Queer Art Quotes

People are really seeing that drag is an art form, that it's so much more than self-expression.

My favorite drag queens are Tammie Brown and Katya, so I like my drag queens a little left of sanity.

I'm trying to take drag back to its down-and-dirty roots where people get offended at first, and then they're like, 'Oh my God, this crazy queen.'

When it comes to drag, my favorite thing we can do is kind of push against the beauty standards of magazines. We don't need to look like supermodels. That what really makes drag special and makes it unique and makes it queer.

When I first started performing, the only community that truly got what I was trying to do was the LGBTQ community.

I agree with Ru that it'll never be mainstream, because mainstream means everybody knows it, everybody loves it, everybody accepts it. That's never gonna happen with drag, but it's definitely become more mainstreamed for people that never knew anything about it, being opened up to it as a form of art.

When I started making films, it was never that I had this great ambition to only do gay-themed material.

I think there's so many amazing LGBTQ artists, ranging from commercial to underground, that are influencing people at large.

Claude Cahun is a fascinating artist - one of the few women to be part of the surrealist movement, she and her partner Suzanne Malherbe took on men's names and made artworks that investigated female identity long before 'The Second Sex' or Cindy Sherman.

I have an art magazine about drag called 'Velour,' named after myself, and I have a monthly show called 'Nightgowns' that curates and presents some of the most creative and high-quality drag in a professional theater setting.

Drag is never going to be completely mainstream because it's still a queer art form.

The truth is I do take drag really seriously, and I think that there's kind of a place for that - to see it as this political and historical art form, and to want to continue pushing it in new directions. And also honor the old directions as well. So I'm sort of like a drag intellectual/drag queen.

I think, from the beginning, I was healed and inspired by queer culture, and Christine and the Queens, as an idea from the beginning, is queer because it questions the norm.

Queerness isn't just Lady Gaga and overpriced drinks and fauxhawks. It's James Baldwin and Bea Arthur and Gertrude Stein and Gore Vidal.

Any time you get to see a bunch of drag queens performing music and performing songs and being idiots, I'm in.

There are a lot of queers starved for entertainment from their own community.

Bob Fosse, even though he wasn't gay. He was certainly queer and had a huge effect on the 'Hedwig' film, as did Hal Ashby and Robert Altman, who had a weird butch queer feeling about him. His films almost flirted with camp but in an extremely realistic acting way.

Queer art is as much about starting conversations as it is about making dramatic statements.

I came to N.Y.C. in 1988 and got very involved with Act Up. I also started making movies, including two very gay shorts, 'Vaudeville' and 'Lady.' It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and New York City was both dying and very alive at the same time.

Drag has always been an open space where anyone within the LGBT community can express their creativity.

The truth is, a lot of people go to drag shows, really, for very light entertainment, and I think sometimes maybe we don't even give the audiences enough credit as to what they'd be down for.

I hope 'Hellcat' is picked up again in years to come by people who realize just how queer it is: not just in its characters but its sensibility.

Working on the Obama campaign was a life-changer for me. I realized during that campaign that structure is the name of the game, and so, soon after the election, filmmaker Adam Baran and I started Queer/Art/Film, a monthly series at the IFC Film Center in downtown New York that invites queer artists to present the films they love to an audience.

My films might have been queer - because I was - but they were not gay.

There's a lesbian aesthetic, just as there's gay camp, but I don't know if there's such a thing as 'lesbian art.'