John Cameron Mitchell Quotes
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The things that interest me are less to do with perhaps finding myself and more to do with surviving and mercy and forgiveness.
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I realized that theater was the perfect thing for me, in short bursts of intense community building.
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You get all these French directors who have all these pretty, vacuous stars of their movies - from Jean Seberg on - who have become iconic but were never really good actors.
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I studied meditation, knowing it would be a huge new calming skill.
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Nothing is a calling card. Everything is what you do. If you do it in order to get somewhere else, you're not actually doing it. If you're thinking, 'What is the weird thing I want to make with my friends?' money and other things will come later.
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My mom was a little weepy. My dad was very logical about it. Once they realized you can't change, they wanted to know that you can be happy and be gay. Once they realized that, they were very cool about it.
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My favorite model of success is when people say, 'Nobody bought that first Velvet Underground album, but everyone who did started a band.'
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I'm an honorary old Jewish lady of the West Village.
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I've avoided situations where I wouldn't have creative freedom.
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Isn't it funny - why is it called a tennis bracelet? It doesn't seem very tennis, does it?
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I actually came out the year that AIDS hit the front pages. So there was this mixed feeling about it - excitement that life's finally begun, but it was completely tied up with mortality and danger and politics.
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After the first 'Hedwig,' interestingly, I was offered to play Hamlet a couple of times.
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There are a lot of silly projects out there.
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It's cool when frat boys say, 'Yeah, 'Hedwig!' I'd like to see that same thing happen with 'Shortbus.'
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I remember seeing a stage version of Plato's 'Symposium' and being really moved because it was written by a man rather than a culture.
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I sometimes buy albums that I don't like now, but that I know I will like. Coming out was the same thing. In high school, I thought, 'I know I'm going to have to deal with this, but I'm not confident enough now.' But when I finally did, my whole life changed.
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I like making art that's useful to people who have a harder road. Art is a tool to get through it; it's a tool to prepare for the worst. By envisioning it in an artistic context, you can make sense of it before and after it happens.
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Some people end up becoming just a conservator of the one thing they did and making sure they get their merch out and all that.
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Drag wasn't really on Broadway. It was considered low-class.
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Humor without sadness underneath it feels cheap and aggressive.
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I quickly found that I didn't really fit into 'gay culture,' as identified by many gay people, and that it can be just as confining as straight culture, not least in the way that bisexual people are told that 'they can't make up their mind.'
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I guess historically, drag queens were imitating movie stars and luminaries. It's kind of nice to have a movie star imitating a drag queen.
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I remember my girlfriend dropped me for the guy I thought was really cute.
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Acceptance and assimilation, you know, breeds mediocrity and perhaps an even more sheep-like conformism in terms of what kind of music you're supposed to listen to if you're gay... What are you supposed to look like? What's your body supposed to look like?