Laverne Cox, Isis King, Janet Mock, Our Lady J, Ryan Murphy, Steven Canals, the people I've met growing up, and even me - all have inspired me to see that it is possible to get far anywhere and that the capacity for positive and motivating influence is truly unlimited.

We rarely see cisgender heterosexual men in positions where they're nurturers. We only paint femmes, trans women, and cis women as nurturers, and because of toxic masculinity, men are taught not to be that way.

Religion has played a big part in eliminating the nuance in humanity. People began to believe things before they knew them. It stopped people from listening and learning with the patience and love of the God they believe in.

I get to decide how my body shows up in any space. When I'm walking into a place like the Globes, I want to make it very clear that how I show up is to further the freedom of everybody.

Parents, teachers, clergy and physicians change lives with their words. It is hypnotic for a child or patient to hear an authority figure's words. As I am always sharing, 'wordswordswords' can become 'swordswordswords,' and we can kill or cure with either words or swords.

For a couple of years at the end of the 1970s, Dustin Hoffman was a fixture in our family. My father was his lawyer and friend.

Raised by an irresponsible mother during the Great Depression in the Jim Crow south, my father was on his own from the age of 13.

I live in a sort of insular world. It's mostly my family, my house, staying home and working.