Stephen McCauley Quotes

The truth is that I am a gay American.

I knew that I was different when I was six years old, but it wasn't until I got to about 10 or 11 that I realised I was a gay man.

For queer people, the personal is very political, just to talk about it in a public space. It's very political just to come out and take up that space and be like, 'This is my narrative. It's not an outsider narrative, and it's not a fetish narrative; it's just my story, and it's worth being told and listened to.'

I'm not ashamed to be gay.

For a long time, gay men fought to be seen as different, doing our own thing: This is our lives; this is what we do. Accept it. There's a conservatism that has come into the gay community: 'We're just like you, just like everyone else.'

In the 1980s, there weren't a lot of role models for gay teenagers.

In retrospect, the most unnerving aspect of being openly gay was that it turned out to be as disappointingly normal as being straight.

I am the most well-known homosexual in the world.

If what you want is a life where your homosexuality is not an issue, move, as many have done.

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

The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier.

I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.

Male homosexuality, in particular, seems to possess some quality of being intrinsically subversive when let loose in long-established institutions, especially male dominated ones.

I'm on the younger end of Gen X, and for me, growing up gay was not cool.

If you ask anyone who is gay, they know, there is no confusion.

I knew I was gay since, like, fifth grade.

What do you mean you don't believe in homosexuality? It's not like the Easter Bunny, your belief isn't necessary.

It doesn't annoy me but I think of myself as a presenter who is gay, rather than a gay presenter. It's a subtle distinction, but that's how I view it.

Lesbians and gays... they still have to fight, even inside. It's not that simple, even if they seem to be accepted.

I now realize that I am a gay man before anything else. Other gays may think they're a Jew first, or black, or a banker, but I'm gay.

I know that, as a bisexual, sometimes people who are gay or lesbian look down upon the bisexual community as well and assume that people who are bisexual just don't know what they want or are just playing both sides of the fence, and that's not the case, either.

When I came out publicly, some photo editors had a field day searching for pictures of me with a limp wrist or some other stereotypical gay signifier - as though, after decades in the public eye, they'd suddenly come across a trove of shots where I looked like a Cher impersonator.

It's going to take generations of gay people marrying before these things start to feel natural. We haven't had it long enough to remake it as our own, so it does feel like you're getting dressed up in straight drag to do it.

I feel like I've been observed as an individual more than a gay person, or as a filmmaker with a certain point of view rather than a lesbian filmmaker with a gay point of view.

I'm the only gay person my parents know.