Queer History Quotes

I've seen things change and people forget: the history of Berlin, the history of queer struggle, the history of AIDS, the history of New York changing from an artistic powerhouse to more of a financial one now.

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were gay, just for starters. They didn't have a name for it, but their primary affections and intellectual attractions were all for other men.

What was interesting was talking to older gay men about what it was like being gay in the Eighties.

When I was growing up as a young lesbian in the '50s, I looked in vain for books about my people. I did find some paperbacks with lurid covers in the local bus station, but they ended with the gay character's committing suicide, dying in a car crash, being sent to a mental hospital, or 'turning' heterosexual.

There have always been drag queens everywhere.

I'm really interested in going back in to the history of non-binary people and seeing how many people in history were non-binary but that didn't know it themselves or because we didn't have the language, couldn't talk about it. I know how that felt being a young person not having that language.

We encrypt 'Drag Race' with the secret language that kept gay people linked for many years before the '80s.

We need to talk about representation for queer people in the media and also in law. And there's a long history of drag queens leading those discussions in marches on the street and even in bars going back to the time of Stonewall and before.

The inspiration behind '1950' was... gay history and the way that our people had to hide in public and how that affected the way that we love each other now.

When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.

OK, so my parents were married in 1955 and my mom knew my dad was gay and my dad knew he was gay and so I was, like, 'Why in the heck did you get married?' Like, what was going on? What was that time? It's like this crazy paradox that my whole life is based on, or my family's based on. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand '55.

I'd grown up with a lot of women. My mother was a famous lesbian in the '20s and '30s, and I grew up with only women, so I was used to getting on with them.

I did some research into what was going on in terms of the sexual revolution that was happening in the '60s in the gay community and particularly in the drag world. Before the '60s, guys doing drag would dress like their mothers or iconic Hollywood actresses.

All Anne Lister wanted was a wife, and the other liaisons couldn't commit, but Ann Walker did. She took sacrament with her, and they became wife and wife. That shows extraordinary strength.

Historically a publicly unaccepted but incredibly rich culture, queer love was only able to exist privately for a long time, expressed in society through coded art forms.

To play a repressed gay man, I had to explore what life was like in an era of sexual repression.

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

It's so important to recognize that there have been fabulous queer artists all throughout our history.

Drag is literally so ancient that it predates modern understanding of gender, of transness, of queerness. Drag predates modern ideas of gender, of theater at all. Drag predates the word 'drag' itself.

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 think camp is a really fascinating thing, and it's hard to define and hard to apply consciously. It's almost something you take from material that's already existed in the world, a reading of the world. But I think it speaks of a long tradition of gay reading of the world, before gays were allowed to be visible.