’re gonna get dropped. And of course you should be able to do both."

"I just wanted to get f****d like a woman. That's what it's about. It’s not about what hole it's going in."

"I think there are a lot of gay men out there who are gay men as a consolation prize because they couldn't be women. That was certainly true of me."

"Ever since my first novel, people have had quite a snippy vibe about YA, and it’s almost like: ‘Do you think one day you’ll write a real book?’…"

"I always say we’re like doctors, we fashion photographers — we get given problems and we solve them…"

"It’s really challenging that idea of who is a hero, who has made contributions to society, but then also not historicizing it, so we’re really putting it in the present because that’s what modern media is so much about…"

"It really was harmful because it makes it feel for women, for LGBTQ folks, for even white men too, that there are only these tokens and that’s not the case. What it does is reinforce white supremacy, it reinforces patriarchy. It’s harmful to everyone, not just the people who are being erased."

"I just haven't experienced a lot of the ridiculousness, you know? I haven't been around that long…I’m constantly shocked. Whenever I'm doing work, a large part of that work is going to be reacting, and I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily — me being surprised but still wanting to change things."

"Where is the pop culture that makes riding public transportation and eating a plant-based diet fun, cool, and accessible to diverse audiences? Imagine the power of being exposed to an abundance of stories, songs, and images that challenge our fundamental consumption culture and expand our perspectives by helping us feel the consequences of our choices. What if we made it uncool to use fossil fuels in the same way smoking became uncool?"

"I try to give folks the tools and resources to be a part of a movement…I'm a very strong believer in the idea that everybody has a place in the movement."

"When it comes to climate change, most of the stories and cultural content that exist to inform and organize people are overwhelmingly pain oriented, outdated, and hella White."

"Murals are not easel paintings,” Baca said. “They’re not individual works created for simple self-expression of your opinion in a public space. To do public works means that you’re making something. A real mural is connected to the architecture in which it’s placed, connected to the people for whom it’s painted and connected to who you paint with. And when it is incredibly well done, it’s like a choreographed dance."

"They very often would let me paint, you know, instead of doing some of the other lessons, because I didn't speak English well enough. So I had a lot of painting. And I brought the paintings home with great pride, and my mother kept them for years, so I do know that I sort of…That was a place that I actually remember the smell of those materials and the texture of the surfaces and just, you know, kind of having this real visceral love of moving that color around -- which is, I think, you know, I still have that…"

"All my pieces are about resilience in the face of adversity"

"That musical time is a way of like creating a rhythm within the piece. And it was an amazing experience for me to see how when lines, directional lines, went through forms -- how forms, if moved to fit within the ratio, to hit the points. Like in other words, if an arm flies out, it goes to the point. Suddenly there's this like visual kind of connection between the forms, and it fits like, clicks like pieces of a puzzle, right into place…"

"I tend to channel my characters and their needs first—that leads to dramatic situations—and then…I start writing and barf out pages. Next, I read what I have and find a glimmer of plot in there. Then I do it all over again with the plot driving the characters. You have to write a lot and throw out a lot and have fun with it."

"I know what they’re thinking. ‘You’re clearly queer, you’re dressed like a child, you have tattoos.’ They have this impression that a person that looks like me…I try not to be like ‘You’re fucking racist!’ or whatever, but they’re probably thinking, There’s no way you belong on the screen. And I’m so happy to shatter that forever."

"I want to represent queerness and mujerness in the conversation. I worry that my poor Spanish may be off-putting to some cohorts. I just talk so damn slow in any language. I also want to represent slow talkers—and mimes."

"I think this is part of the female gaze…We are used to being watched, so why not watch ourselves, and why not enjoy it? Watching each other, excluding the visage of men—I can enjoy my sexuality."

"Stop giving a s— what other people think of you. We make decisions too often based on that…When we start to live for ourselves, and be a little bit more selfish, I think we’ll lead more fulfilling lives. So I think what we need to do, is stare at ourselves in the mirror a little bit longer, and really own who we are and not try to be what we think others want us to be."

"My audience is a mix of people, very San Francisco progressive, gay straight, Latino, people of color, white folks, and women. What I’ve learned is you can’t get everybody. I don’t want to compromise who I am. I love anyone who buys a ticket to my show."

"Being black and gay, having dreadlocks, having a certain kind of swag, and dressing the way I do…‘That’s dope, you’re cool.’ I don’t feel validated by that. . . . I don’t want to be White. I don’t want to be straight. I don’t want to blend in. . . . I try to wear queer designers who happen to be brown and makin’ shit."

"If I talk about my body the way the men do, that’s not okay with the audience. I was at a comedy show where there was this cool lesbian couple in the audience, really stylish, and one of them had to leave. She was crying sitting there listening to all the jokes about Subarus and mullet haircuts. I thought: I am going to get back at them. I want a man to look at this show and realize that their junk is no more appealing than women’s junk. I want them to look at junk."

