Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I tend to read 'The New York Times' and 'The Washington Post' online, and I go to the website for the BBC. I am a junkie when it comes to the news.
'Milk' had to be a financial success, following the success of 'Brokeback Mountain.' It had to make money so studios would develop other LGBT projects.
Growing up Mormon, you learn how to be very, very organized, and it's a passionate group. I mean, in that way, it's prepared me very well for Hollywood.
If you go to Paris, try to speak French. If you go to the South, try to speak Southern. Southern isn't stupid. Southern is narrative; Southern is family.
For people who have fertility issues - and certainly gay men have fertility issues - there's several options for having a child and surrogacy was one of them.
I think people in the U.K. best know me as the guy who will take their picture when they run into Tom Daley. But I'm also his husband and the dad to our child.
I'd say I'm not sure about Christianity, but I sure do like their Christ and the lessons about turning the other cheek, about forgiveness, of yourself and others.
Children are raised by single parents all the time. Those children - I'd like to claim myself as one, I was raised by a single mother who raised me incredibly well.
We've got the same problems any other gay couple and any other straight couple have. But it's 90 percent great. And that's better than most, I think. That's me and Tom.
I always thought that the film would be successful if we captured Harvey Milk, like the way Harvey really was-the personality, the humor, the corny bad jokes, all of it.
I'm my mother's son, so when it comes to altruism and understanding how to do things to benefit a person's life... the women in my life have been much better than the men.
I was very lucky to hear the story of Harvey Milk, it was life-saving for me. I wanted to share it in case it helped others, but the story of one gay man isn't going to do it.
Through my political work in D.C., and having done 'Milk' I got to know a lot of gay octogenarians. They are lovely and they like to tell their stories, and I like hearing them.
I turned in a script that meant a lot to me and an executive at Warner Bros said he was disappointed in me. I took a hit of confidence and stepped away from film-making for some time.
My mom was paralyzed from polio at the age of 2, abandoned by her husband, left with a 2-year-old, a 6-year-old and a 10-year-old, and so, we were raising her as much as she was raising us.
I love the true life stories and the biopics - people say I'm pigeonholed, but it's a fantastic kind of pigeonhole - but it's tough to then go and direct it because I know all the real people.
Tom and I have never claimed to be perfect, whatever that means in a relationship. We're not trying to be anyone's example. We're living our lives and building our family and doing what we love.
My mom had grown up in the South. Louisiana and Georgia. She had been deeply religious. Baptist, then Mormon. She had worked for the U.S. military. She had voted for Ronald Reagan and Bush Senior.
Here's the thing with 'When Harry Met Sally,' it doesn't matter how many times you watch it, it's always interesting, and you're always identifying with a different scene in the movie - at least I am.
Gay and lesbian people want to love and be loved. Some of us want to get married. Some want to have and build families. We want our kids to have their lives be a little bit better than what we've had.
You can't keep treating people differently under the law because of their differences. That's not America. I dare say that's not even a good conservative value. We're all supposed to have an equal shot.
Eventually my courageous Mom did something we do all too rarely. She got on a plane and she came to see me in L.A. - this place where we'd always been told sinners lived. She came to see my gay friends.
I have no respect for someone who lies about their sexuality. At the very least say 'no comment', just keep your personal life personal. If you're going to closet yourself, that sends a negative message.
To me, you couldn't write a character like J. Edgar Hoover and have it be believable. I mean, he was a crock pot of eccentricities. We couldn't even fit all his eccentricities into [ the same named] movie.
I'm always interested in getting to know people, and that means vilified people as much as those celebrated. You find out that heroes aren't always so heroic, and villains have some bit of humanity in them.
Mom came from what has been called the poorest place in America - Lake Providence, Louisiana. She was born on the south side of the Mississippi which was mainly African American and even poorer than the rest.
I don't have to sympathize or empathize with a human being in order to be able to portray them. I mean, some of the greatest roles that actors have been able to play haven't been the most endearing on screen.
You know, for a long time I became almost atheist. I believed in nothing. And it was tough for me to believe in anything at all because I had believed so strongly. And I divorced myself of spirituality, I think.
I think for too many decades, the politicians have driven a wedge between the gay and lesbian communities and the religious communities for their own benefit, and I think it's time to start to broach those divides.
