A Quote by Nancy Garden
When I was growing up as a young lesbian in the '50s, I looked in vain for books about my people. I did find some paperbacks with lurid covers in the local bus station, but they ended with the gay character's committing suicide, dying in a car crash, being sent to a mental hospital, or 'turning' heterosexual.
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A lot of my friends were gay, so I was spat on on the bus daily, and I ended up in hospital a couple of times from being beaten up so badly.
One day I was 17 years old and I ended up trying to commit suicide and I ended up in the hospital. As a teenager, that was a really scary thing.
The Trevor Project provides crisis-intervention and suicide-prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning teens and young adults. It's truly a lifeline to so many young people who just need someone to listen to them.
I think what Lawrence did was provide an assurance that gay and lesbian couples could live openly in society as free people and start families and raise families and participate fully in their communities without fear. And two things flowed from that, I think. One is that has brought us to the point where we understand now in a way even that we did not fully understand in Lawrence, that gay and lesbian people and gay and lesbian couples are full and equal members of the community.
If I did the structure and had this thing about a straight character, I would never have a sex scene to prove that he's heterosexual. If I have a gay character in a movie, I need to have a sex scene in it - just to prove that he's gay?
I went down to Houston and I stopped in San 'Antone, I passed up the station for the bus. I was trying to find me something, but I wasn't sure just what... man, I ended up with pockets full of dust.
I'm very gay, but I love women. I'm not attracted to men in any way. ... But yes I am gay, I'm so happy. I'm a gay, heterosexual male. ... I got major love for the gay and lesbian community, and I just want to push less separation.
I don't think that gay and lesbian relationships are identical to heterosexual relationships. I do think that heterosexual weddings, or at least most of them, are sort of camp pantomimes about male and female sex roles, even if the couple is marrying as individuals and equals.
When someone isn't ready we must not try to force them out. People are being bullied and committing suicide because they're gay and it's horrible.
I wanted to be a librarian from a very young age. Some of my earliest memories are being taken to the local library. I ended up working as a bookseller. Becoming a writer was the logical offshoot of being a reader.
In researching literary agents I did what the books tell you to do: I looked at the acknowledgments page of a book that was similar to mine. Happily, that author thanked his agent. I looked up the agent on the web and found out that he not only represented authors writing books similar to mine, but I knew some of his clients! So, I sent in the manuscript, and they decided to represent it.
Paperbacks weren't considered real books in the book trade. Up till then it was just murder mysteries, potboilers, 25-cent pocket books sold in newsstands. When the New York publishers started publishing quality paperbacks, there was no place to buy them.
We have many cases of men committing suicide rather than face their own individuality. I know of no case of a woman who committed suicide because she was gay.
I'm happy to say I haven't received that much negative feedback. I'm always thrilled when I get feedback from young people, particularly from The New Normal, young gay people - when they say they want that when they grow up, that means a lot to me. As a kid growing up, I didn't really have a lot of gay role models on television, so it's nice to be part of a movement that gives some more of those.
Heterosexual women ask questions that are a lot to do with what I did to my body and what that was like to lose all that weight and so on. To me it just reveals that that's a preoccupation of theirs. Or gay women have been really keen on knowing how I felt about playing a gay character and have often wanted to talk about their own experiences with children. Straight men have often shown some sense of relief, that they get to experience the philanderer as a woman and not have to judge her in the same way. That's fascinating to me.
It's important to stress what I didn't find. I did not prove that homosexuality is genetic, or find a genetic cause for being gay. I didn't show that gay men are born that way, the most common mistake people make in interpreting my work. Nor did I locate a gay center in the brain.
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