"I feel very ni de aquí ni de allá…I’ve carried that border, that duality with me, because I’m not a full American...They can’t deny us right now…We don’t have it all, but we’ve gotten this much. We are undeniable. We are here."

"I can only speak for myself, but as an actor i wasn’t like, “I’m going to challenge the way people see Latin people.” I was just happy to get roles. I tried to find new material in characters, but I wasn’t post-race about it or anything like that. I was just looking at it as just work. I wasn’t framing myself, so I wasn’t framing characters. Now I see the importance of playing [certain types of] characters. I’m not necessarily choosing characters that go against stereotypes, I’m choosing characters that you don’t even have time to question where they would fit in. Or what box they would fit into."

"The hardest thing about being a black writer in this town is having to pitch your black story to white execs…Also, most of the time when we go into rooms to pitch, there’s one token black executive that sometimes can be a friend and sometimes can be a foe. I wonder if they think it makes me more comfortable, if that makes me think that they’re a woke network or studio because they’ve got that one black exec. It feels patronizing. I’m not against a black exec. I want there to be more of them."

"I'm a person that documents the lives of people of color…So that way, when we're gone, no one will forget we were here."

"It’s the duty of the playwright to sneak in as many effronteries as he can. If you act completely effrontive to people, they’ll never go listen. So you gotta sneak it past them…"

"It was a challenge to always be a Latino to Whites, but a Cubano to L.A.’s Chicanos. I was married to a woman for awhile and no one asked about my sexual behavior; but when I came out, it’s often the number one question asked by journalists, which I find insulting as it distorts the purpose of the interview. This notion that I must somehow be sleeping with anyone famous [he’s not] is too much about my private life."

"I’m obsessed with women and Latina women. I think I’m on my seventh or eighth all-Latina play. I’m really comfortable in that world. So, if I had to say what I’m interested in exploring, it’s that—class, and how it affects Latinas and people of color."

"The border is a notion too. It’s a mood. It’s a culture…after living seven years on the border, and I really was speaking in two tongues—I was dual person back then…"

"There’s always somebody in my plays who’s the outsider looking in. And when you don’t fit into the family structure, you’re the outsider. And the more fascistic a country is, the more that it wants to punish the outsider…"

"To perceive Latin people as menial workers, with some sort of underground element. Not to see people as individuals, to always see people in terms of their racial group. That’s who you’re fighting all the time; that’s who you’re fighting in theater, as well…"

"I wish that more young people, especially less affluent people of color, would realize that we’ve been making stories forever, we’ve been creating rich characters. If we can ignore the pressure to tell a story the way “they” want to hear it and just tell it the way it is, we’ll continue to grow in the industry and have greater power."

"We haven’t gotten a chance to tell those stories for Latina women. If you look at what’s in the landscape right now, it’s very stuck in its lane, and I love that we have no lanes. There’s no road. There’s nothing. We start off somewhere and it just detours, regarding the characters…"

"I probably am a playwright first, and a director second. But, since I do a lot of directing sometimes, it's an almost equal thing. Writing is very exciting to me because I'm able to control the world that I want to create. And, as a director, you go into another world, and you kind of help flesh out a world that other people have created..."

"The reasons that I stayed in theater are very personal. I think Asian-American stories can be best served in a place where you can tell them the most, and for me, where I can see that happening is in novels and in plays, because it's more easily done. In plays, anyone can do it, so the opportunities to tell Asian-American stories are infinite…"

"The dramaturgy of audiences and communities is crucial: how they think, how they hear stories, how they relate to the theatre…That was an interesting curve. Not having lived in the Midwest, I found that it’s segregated, it’s tribal."

"I think it’s that a musical must maintain buoyance. Most musicals are informed by very rigid archetypes. If you get a very sophisticated mind writing them, you sense something else, but it’s a folk-art form, really, at its best…"

"There are fundamentally two schools: You stand where you are and demand that actors come to you, or you go to where they are. It’s not just with actors, it’s designers, too. You go to where they are and you try to cajole, woo, seduce, engage, empower them to go on the journey that you think they should. I generally employ [those methods], because I really believe that if you force an actor to do something, there’s a piece of them you never get back…"

"As a director, I was able to journey into these plays, find myself, and realise the worlds the playwrights have written…I find my inspiration and my passion in other writers and their versions of this country and this world."

"Sometimes you feel where it was trying to go down. There’s a residue feeling and so it lasts a little bit longer. Even after you stop choking, you still feel it inside your throat. There’s something about theatre where I want to not be able to get up, walk out and go: ‘Oh, that was nice,’ but really have to engage with it as I go home and think about it and work over what I felt about it. That’s the type of theatre I like.”"

"Both of them come from birth. I was born black and gay. I was not socialized to be gay. I always knew I was different; I was always interested in something that a lot of kids were not into…"