"While I don't often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact. What I have "chosen" is to be in a gay relationship."
There are a lot of people who really don't believe people, when they say they're bisexual. So I try and avoid the bisexual label, because it just brings so much grief down on you.
People think you're faking, your washy, or people think you're a sex addict, or something, who doesn't want to make up their mind.
I want to be a political fighter, and I want to be in there, fighting. So, I call myself gay. And certainly, I'm like, delighted to be in the Gay Club.
People, all the time, talk about, you know, when I came out. Well, I don't feel like I came out. I feel like I fell in love with someone and that person was a woman and I don't want to minimise that in anyway.
What I'm attracted to, about Christine, is her butchness, and her gayness. But I don't feel like all of a sudden there was a part of me that had been, you know, denied, or living in the shadows that finally could come out.
Gay people are fighting really, really hard for our civil rights. What's important is, the world looks at all of us and sees us as gay, and so we need to be cohesive, and we need to fight as one community.
Marriage equality is so much the right issue for me to kind of pin my hat on. Because after years of being in love with a man, and everybody badgering us to get married, all of a sudden I was in love with a woman that I actually wanted to marry, and I wasn't allowed to.
In a society where there are two different sets of rules for different kinds of people, you're immediately sending a message, that those people that don't have those rights, they're somehow lesser, and they're not really full citizens, and they're not, maybe, even really human.
You're sending a message to the worst elements in society - If you want to, you know, find someone to pick on, this is a good group because the government is not going to protect them.
Being out, how will that affect you being cast in things? It's very difficult to gage. You don't really know about the parts you didn't get cast in. I was offered three roles in a row, just now, that were all lesbian roles.
My daughter, who's 16, was saying to me, “How do you feel about that? Do you feel, like, all of a sudden you're now being typecast?”
My daughter is Jewish, and she's being raised Jewish, and I was like, you know, it's like, It's very similar. It's like, as a Jewish performer, you can complain, “Why do I always get the Jewish roles?” We gotta embrace those roles. We gotta play those roles.
Now that we're married, there is a way that people see us and treat us that is different.
Somehow, once we were married, they understood us as a family in a way that they hadn't before.
I am not a particularly religious person, but I am somewhat religious. The left in general have made a terrible mistake ceding religiosity to the right.
Bishop Gene Robinson, who performed Christine's and my wedding ceremony, said when America was founded, and we said “we”, we had a very particular bunch of people we were talking about: white, male, property holders.
And gradually the “we” became larger and larger. So, then it was white men and black men, who had been freed by that point.
And then, gradually, it was opened up to include women. Gay people are, kind of, almost the final frontier.
This is what the gay rights movement is about, saying that I, as a gay person, am a part of the “we.”
It can't be “us” and “them” anymore. We have to understand, we are all “us”.
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