Top 1200 Gay Rights Quotes & Sayings - Page 11

The rights of homosexual people are human rights, and human rights are for everyone.

Coming out as gay was an easy enough matter for me, since I worked in a profession where being gay had a long history of being accepted.

You don't bring in a gay character as a way of commenting on gay issues. You have one there because he's real, and that's his life, no less so than your life is yours.

I don't think America knows what a gay parent looks like. I am the gay parent.

When I wrote a gay character, I spent six months asking questions I've never asked a gay friend, the questions you don't ask just because you don't have the right to do it.

I knew that I was gay, I knew it. I just couldn't see myself as a gay woman, even though that's where my heart was.

[Larry Kramer] thinks Charles de Gaulle was gay. He thinks Max Schmeling was gay.

I do think some older people in the gay community could be better influencers for gay youth, better educators. I made it a point to be that person.

You don't look at a painting and ask if the artist was gay or straight. I think it's irrelevant in any situation - I don't care if my garbageman is gay or straight as long as he picks up the garbage.

I can pass as a lot of things: people meet me and don't think I'm gay and speak about gay people in a certain way or they don't know I'm Middle Eastern and do the same.

I know that a large part of my fan base is gay. They've shown me love from the start. I mean in this industry, everyone from my glam people to my dancers are gay. You can't be homophobic in this line of work - I'm a pop star!

I love that drag is a way for people to vacation in the gay nightlife, but... it's quite a different experience to perform for a gay audience than a straight audience.

When I first came up, the whole AIDS epidemic was starting, and the gay community that I experienced from the beginning of my career was mostly - and overwhelmingly - concerned with staying alive. And, also, I felt really aware of the preciousness of life and time. The gay community and people who were HIV-positive were treated so badly, and I was very disturbed by things. But I also saw a lot of love and connection in the gay community at that time.

Maybe there are logical reasons for a gay person not to have a great relationship with their parents - not because there's a parent who made him gay, but just because it may be difficult to understand everything.

I think that the best day will be when we no longer talk about being gay or straight - it's not a 'gay wedding,' it's just a 'wedding'... It's not a 'gay marriage,' it's just 'a marriage.' It's not a 'black man' or 'white woman,' it's just 'a man' and 'a woman,' or 'a human' and 'a human.' I'd just like to get to that.

Love yourself, whatever makes you different, and use it to make you stand out. Mine is my voice and the fact that I'm gay: well, the fact that I'm flamboyantly gay.

I would rather people not smoke. I certainly appreciate the fact that smoking is not legal in restaurants and bars. That used to stop me from going out at night because you'd go someplace and your clothes would reek and you wouldn't enjoy the experience and that affects your rights. It's always a question. Whenever you are talking about these issues, it's not a question of restricting rights. It's a question of restricting whose rights, and providing for whose rights and that's a tricky balance.

I grew up in a pretty gay world - my brother's gay and he's been married to a man for 20 years, which is like 60 in straight-people years.

I'm not getting married until gay people can get married. Because I'm gay.

In the law, rights are islands of empowerment. . . . Rights contain images of power, and manipulating those images, either visually or linguistically, is central in the making and maintenance of rights. In principle, therefore, the more dizzyingly diverse the images that are propagated, the more empowered we will be as a society.

There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.

We must understand the role of human rights as empowering of individuals and communities. By protecting these rights, we can help prevent the many conflicts based on poverty, discrimination and exclusion (social, economic and political) that continue to plague humanity and destroy decades of development efforts. The vicious circle of human rights violations that lead to conflicts-which in turn lead to more violations-must be broken. I believe we can break it only by ensuring respect for all human rights.

When I was young, they thought I was from outer space. I was the only gay person they probably knew, and they struggled with that. Everybody knew I was gay. They just didn't want to talk about it.

If on one day we find the fast-spreading recognition of popular rights accompanied by a silent, growing perception of the rights of women, we also find it accompanied by a tendency towards a system of non-coercive education--that is, towards a practical illustration of the rights of children.

I know, people were like, "It's all right that she's gay, but she doesn't have to look so gay." Trust me - I'm never cutting my hair again!

I think after time goes by and you earn certain rights or you break through certain barriers, you could sometimes, maybe, take it for granted what you have now that you didn't have before. And then that would lead to a certain lack of community, in a way, caring in a way, that I saw before [in gay society].

From my admittedly cranky perspective, Bush/Cheney are lousy on the Bill of Rights, Clinton/Gore were lousy on the Bill of Rights, and everyone within bribing distance of the 2008 election (Hillary, McCain, Giuliani) are lousy on the Bill of Rights, too.

My main quarrel with liberalism is not that liberalism places great emphasis on individual rights - I believe rights are very important and need to be respected. The issue is whether it is possible to define and justify our rights without taking a stand on the moral and even sometimes religious convictions that citizens bring to public life.

