I am spiritual, but religion is man-made, and I’m not having that any more. So my chosen family became my support system.
I grew up in the pentecostal church and that wasn’t very supportive for me. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Justice is 200-plus years of work, pissed away in three-and-a-half years by these fucking assholes. I’m not surprised by anything that’s going on right now. I have lived as a black gay man for 50 years in America. This is the fearmongering that still exists. The governor of Arkansas threatened to de-fund PBS in Arkansas if they ran the episode, because it’s perverted, it’s the gay agenda, and I’m gonna come into their home and molest their children. When they put up a picture of me standing on the steps, there was a backlash from the south. Sesame Street asked me to come on in the Christian Siriano dress, and they wrote a special song about friendship with me and a penguin. All that stuff is of no consequence to me, because I’m going to continue to do me. You can say whatever you want, you can tweet whatever you want, you can write in my comments.
That doesn’t happen when you’re 20 – I had to live long enough. I give zero fucks about what anybody thinks that I’m doing. I don’t care what you think about me because I’m wearing a dress to the Oscars. What you’re seeing in the past two years is the result of me making that choice, all those years ago. That was what motivated me to do things differently. Nobody wanted to see me do anything but be the fairy clown. When I asked for what I wanted, I was dismissed. In the late 90s, I made the decision that that was no longer acceptable for me, and the work dried up. So I became a clown I became the flamboyant queen. This was the late 1980s, early 1990s, and nobody knew where to put that kind of energy in a mainstream way. When I started out in this business, I came to New York City and played my trump card, which was my singing voice.