I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that this is somehow a stranger who is carrying your child. And this is absolutely not true. Your surrogate becomes one of your best friends and a member of your family.
I hope we build a son who's strong enough to stand up for other people. And if Donald Trump is out there teaching folks how to build walls, we're hoping to instil in our son the ability to know how to take them down.
Have I always agreed with my Southern, military, Mormon family? Absolutely not. Have we always figured out how to get along? Yes! At the point at which politics supersedes the family and community, we've got a real problem.
I am hopeful that there are three or four Harvey Milks. It would be nice to have one in California and one in New York and one in Texas and Oklahoma-it would be fantastic. Maybe even one in Salt Lake City. I would like that.
Mom got very heated about the new government policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. In her view it was going to allow closeted gay people into her military and she was really against it... she just assumed I agreed with her opinions.
Why make a biopic if it's not somehow helping us now? There's really no point. If it's not informing how we can do things differently now and maybe not repeat our mistakes, than why do this piece about this person or this event?
Too many of my heroes have been cut down, but do I want security guards? No. I've been offered them in the past. But the more you present yourself as someone afraid of being attacked, the more people see you as someone to attack.
I do try to deliver a solid first draft, meaning it's my tenth or twentieth draft and then I call it 'first' and hand it in, much to the chagrin of the studio sometimes when they look at the contract and go, 'You've passed your deadline.'
What's beautiful about the journey of surrogacy is that relationship you build with your surrogate, when it's done in places with good law. These aren't women you stop speaking to once your child is born, this is someone who's part of your family.
When we walked out of that hospital, we had a birth certificate with our names on it that said: 'Father one and father two, Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black.' And we knew our son was not only ours in our hearts but also legally and protected that way.
When I got the deal to do 'J. Edgar,' which was really the brainchild of Brian Grazer, 'Milk' hadn't come out yet. We had just completed principal photography, and it was still basically this little film where we just really hoped someone would see it.
I've never encountered homophobia in casting from the studios or networks - not once, not ever. Where you encounter it is with the agents and the managers, they're the ones who have an outdated notion of the price an actor might pay if it's discovered that they're LGBTQ.
In this miraculous, beautiful universe of ours, where it's an absolute miracle that our eyes and ears can witness it all, we somehow have bought into this lie that the highest plane of existence is whether we put an R or a D on our voter registration card. That's insanity.
It's an incredible education [for the movie J. Edgar Hoover] . It was like I did a college course on J. Edgar Hoover but not knowing and understanding the history and reading the books, but understanding what motivated this man was the most fascinating part of the research.
You know, growing up Mormon, I always got the sense that it was hard for the leaders of the church to feel like they were outside of Christianity. I think, you know Mormon people believe that they are Christian, and a lot of people outside of the Mormon Church, you know, don't see them that way.
There has been this resurgence in anti-LGBT language in the U.K. and the U.S., and the rest of the world. In the U.S. we've heard it with Trump's rise. Here, I've heard language borrowed from the most conservative anti-gay voices in the U.S. used by some gay and lesbian people against trans people.
People from pre-sexual revolution and even from the 60s and the birth of the gay movement still define gay as two men or two women having sex. Our generation defines it from a more emotional standpoint. To be gay means you are drawn to the same sex. But it's a part of who you are, an identity, not an act.
Our brothers and sisters in the trans community, they showed up to every one of our marriage marches when it wasn't necessarily what they needed. So we have to be there for them, use our lessons learned in the marriage fight - how to win when it's difficult, how to change minds that are difficult to change.
How amazing is it that when a young gay or lesbian person has their first crush, no matter where they live in the country, they can imagine that all the way to marriage? When I first experienced a crush, in Texas, there was maybe a second of butterflies that were then dammed in by the fear of what that meant.
Although my mom and I had often disagreed politically and personally, she'd led our family by example, instilling in us a can-do attitude that often defied reason - an optimism many would call foolish, ignorant, and naive, but an optimism that occasionally shocked our neighbors and our world with its brazen veracity.
Having a son has made it all the more important for me to stay in close contact with my family in Texas and Arkansas, whom I know full well voted for Trump. Though I didn't, and have deep problems with this administration and many of them don't. But I'm not going to let that cut the tie from my son to his own history and family.