There's so many different kinds of rights to consider these days: computer, e-book, all sorts of things. Forget foreign rights and entertainment rights. There are so many things to consider and an agent is going to know how to wade through all that much better than you are.

I'm not a stereotypical gay man but I am a gay man as much as anyone else.

There are lots of big books that have gay characters - or, more commonly, a gay character - in secondary roles, but seldom are their lives, and especially their sexual lives, on center stage.

I've been in the industry forever, since I was a kid. It's a very LGBTQ-plus friendly industry and all my friends are gay or gay-straight, or trans-nonbinary, everything.

The way we need to view aid is as a fulfillment of rights, and Mexico, as other countries around the world, have agreed and signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the covenants of Human Rights and that includes the right to food, the right to water, the right to housing and the right to education.

It's not enough for Hollywood to make a bunch of gay movies. That's obviously a big part of the equation, but then gay people have to show up for those movies.

I’m quite flirtatious with anyone. Some people, because I’m playing a gay character, get quite nervous. And I have to reassure them. I’m like, ‘I’m not gay. I’m not coming on to you. Yet.’

Do you care about climate justice? Are you about women's rights and women's reproductive rights? Do you care about civil liberties and the Voting Rights Act? There are so many opportunities for people to go back and be inspired and plug into their own community.

When I went into 'Fiddler,' I wondered about the response I'd get - the backlash because I'm openly gay. There was none. I toured Canada and America, and not one single review suggested that I played the role gay or that I seemed anything but Tevye.

There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile.

I am in the valley of prayer on the issue of gay marriage, and I will err on the side of inclusiveness and not exclusion. I'm going to follow Jesus and say, Whosoever will, let them come. And I'm going to extend rights to all of God's children and if I am wrong, God will have to judge me.

They always try to make it like jocks discriminate against gay people. I've been a big proponent of gay marriage for a long time, because as a black person, I can't be in for any form of discrimination at all.

I think the gay - the gay/straight alliances in the school are very useful as far as creating understanding among kids and so kids aren't necessarily so stigmatized or demonized for being who they really are.

I think, as a gay man in society, we are not accepted yet... let alone a gay man with a kid.

I've always known I was gay, but it wasn't confirmed until I was in kindergarten. It was my teacher who said so. It was right there on my kindergarten report card: PAUL IS DEFINITELY GAY AND HAS VERY GOOD SENSE OF SELF.

[On Philadelphia society:] The parties remind me of the Gay Nineties -- the men are gay and the women are in their nineties.

I'm a straight guy and I date women, but I get on really well with gay guys. I'm very comfortable with my sexuality. The weirdest thing for me is when straight guys get really freaked out by gay guys. It's almost like they're insecure in their own sexuality. For me, I can be in a room full of gay men and have fun.

Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum - all we are supposed to expect - but human rights aren't enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.

People come up to me in pubs - gay pubs, mind you - and can't believe that I'm gay.

Is it easier for you to have straight friends, Larry [Kramer], since you seem so often disappointed in your gay friends who can't live up to what you expect of them as gay people?

I thought I would try to be gay for a while, but I'm just more sexually attracted to women. But I'm really glad that I found a few gay friends, because it totally saved me from becoming a monk or something.

The truth is even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America, right under the surface we have huge issues at play that really do affect women. It's time for all the women in America and all the women that love women and all the gay people and the people of color that we've all fought for to fight for us now.

Someone will say, 'Shura's album is about being a gay woman in London.' Umm, I feel like my album's just about me. I am a gay woman, and I live in London... It's not about being a gay woman in London.

Words can mean different things to different people. It is important to understand what people mean when they use a certain word. Let's make an example. Take the word gay. Fifty years ago, gay meant exclusively cheerfulness, lighthearted excitement, merry or bright colors. Today this word has a different meaning. You won't call a cheerful person gay because it could be understood as something else.

I have always been attracted to gay guys so I always thought I am gay man.

Being a teenager, a gay teenager, in such a small village is not that much fun. I am part of the gay community and most gays have a similar story to mine.

For some reason, being gay can be such a sad thing in media, so it's really cool to see someone like me who doesn't look like, I guess, the stereotypical gay guy.

I had to smile when stories emerged questioning whether I was gay. Obviously I knew I wasn't but people were curiously desperate to suggest I was ... when you know a gay guy has a crush on you, it's the most flattering thing.

I've had so many interviews where the last question is, Are you gay? I had to find very creative ways to say that I was gay, but that I wasn't going to talk about it.

I really brought that with me: that people think gay people are disgusting... I remember thinking, 'Okay, I might be gay. But I won't tell anybody. Nobody will ever know.'

Gay people can't be proud of the country and want to defend it too. What's the army afraid is going to happen if gay people are in it. Private, shoot that man! I can't, he's adorable.

All too frequently, the knee jerk reaction to tragedies by the media and chattering class is to move to restrict our rights... Our founding documents make it clear that our inalienable rights come from God and that the job of the government is to ensure and protect those God-given rights.