Lgbt People

"Theater is a service where the god keeps changing…Sometimes it’s the actor. Sometimes it’s the director. Sometimes it’s the stage manager. Sometimes, but almost never, it’s the playwright."

"Art is something you don’t just reproduce—what you see everyday doesn’t seem to be inspiring to them. But you do something with it so that it’s not bound by the law of reality. My work has always had that influence. I’ve never felt that it was necessary at all to write realistic plays…"

"I did, not only because of that, but also because there was no value placed on education in my family. My mother just assumed I was smart, and I had glasses so I was called “four eyes,” and I was always reading a book, and so the outsider feeling came from the fact that I really loved school…"

"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…"

"Having a play directed by someone else is like going to a religious school when you’re a child, you listen and obey…"

"…White people playing people of color is not new; what is new is people of color are now [able to] own their own authenticity. White theater was created to reflect their audiences and white theater must deal with [changing audiences and perceptions]. … I think it’s about what the story requires, and what happens when you cast someone who could not be believable and who could not tell that story…"

"My plays are clean. Most plays have four, five vital moments in the play and the rest of the play is just getting to it. It’s just fill. I don’t know why, whether it’s just to create the sense that it’s real or that you have to spend two hours to experience the power (you have to see not just snapshots). But I find it very boring. I go to sleep when I see plays like that, and I go to sleep writing it…"

"On the interrelationship of poems and politics in “‘Every poem is political’: Danez Smith, the YouTube star shaking up poetry” in The Guardian (2018 Jan 28)"

"Every poem is political. In poems not obviously political, the writer is trying to avoid something…"

"Poems have helped me figure out a lot about queer sexuality – it is a big hill to climb. The ability to transform myself in poetry helps me imagine myself differently in the real world."

"For me, it’s about writing a good poem. The questions of page and performance come later. My first allegiance is with what the poem wants to be, in terms of how it looks. The question of performance is something I ask myself at a later date once the poem is finished, when I ask myself, ‘can I read this to an audience one time through and be able to make them feel something?’ Some poems are just easier to translate to a space of performance than others…"

"Naming is important. In many black cultures you learn the importance of giving the right name or not naming things…"

"The ball culture is a space started in uptown Manhattan, in Harlem. It was created by a group of black trans women and drag queens who were tired of being pushed out of white drag spaces, where they kept on being upstaged and not given titles. The titles were favored to white queens, white queens who embodied Western culture's idea of beauty and femininity more than the black and brown queens did. So Crystal LaBeija created the scene, and it has become this kind of community space — one where a lot of orphaned people, homeless folk, trans and queer people gather together in houses…"

"I did not, but that’s just my experience. I know a lot of people who do, and that’s where the burden of representation comes in. I’m sitting here telling my specific story, but though I wasn’t comfortable with that, there are thousands of people who are, or thousands who don’t have access to the funds to have surgery."

"The ‘pretty privilege’ can give you access to spaces, just like your able body gives you access. But it makes impossible beauty standards for many other trans girls who are struggling with that right now."

"My grandmother gets who I am, so when you ask me about people who don’t understand, or people who are on their bully pulpits saying you shouldn’t accept people, I’m like: “What’s happened to you that, of all the things you can talk about, of all the injustices in the world, the one thing you want to concentrate on is trans people living their truth? How is that harming you and your identity? How I identify has nothing to do with you, and how you identify has nothing to do with me. Right? So live your life and let me live mine."

"Part of me wonders if I should’ve labelled by characters according to contemporary definitions of gender and sexuality so there’d be no doubt in anyone’s mind. To me, all of these labels are context dependent and therefore it does not feel authentic or organic to use words that have developed out of our contemporary discourse to describe my characters…"

"I want it to be there for the people who need it. I don’t want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again."

"I feel like, as a person of color, I’ve always been kind of doing the work against the tide…I feel like change is coming, and change sometimes comes too slow for a lot of us. But it comes."

"I realized the more specific the story, the more universal it becomes."

"I think what happened was the language settled in me much deeper than it settled into people who just can read something once and absorb what they absorb of it. I feel like what I was absorbing was not by any means superficial. And I think I was - from a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for this deep understanding of the literature not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page…"

"The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South. And the town we lived in - Nicholtown, which was a small community within Greenville, S.C. - was an all-black community. And people still lived very segregated lives, I think, because that was all they had always known. And there was still this kind of danger to integrating. So people kind of stayed in the places - the safe places that they had always known."

"It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear me say that boundaries between genres are not borders to be respected so much as walls to tear down. I can’t imagine being a writer of only one genre, and I find that most of the time, even works that I’m writing to fit a particular genre are influenced by my experience of other genres. I think that everything I write is “literary,” but we also have to understand that these terms have marketing implications and so on…"

"Once upon a time I wrote the way a very young child draws, with absolute confidence that the work is genius. A splotch of colour there. A smear. Spirals and zigzags. Exploration and process are at the heart of art when we are only beginning. My writing has always been intentional. Both intensity of feeling and lushness of language have been primary goals of mine from the get go, but it did not always involve this level of anxiousness, of desperation…"

"I’ve been really intrigued by the idea of the end of the world — how it’s never really real, though it may feel like it is to us living in the midst of climate change as we are. Except on the scale of billions of years, according to the kind of timeline where suns birth and die and so on, worlds are quite adaptive creatures. Earth has had five or so ice ages. Dinosaurs have come and gone, many dying, others living on as birds. Mass extinction is par for the planet’s course…"

"Part of that has to do with the fact that the book is a mix of humor and pathos. For me, I love someone like David Sedaris. I think it’s easier for people to consume white gay queer men doing this. It’s different if you’re not [white] because so often we consume otherness solely in terms of pathology. It’s like, “I’m black and gay, so it must be so awful to be me.” The idea of me being able to make fun of my trauma and what I’ve gone through — [publishers] didn’t think there’d be an audience for that. But thankfully we’re proving that there is."

