Ian Mckellen Gay Quotations

It's only fair that stable gay relationships of long standing should have the same rights and responsibilities as married couples. I know the image of gay marriage is to some people horrific and ludicrous.

Every anti-gay remark from the Church gives the thug a license to be cruel.

The battle going on over gay marriage in America reveals an awful lot. The Bible belt - people hate gay people. Because the Bible tells them? No, the Bible tells them an awful lot of things that they ignore.

There is a fantasy as old as the modern gay rights movement that if all our skins turned lavender overnight, the majority, confounded by our numbers and our diversity, and recognising a few of our faces, would at once let go of prejudice forevermore.

I can't take on all the worries of the world, you know. I can only talk about being gay and being an actor. I'll have to leave those other battles to somebody else.

It was wrongly assumed that I wished to become some sort of leader among gay activists, whereas in reality I was happier to be a foot soldier.

Establishing the rights for gay people to be married would cost the Australian government nothing financially and would gain for you worldwide respect from people like us and, of course, would change lives enormously - the lives of gay people and of their friends and of their families and therefore of Australia as a whole.

I've had enough of being a gay icon! I've had enough of all this hard work, because, since I came out, I keep getting all these parts, and my career's taken off. I want a quiet life. I'm going back into the closet. But I can't get back into the closet, because it's absolutely jam-packed full of other actors.

I'm dead against the idea that you should try to "cure" people of being gay.

I have been reluctant to lobby on other issues I most care about - nuclear weapons (against), religion (atheist), capital punishment (anti), AIDS (fund-raiser) because I don't want to be forever spouting, diluting the impact of addressing my most urgent concern - legal and social equality for gay people worldwide.

I think it's one thing to declare your sexuality, if you care about what that is. It's another thing to start talking in public about what you do in private and who you do it with. It's not that they [my significant others] don't want to be identified as gay, but that they don't want to be identified as ... with me.

In the old-fashioned sitcoms, to be gay was, in itself, funny, and you laughed at the characters rather than with them.

I am going around British secondary schools, as a gay man talking about my life, and encouraging schools to get rid of homophobic bullying and to care for their gay members of staff and their gay students.

The demographic of our audience is young. It also contains a high proportion of black, Jewish and gay people, who have all been encouraged by society to think of themselves as oddities or mutants. I hope that's why X-Men chimes with them - it's certainly why I was attracted to the idea in the first place.