Dee Rees Quotes

I have a coming-out story that's probably very similar to lots of people who are my age: the fear of being rejected, the fear of losing your family and friends. You know, I worked through all of that, and that fear, and what that does to you, is pretty profound.

I will never forget what it was like coming out and having nobody to look up toward.

I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

When you're a young kid and you're gay, you're out there on your own. And you're trying to figure this thing out. And your parents typically aren't gay.

I think as far as I've been able to understand from my friends that I went to college with and things like that is that it almost seems like Russian Roulette when you're coming out of the closet to your parents.

Coming out was painful, but life got so much better for me.

In my work with young Jewish adults in the gay community, I hear their stories of discrimination, of struggling for acceptance, of feeling invisible not for what they have done but simply for who they are.

There's so much bullying with young people and them feeling like they can't come out, and they don't know what to do. And it's something that you have to work through. And, you know, for me, it was - I came out, and then I went back in for a minute. And then I came out, and I was like, 'You know what? This is who I am.'

All my friends were doing just dumb stuff that kids do, like making out with people at parties and starting to date... I didn't know any gay people growing up or any queer people growing up, and so I just really felt alone and kind of lost, and I just wasn't experiencing life.

When I was a kid, dealing with trying to discover myself, I didn't have anybody to talk to. I didn't have any Internet and didn't have any friends. You felt very alone and very frightened.

I felt my whole life like I didn't have a family, and I needed one. So I had to build one, and you build one with faith, hope, and the healing power of love - or you end up the 'Unabomber.' That's the choice.

One of my best friends since I was eleven years old is a gay man, and I knew his struggle. It was a tough life, you not accepting yourself.

After I came out to my mother at 17, I ran away from home and lived with a friend. We come from a highly religious family, and she could not accept it. It was devastating, and I was depressed.

My mom died before she knew I was gay, and my dad thought it was a phase, then realized it wasn't.

When you live this trans experience, there's a point and time in your life that you almost stop developing because you don't know where to go.

I don't know how much longer I can keep going without a friend. I used to be able to do it very easily, but that was before I knew what having a friend was like.

As a group, housewives to-day suffer more from social isolation and loss of purpose than any other social group, except, perhaps, the old.

Over the years I've seen people lose a spouse and then withdraw and lose interest in life, and I believe we need to resist that.

Even though I was manically overachieving and involved in everything, I still never felt like I belonged. That's definitely affected my whole life and why I wanted to become an actor and tell people stories, because communication and feeling like you belong is such an integral part of our social fabric.

Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.

I grew up on a farm in Oregon, an adopted child, with one sibling, and parents the age of all my peers' grandparents. We lived in isolation from the people around us, and it was always a struggle to cope with as a child. The heart can really expire under those conditions. I always felt like I was looking at the world from the outside.

The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.

I do have a family, and I do have friends, and so-called friends, and acquaintances, and many other people I see only around Christmas time. Maybe they could vouch for me. Maybe they could testify to my existence and save a part of me that thinks I'm no better than a bag of potato chips.

Telling the world is the most difficult experience of my life, but it is very close to having to live through the experience that occasion this meeting.

I didn't have any role models. I really thought I was doomed to this loveless, lonely life. I didn't know any gay people until I began doing theater.