"My mother is very smart, thoughtful, and loving, but I find that religion can take the most intelligent parts of her and warp them. There is a theological argument to be had about being gay, but I have found that trying to have that argument with people who believe their religion is opposed to gay identity is too hard. It tends to dismantle too much of who they are as people. Easier to just clarify, “I plan to have sex, so I can’t date Jesus.”"

"I don’t want people to consume our suffering. I am not tragic. I don’t want to be pathology porn so I don’t write it."

"I believe in a god. And I just don't think I believe in maybe necessarily the Christian God I was raised to believe in. But I do like the idea of Christians who actually practice the teachings of Christ. I think Jesus is like a swell guy…"

"So me saying that only 4% of those films are directed by women, there's a misconception for some people in Hollywood that that's the pool of talent. And you see that in the indie space, women represent maybe 28% of films that are made. So it exists in the pipeline — people are making a conscious decision not to hire those women and not to put them up for projects. Also there's still this language that I really hate, with a studio movie, that we "took a risk,"…"

"I had all but decided to take a break and do some plays, and to see plays and read books and not work – literally not work – until I was going to burn for something."

"Poets pledge allegiance to a country I don't believe in."

"The film itself is sort of an indictment of Hollywood. With black people, why is everything that we do wrapped in Christian dogma? Why do we only have to be the sassy black friend? It was incredible to be able to talk about the frustration that I’d had in this industry, in a film. And then it did so well. So that became my North Star."

"Because it’s set in the world of boxing, and about men, there’s a real danger of it just existing in a real toxic masculinity space…And while I don’t think it should be the role of the women in the film to soften that entirely – like, men should have the responsibility to deal with their toxicity,” she laughs, “I do think that there’s a nice opportunity for the women in the film to come in and be like, ‘Hey…’ you know?"

"The fundamental violence of colonialism, then, is perhaps the inculcated sense, a sensation that bubbles up most acutely by way of the physiological, that your body is not yours to keep, that it is never solely yours to maintain sovereign control over."

"... I find writing nonfiction difficult; it feels like pulling teeth. It’s technically and logistically challenging and emotionally draining, and the whole time you have one hand behind your back. I admire folks who write good nonfiction so much, because I’ve seen firsthand how hard it is to make it work and work well."

"I usually start from a concept, an idea, a form, a question, or a (sub)genre. Never a character or a setting. And I don’t write into nothing; I always have somewhere I’m directing my thoughts."

"Sometimes stories just need something to hold on to, and form is a way of doing that. Sometimes you’re looking at a story and you’re like, What comes next? But if I say I have to add an item to the list, another lover or an episode of SVU…it’s easier."

"There’s something so dark and weird about what a cliché it is…And it makes art harder because it’s like how do I turn this thing that operates on cliché — its life blood is the cliché — and create something interesting from this incredibly dead thing? If you say it’s as hot as an oven, your brain skips over the phrase, it’s so worn. And that’s what makes cliché so dangerous. If you say it enough, you lose your ability to engage with it in any kind of critical capacity."

"His poetry and the plays are so fraught with the things that aggravated and influenced him and ultimately made his life successful. He took this form and infused it with an urban, Latin lifeblood that had never been used in poetry before. He was remarkable as a writer in terms of never really self-editing himself or censoring himself."

"I happen to feel that [Piñero] was a romantic character and there was something about his love for land that was very wonderful, the way he held Puerto Rico, that elusive homeland in the foreground of his thoughts and writing. For all of us who are uprooted and thrown into this city, to keep a semblance of that is always so dignified. That would make it perhaps a bit nostalgic for me because people like that don’t seem to be around anymore."

"When I started writing, there were only two women writers that I knew: Lorraine Sutton and Margie Simmons. There were very few Latinas writing in English... So when I started, I was mainly surrounded by men-Pedro Pietri, Jesus Papoleto Melendez, Lucky Cienfuegos, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Tato Laviera. Many of them had books already published. I was like a sponge, absorbing different things from these male contemporaries."

"Prison is a society within a society. It’s a reflection of life in the streets. The jargon may be different, but we think and feel the same as on the streets and we recreate it in prison."

"Theater is the only thing that still belongs to the people"

"Lesbian relationships are the fantasy, the ideal — I would say that I think lesbians and queer women perpetrate that that idea. And I think it can be really harmful, because it doesn't permit space for a multitude of experiences, some of which can be bad — not because the relationship is a lesbian relationship, but because somebody in the relationship is not well."

"People like domestic violence narratives to be very clear cut, and I talk about in the book how on some level I really wished, I wish she had just punched me in the face, and I had this black eye, and I could be like, "Hey, she punched me. I had a black eye. You recognize that, right?" But it was a lot more subtle than that…"

"I believe firmly in that theory that the stuff you learn when you’re very, very young, it sort of stays. The very first dance I made up that was any good, I was about 15, and I’ve been wringing changes out of that ever since. That’s interesting to me. That’s not death. It’s style or something."

"If that means that it's not for everybody, then yes. "Elitist" doesn't need to mean wealthy and conservative; it can also mean specialised and rarefied, and that's no bad thing."

"I guess once I finish a dance and release it to the public and we're performing it, I'm kind of done... Well, I love watching it, and I love watching other people's work too if it's really good and interesting. But you know, the most exciting part is also very often the most frustrating part: trying to finish something or get it just right or get across something that I'm not sure what it is until it happens.”"