When we went to school, we had the odd tornado drill.
It's a lot harder to write a story that's compelling about identity and sense of self without some villain in the room.
We always try to go back to character: What do they want? What are they doing? What's in motion that they're dealing with? When things get particularly heavy, we will take a step back and look at who has some room to have some things lighter, funnier, or sweeter happen.
You live with your family for awhile, and then you move out into the world, and you still have your family; you just don't get to see them every night when you go home for dinner.
Weddings are such a microcosm of norms, of traditions, and in those traditions, there are a lot of things that have been sort of codified: misogyny and ownership and the patriarchy. So what happens when two very, very disparate families come together for one wedding?
We prioritize access to guns to such a degree that we are traumatizing an entire generation of children.
Gay adults start as gay kids... Now they've got to figure out how to be with each other and be with family, friends, and the communities at school.
Something we learned from foster kids after sitting down with them to hear their stories is that so many of them are invested in social justice, and they're all invested in making the system better for the kids behind them.
I worked on congressional campaigns when I was a teenager. I did United Way fundraisers when I was a teen. We advocated; we spoke out. I protested the first Iraq War in college.
I think so much of adolescence is about finding your tribe, and what kids today have that we did not have is access to the whole world.
I'm on Twitter every single week. It's sort of like being a playwright standing in the back of the theater.
I believe that young kids have agency and can make a difference in the world.
I'm interested in the ways that we're all broken.
I don't think we set out to make it the most intense 'Fosters' finale ever, but I kind of think that's what we ended up with.
I was certainly a kid who believed he could make a difference in the world. I was, as a young person, cooking up plans. My hero is Billie Jean King, and the thing that I find so impressive about Billie Jean is that she took something as banal as playing tennis and used it to change the world. She really did.
There's always hope in 'The Fosters.' These are fundamentally good people who are all trying their best and making some terrible, terrible decisions, but they're trying their best. And there's always hope for those people.
One of the things we try to do on 'The Fosters' is shine a light on the problems and the people that get pushed to the periphery. From the very beginning of the show, when we told people we were putting foster care at the center of a TV show, even the people who work in the system were afraid.
We, as a culture, use television as at least one of the great arbiters of truth. Even though we know it's fiction, when we see it portrayed, we believe it. We recognize it as part of our culture.
We try to not write stories based on reaction. We try to write them based on character integrity as we understand it and observe it.
We've all been watching stories about heterosexuals forever... As a gay kid, you are always having to translate. You are always having to pretend like you are one of the other characters. You're not seeing your life accurately reflected.
