Am I gay, am I straight? No, I'm just slutty. So, where's my parade? What about slut pride.

I slept with a woman on the ship, and afterwards I was thinking, "Am I gaaaay? Am I straaaaight?" And then I realized: I'm just slutty. Where's my parade?

I spent the first half of my career being accused of being gay when I hadn't had anything like a gay relationship. So I spent my years growing up being told what my sexuality was really— which was kind of confusing.

I look inside myself and ask, do I feel like a man, or a woman, and the answer is that I feel like shit.

I gotta come to term with my sexuality. I gotta know what I'm all about.

My gay friends ask, Well are you gay or what?

When I was about eight or nine, I knew I liked boys. But I soon came to the understanding that gay was not as good as straight. That it would be better to be straight and that people didn't like gays because they can't marry and had to be secretive. Nobody told me directly, but these were messages I got from society.

I am not strange but I feel queer. I am like that sometimes. I feel like crying all the time. It is very silly but it will pass.

I gotta get in term with my sexuality, I gotta know what I'm all about.

INEZ: What's the matter?

ESTELLE: I feel so queer. Don't you ever get taken that way? When I can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn't help much.

the fledgling gay adult, is so assailed by social disdain that she can rarely afford the vulnerability that complete honesty requires. It’s not as if, in most cases, she can take time out from her life to figure out who she is; she has to figure it out while she lives, and while her parents and friends, colleagues and church, siblings and lovers, impose a willful definition of normality upon her. And when she does engage in the search — in the quiet moments stolen from social interaction — she has to do so against the tide of shame that pushes her as powerfully inward as pride pushes her powerfully outward. And these impulses can make for a crippling combination. Shame forces you prematurely to run away from yourself; pride forces you prematurely to expose yourself. Most gay lives, I’m afraid, are full of an embarrassing abundance of both.

I often find myself in some embarrassment as an Anglican wondering whether I am a Catholic or a Protestant.

You have to understand what the world was like back then. Being queer was very dangerous, and there was a lot of stigma about it. Even when I was hustling, it took me a long time to realise myself as a gay man. It's hard to accept that some of us, at one time or another, had heterosexual feelings. I certainly did. I emerged very slowly into homosexuality, despite the way I was living.

I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music, they just wanted to fight and get laid. It was many years ago but it gave me this real hatred for the average American macho male.