Queer Quotes

To engage in activism that envisions alternatives ways of organizing society and alternative ways of being is to risk membership in society, a sense of belonging, however partial it may be. Activism can make us vulnerable because it is so obviously about wanting something beyond what is, and to have a political desire often is construed as wanting too much.

Deborah B. Gould

Part of me wants to make this boy bruise, bleed, and sob, and part of me wants to soothe him and care for him. The tipically complex yearnings of the kinkily queer.

Jeff Mann

It is so hard for a queer person to become an adult. Deprived of the markers of life's passage, they lolled about in a neverland dreamworld. They didn't get married. They didn't have children. They didn't buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment.

Michelle Tea

Not many boys like boys; but they like being a boy, showing it, being it together" (22)(rbt: where does this come from? this being a boy, which is also a doing -- this being wrapped in desire? who teaches it? how? when?)

Duvert Summers

Partner struck me as an ugly euphemism. Euphemism in the sense that people don’t like to talk about sex, so they displace it on to some kind of business model. Since I have a distaste for business, I see no appeal to something that sounds like a financial leadership team.

Barbara Browning

The African continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged.

Chantal Zabus

Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don't guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With girls, it's total vulnerability from the beginning. Our skin is bare and soft. We love with claws and teeth and the blood is just proof of how much. It's feral.And it's relentless.

Leah Raeder

What happened was private. I was in it with Rose. She had hurt me grievously and now I was forever attached. I was in it now with all the women in the world. I walked home glad. I will die, I thought with a bounce in my step. I'm whole. Not whole like anyone else, but whole like me. Painful, but simple. It was very simple now.

Eileen Myles

The bag I wanted was beyond reason - something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous.

Eileen Myles

I hate that word. Straight. At the very least, those of us who are nonstraight should get called curvy. Or scenic. Actually, I like that: 'Do you think she's straight?' 'Oh no. She's scenic

Nina LaCour

She didn’t know that my heart was a sandstorm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn’t know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her, my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful.

Michelle Tea

As though I had displeased the gods with my erotic hubris, I managed to be the only bisexual girl in the history of colleges who failed to arouse the interest of the campus queers immediately upon setting foot in the dorms.

Valentine Glass

Maybe I grew up too fast, maybe that's my trouble. I feel so lost out here...hung up between two worlds; half-kid and half-adult, half-boy and half-girl. And sometimes it seems like I get the dirty side of both.

Ann Bannon

The eye of youth is very observant. Youth has its moments of keen intuition, even normal youth -- but the intuition of those who stand mi-way between the sexes is so ruthless, so poignant, so deadly, as to be in the nature of an added scourge...

Radclyffe Hall

You can stop waiting, you know,' she says. 'For what?' 'For God to strike you down.

J.C. Lillis

Though she was intrigued by someone like Claude, the love affairs of a real lesbian like Petit were a matter of complete indifference to Mickey. It seemed to me that our indifference, the indifference of the 'normal' world, made the life of such women even more tragic. For they suffered from their loves, like any other woman, but without the balm of sympathy and understanding.

Tereska Torrès

If queerness can be defined, then it is no longer queer.

Madhavi Menon

Living with stress and secrets is both stressful and secretive.

James Dawson

I have laughter and amazement, not search results. I have unexpected longings, not hierarchical ratings.

D. Travers Scott

Why, oh why, must we always go through pigs to get our truffles?

James St. James

If your organization is not formally committed to a policy of nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression or gender presentation in its employment practices, you should not expect lesbian,gay, bisexual, transgender, gender-nonconforming, queer, and/or questioning patients and families to feel safe seeking out your services.

Kimberly D. Acquaviva

Her friend - and her partner on the stage. You will not believe me, but making love to Kitty - a thing done in passion, but always, too, in shadow and silence, and with an ear half-cocked for the sound of footsteps on the stairs - making love to Kitty and posing at her side in a shaft of limelight, before a thousand pairs of eyes, to a script I knew by heart, in an attitude I had laboured for hours to perfect - these things were not so very different. A double act is always twice the act that the audience thinks it; beyond our songs, our steps, our bits of business with coins and canes and flowers, there was a private language, in which we held an endless, delicate exchange of which the crowd knew nothing. This was a language not of the tongue but of the body, its vocabulary the pressure of a finger or a palm, the nudging of a hip, the holding or breaking of a gaze, that said, You are too slow - you got too fast - not there but here - that's good - that's better! It was as if we walked before the crimson curtain, lay down upon the boards and kissed and fondled - and were clapped, and cheered, and paid for it!

