Whether straight, gay, bi, trans... body image and identity can be a struggle for us all.
Someone coming out as gay shouldn't be newsworthy; it shouldn't be warranting a magazine cover or anything like that, which I had as my story for coming out.
The whole principle of coming out is that everyone knows someone who's gay. The minute someone comes out, no one can be a bigot, because someone they love is gay.
If you're writing a bi character, did you look at a lot of bi actors for the role? Did you really go and find people that identified as queer? If you did, then great, and if you didn't find anyone you liked in that pool, well, that's surprising. If you write a character that's trans, the time is now - cast a trans actor.
For me, I remember being 19 and coming out as bi to all of my friends. I'd had girlfriends, and all of these experiences and such, and then, as I got older, I started identifying as gay.
I watched pretty much every coming out video on YouTube that has ever been posted; I watched it in between 14 and a half and 15. Those coming out videos, and those people on YouTube, those brave, brave, brave people on YouTube, without them, I don't know where I'd be.
It is not a woman’s duty to disclose that she’s trans to every person she meets. This is not safe for a myriad of reasons. We must shift the burden of coming out from trans women, and accusing them of hiding or lying, and focus on why it is unsafe for women to be trans.
Phury?" "No, I'm not gay." "Don't feel like you need to hide it or anything." "I wouldn't. I'm just not." "You bi, then?
Many in the trans community are fed up with L.G.B.T. organizations that continue to erase trans identity or just give lip service to trans issues. We need our cisgender allies - gay and straight - to treat transgender lives as if they matter, and trans people need multiple seats at the tables in the organizations that say they're interested in L.G.B.T. equality; this absence has been painful since Stonewall.
I never really got any backlash from coming out. Across the board all I really got was kids who were grateful, which is so touching and rewarding for me. So grateful that I came out, that I could serve as someone in their world that was gay and helped them feel comfortable about being gay themselves.
Almost as soon as I came out as trans, there was a spike in online harassment more vicious than anything I'd experienced before. It turns out there are many people who spend a good portion of their spare time making life as miserable as possible for trans people.
I would go on record saying that there is probably one gay or bi-person in every football team. They're there, they are 100 per cent there. I think people that are gay or from that community definitely are very worried about having to shoulder the responsibility of being the first. I think once the first comes out, there would be loads.
Coming from a YouTube perspective, a lot of times you kind of limit yourself and think, 'Oh, artists from the real world wouldn't want to work with someone who's made their career on YouTube.' But more and more, I'm realizing that artists from both sides are learning that we can benefit from each other.
Learning that someone is gay, queer, trans, doesn't tell you much by itself. They could be any kind of person aside from that particular slice of identity.
I say, 'I'm bi, my love knows no gender,' and the straight community says, 'Oh right, that's just a cover-up - you're gay!' And the gay community says, 'Yeah right, that's just a cover-up - you're gay.' They both want to push me gay.
'Normal Life' looks at the current moment in trans politics, understanding that it is often assumed that trans resistance strategies should mimic the lesbian and gay legal rights frameworks that have become so visible in recent decades.