iO Tillett Wright

“Familiarity is the gateway drug to empathy.”

“All I'm ever looking for in my work in general is honesty and truth and people being real to themselves.”

“We are neurologically hardwired to seek out people like ourselves. We start forming cliques as soon as we're old enough to know what acceptance feels like. We bond together based on anything that we can - music preference, race, gender, the block that we grew up on.”

“For me, photography is not just about exposing film, it's about exposing the viewer to something new, a place they haven't gone before, but most importantly, to people that they might be afraid of.”

“I was born and raised in Manhattan; I didn't realize that I, in all my androgyny, was a freak to the rest of this country.”

“It's illegal to be gay in Little Rock - this is such a reality for so many people, but once people get to these bubbles of New York or L.A. or Boulder, Colorado, they forget.”

“Where I come from, if you weren't a drag queen or a radical thinker or a performance artist of some kind, you were the weirdo.”

“At sleepovers I would have panic attacks trying to break it to girls that they didn't want to kiss me without outing myself.”

“Along with racial equality and the late bloom of women's rights, future generations will have to explain how, in the past, gays were misunderstood and publicly humiliated for loving each other, and, eventually, how they stood together and conquered stupidity and hypocritical hatred, and fought their way out of marginalization.”

“I was part of a show called 'Manifest Equality' in Los Angeles in 2010, and I realized there was a disconnect between people who are gay or have gay friends and are gay-friendly, and people who think they don't know any gay people.”