Sarah Waters

In ancient Greece, adolescence was a time when young men left their biological families to become the lovers of adult men. Sexuality was but one element of an affectional and educational relationship in which youths learned the ways of manhood

Barry D. Adam

I opened my mouth to do some calm explaining. "I'm gay." is what came out.

Jane B. Mason

There's something very... I don't know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You've never changed sex, have you?' He shook his head. 'Or slept with a man?' Another shake. 'I thought so,' Yay said. 'You're strange, Gurgeh.' She drained her glass.

Iain Banks

I am not here to entertain straight people.

Sarah Schulman

Gay kids aren’t a “plot point” that you can play with. Gay kids are real, actual kids, teenagers, growing up into awesome adults, and they don’t have the books they need to reflect that. Growing up, my nose was constantly stuck in a book. Growing up as a lesbian, I was told over and over and over by the lack of gayness in said books that I did not exist. That I wasn’t important enough to tell stories about. That I was invisible. Why are we telling our kids this? Why are we telling them that they’re a minority, and they don’t deserve the same rights as straights, that they’re going to grow up in a world that despises them, that the intolerance of humanity will never change, that they’re worthless. It’s not true.

Sarah Diemer

To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother. - Dedication, Todo Sobre Mi Madre

Pedro Almodóvar

We can't ignore right-wing demagogues who insist that the word of the doctor who proclaims a child's sex at birth somehow holds more sway over the reality of the body than the word of the person who inhabits it. - Gwendolyn Ann Smith

Kate Bornstein

When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience - with all their expectations, prejudices, and presumptions - completely off the hook. - Scott Turner Schofield

Kate Bornstein

My conversations with people who are just beginning to understand and include transsexual and transgender people in their plans or programs lean heavily on this. For them, the very fact of a transsexual who is a real student at their school or client of their agency can be new and surprising. But for queers and transfolk, who have institutionalized an additional set of queerly normative genders, it can sometimes be difficult to hear that we, too, must expand. If butch daddies want to crochet, if twinkly ladyboys are sometimes tops in bed, if burly bears can do BDSM play as little girls, if femme fatales build bookcases in their spare time, these things, too, are not just good but great. They bring us, I believe, wonderful news: news that gendered options can continue to explode, that the chefs in the kitchen of gender are creating new and imaginative specials every day. That we, all of us, are the chefs. Hi. Have a whisk.

S. Bear Bergman

She follows her nose and stands once more before the doors of a quintessential dilemma. Male or Female. Here is her paradox. A staccato voice seems to challenge her, berate her. Hombre or Mujer. Mann or Frau. Homme or Femme. Gentleman or Lady. Com on, decide. She knows them all. She is them all. Not fluid or all-encompassing, gathering the harvest of the reaping fields, but fractured and split and bleeding. Her inner core weeping out of itself. There is nothing for hermaphrodites. It's too confusing. The words rattle around in her earbones, androgynous and humming. How can she choose? She cannot choose. To choose is to sunder.

Mark O'Flynn

I see fashion as a proclamation or manifestation of identity, so, as long as identities are important, fashion will continue to be important. The link between fashion and identity begins to get real interesting, however, in the case of people who don't fall clearly into a culturally-recognized identity.

Kate Bornstein

That’s the vicious truth doctor. For me and persons like me, we are experiencing a divorce from our own individual self by sensing our sensations, emotions, behaviors as not belonging to the same person or identity. That’s how you psychiatrists could explain it. That’s how society would like to codify its population. Such a ludicrous model we’ve been creating calling it civilization

Neda Aria

I felt old. Again. It had been happening a lot lately. I did not live the life of an old lady, but I could hear it beckoning to me, like a mermaid on a rock."— Michelle Tea, "Paris: A

Clint Catalyst

Harper: You, the one part ofthe real world I wasn't allergic to.

Tony Kushner

Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.

Tony Kushner

A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out.

William S Burroughs

Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.

Susan Stryker

If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

Alison Bechdel

You could cut...all that

Mel Bossa

When he appeared before the lord, his lordship was smitten immediately with the boy's unadorned beauty, like a first glimpse of the moon rising above a distant mountain. The boy's hair gleamed like the feathers of a raven perched silently on a tree, and his eyes were lovely as lotus flowers. One by one his other qualities became apparent, from his nightingale voice to his gentle disposition, as obedient and true as a plum blossom.

