Queer Characters Quotes

The 'Family Ties' role was the first of many gay roles that I've ended up playing. I remember that I made them laugh, and it made me feel good, 'cause it really cracked them up.

In 'A Few Best Men,' I play a lesbian character. I played the lesbian sister of the bride who ends up kissing a dude at the end, but she was, like, a full-on lesbian in that. And I beat out famous Australian lesbians for the role.

I think every time there's a show like 'Modern Family' or 'Will & Grace' that portray gay and lesbian characters and is successful, it just further opens the door.

Queer black characters have been the sidekick for long enough. It's time for us to finally take the lead.

As an actor, it was important to me to play gay characters because, growing up, it was something I never really saw done on television and in film, and I was questioning why there weren't more people like me.

The token gay character is always so funny and so fantastic. That's happened a lot. Or they're often purely victims.

What I would love is for a normalization of queer characters on TV.

Shouldn't you be able to tell your stories from your point of view? We're dealing with that with 'Looking' where some queers are like, 'These guys are so boring! They don't represent me!' But no show can represent everything, so is it OK for us, in 'Looking,' to write about these three men and their world?

I don't think there is a guy that played more gay characters than I have done in my life.

The fact that I'm able to portray these complex, fully realized, queer Asian characters? I never thought it would be in this position. You just never see those types of characters and that type of representation.

A lot of queer characters get painted with either a caricature brush, or they're used to teach, in a way.

I haven't seen that many gay movies, but I haven't loved a lot of the ones I've seen.

As a fan of the franchise, I count myself among the countless LGBTQ fans who have longed to see themselves and our relationships depicted on 'Star Trek.'

I knew that I wanted to primarily play queer characters.

A lot of people know me from my character that I play on 'Superstore,' Mateo, and I'm not interested in playing straight roles. I'm all about playing queer roles.

I think they do a great job on Queer as Folk.

Coming of age as a young queer man of color, it was a rarity to see any reflections of myself portrayed in mainstream media. Turning on the television or going to the movies was an escape into the imagination, yet it did not allow me a place of true connection to what I was viewing on the screen in front of me.

I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.

The more queer characters I play over my years of working as an actor, and the more I see other young artists stepping up with the same intention I have, to make space for the voices of a generation of people who may not fit the status-quo, the more it inspires me to keep going.

We don't see a lot of LGBTQ representation in period dramas because there was so much shame around it at the time. The stories that we tell about that time don't tend to focus explicitly on those sorts of characters, which is nonsense because they existed.

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.

In a perfect world we'd want gay people to play gay people, but I think that's a good rule of thumb: Whoever gives the best audition should get the part. My problem is getting anybody to hire me for anything other than queens.

As we wrote 'Book 1,' before the audience had ever laid eyes on Korra and Asami, it was an idea I would kick around the writers' room... The more Korra and Asami's relationship progressed, the more the idea of a romance between them organically blossomed for us.

My writing books with positive gay characters has come more out of anger than anything else: anger at not having been able to find honest, accurate books about people like myself as a teen, books that show we're as diverse as straight people and that we can lead happy, healthy, productive lives just as straight people can.

Being a black lesbian myself, I roll my eyes a little bit when I see black lesbian characters on shows where it's purely there for decoration. You can just hear it in the writers room... 'What if we make her a lesbian?'