Saikaku Ihara

If I was gay, I wouldn't need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a coming-out party without people thinking I just want attention. I wouldn't have to explain that I fall in love with minds, not genders or body parts. People wouldn't say I'm 'just a slut' or 'faking it' or 'undecided' or 'confused.' I'm not confused. I don't categorize people by who I'm allowed to like and who I'm allowed to love. Love doesn't fit into boxes like that. It's blurry, slippery, quantum. It's only limited by our perceptions and before we slap a label on it and cram it into some category, everything is possible.

Leah Raeder

(...) I think your definition changes based on your experiences." (age twenty-two, bisexual)Six years later, this same woman noted:"I date both men and women, but i don't like the word "bisexual", because I think it implies polarity. I guess I started thinking about this around 4 1/2 years ago, when I was involved in a long-term committed relationship with a man, but a queer man. And it made me redefine things, because I didn't believe that a queer man and a queer woman together in a relationship like ours was conventionally heterosexual." (age twenty-eight, bisexual)

Lisa Diamond

I've had more difficulty accepting myself as bisexual than I ever did accepting that I was a lesbian. It felt traitorous. A few years ago, I admitted to myself that I was still interested in men in more than a "Brad Pitt is slick hot sexy" kind of way. But I worried whatmy friends, exes, and the Community would think. I never even broached the subject with my parents. Because what bothered me the most was that people would think that being a lesbian had been a phase for me, when that was so very not the case. What I feared was that I would no longer be part of a community, that I might be seen with my boyfriend and not be recognized as something not the same.

R. Gay

What was the point of being himself if he had to be alone?

Austin Chant

As a lesbian I have no face, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.

Gloria Anzaldua

Laugh and cry and tell stories. Sad stories about bodies stolen, bodies no longer here. Enraging stories about the false images, devastating lies, untold violence. Bold, brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world.

Eli Clare

All monsters are queers. Who is able to bring the dead back to life? God and the Devil. The Devil makes dead men into monsters: immortal, immoral—and queer.

Derek McCormack

Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his extraordinary gift.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

I find myself making excuses for this kind of bullying behavior. Not everyone has been to college, learned trans 101, studied queer theory... But this is unfair to myself and other trans people. I've come to realize that understanding me isn't a matter of being an intellectual. Likewise, one doesn't have to be a radical to respect my feelings. Decent people consider how their comments affect others.

Elliot Deline

What I love about being queer is... Everything. I like that it makes me different, and I like that it makes people uncomfortable sometimes. I like that it makes people ask me lots of questions about things they probably would not normally ask people about their relationships or lifestyles. And most of all I love being queer because i get to have a girlfriend.

Tegan Quin

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind usis a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another

Anatole France

Our creed [atheism] is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.

Erwin Schrödinger

By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were....Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't.

Erwin Schrödinger

Why, these men would destroy the Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor. They found a tooth in a sand pit in Nebraska with no other bones about it, and from that one tooth decided that it was the remains of the missing link. They have queer ideas about age too. They find a fossil and when they are asked how old it is they say they can't tell without knowing what rock it was in, and when they are asked how old the rock is they say they can't tell unless they know how old the fossil is.

William Jennings Bryan

We both disliked rude rickshwalas, shepu bhaji in any form, group photographs at weddings, lizards, tea that has gone cold, the habit of taking newspaper to the toilet, kissing a boy who'd just smoked a cigarette et cetra. Another list. The things we loved: strong coffee, Matisse, Rumi, summer rain, bathing together, Tom Hanks, rice pancakes, Cafe Sunrise, black-and-white photographs, the first quiet moments after you wake up in the morning.

Sachin Kundalkar

I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I'm looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don't know where I'm going; I decided I'm not crazy or alien. It's just that I'm more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles or forests []. A wolf child. And they've dragged me into this fucking schizo-culture, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles.

David Wojnarowicz

When straight-identified women have sex with women, the broader culture waits in anticipation for them to return to what is likely their natural, heterosexual state; when straight-identified men have sex with men, the culture waits in anticipation for them to admit that they are gay.

Jane Ward

The pending brahpocalypse/ coup d'état - whatever it was - was much more important than whether a donut-eating Police Officer saw a flying saucer over a gay club or not." - Red Gods Sing.

Trevor Barton

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