85 Quotes About Queer

But in the midst of this decaying, burning city, there are pockets of hope. It can be found in the tiny dark rooms in underground bars, where women with short hair cheer on men in dresses. It can be felt in abandoned cinemas where anonymous strangers fall in love if only for a few moments, and in the living rooms where families crowd around, drinking sweet black tea and Skyping their homesick relatives so that together they can watch the long, rambling talk shows that go on all night. Saleem Haddad

In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where all those excesses are on display, those are straight families, and they think it's funny. But what people don't think is so funny is when two middle-aged lawyers who are married to each other move in next door to you and your wife and they have adopted a Korean girl and they want to send her to school with your children and they want to socialize with you and share a drink over the backyard fence. That creeps people out, especially Christians. So, I don't think gay marriage is a conservative issue. I think it's a radical issue. Edmund White

You look like a lesbian artist fairy. LaCour Nina

I have come to realize that in life and politics, there is always more to take into consideration. Michael Bronski

Glitter family is my long-time favourite term for this: the people who those of us pushed to society’s margins (and beyond) make our cohort. Glitter is known to be shiny and unruly, easy to get and hard to be rid of. I love the drag connotations and the femme visibility of it, as well as its unmistakably queer sensibility–look only as far as glitter-bombing for proof that nothing is as thoroughly and satisfyingly queer as glitter. S. Bear Bergman

It's okay to feel bad about how things went down, but it's not okay to drown in guilt and regret every day for having made decisions other people don't agree with. At some point, we all have to man up and decide to do what we have to do, despite the people around us who try to get in the way. ME Girard

My mom's like me and she doesn't want to look weak in front of other people. And she's like Colby in the way that she has to take hits at other people whenever she feels threatened. That used to make me want to cave and do what she wants. But it doesn't anymore. ME Girard

In every woman, Claude had told Mickey, there is a need rarely satisfied by men, a need for simply caressing, and she had described how one of her women friends loved to cares the 'neutral parts' of her body for hours at a time. The neutral parts were the shoulders, the arms, the throat, the back, the parts that men seemd to forget. The insatiable desire for tenderness was felt most strongly in these neutral parts, wich were so rarely caressed. Men made love each in his fashion, more or less expertly, according to Claude, and they were especially fond of those things in women that were different from their own bodies. . Unknown

Not to do as the child wishes would be wrong because he is born on a path, and it would be evil, a crime against nature to make him deny his spirit. Guy Vanderhaeghe

How many of these children would one day be queer? How many would be felled by the acronym? How many by something else? How many would forget the circus? How many would never see it at all? How many would join? Trebor Healey

Sometimes it feels like my queerness was always there but I was too shell-shocked and splintered by violence to see it. When I finally did? It saved me. Opening up to my queerness saved me. Once I began to identify as queer, I began to require this dreaming and commitment to change from my partners. I define myself to claim myself, to foster a curated community of support Jennifer Patterson

I can line up these moments of violence, precariously as dominoes. Sometimes I worry they will all fall; knocking each other down, knocking me down. Sometimes they do. Violence left me hollow. It left me enraged. It left me desperately needing to leave a body I couldn't trust. But most frustrating of all, violence left me too wounded to claim the space I needed in order to find fulfillment in the arms, heart, and body of a queer relationship. . Jennifer Patterson

In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, ‘she’ is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of ‘woman’. The ancient, dimorphic form ‘he’, once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of ‘she’, during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to. . Samuel R. Delany

A text by a minority writer is effective only if it succeeds in making the minority point of view universal. ('The Universal and the Particular')". . In claiming the lesbian point of view as universal, she overturns the concepts to which we are accustomed. For up to this point, minority writers had to add "the universal" to their points of view if they wished to attain the unquestioned universality of the dominant class. Gay men, for example, have always defined themselves as a minority and never questioned, despite their transgression, the dominant choice. This is why gay culture has always had a fairly wide audience. [From the Foreword "Changing the Point of View" by Louise Turcotte]. Monique Wittig

I was finished with assuming the best intentions of those who abandoned me, done trying to assuage my loneliness in barren places. Saleem Haddad

The damaging part of learning to live your life in two parts , whether in reality or fantasy, cannot be underestimated. It is an infectious skill that you learned, one that would eventually spread beyond the bedroom of your life. Life wasn't ever what it seemed on the surface. Nothing could be trusted for what it appeared to be. After all, you weren't what you appeared to be. In learning to hide part of yourself, you lost the ability to trust anything or anyone fully. Without knowing it, you traded humane innocence for dry cynicism. . Alan Downs

I'm more a collector of identities and words that feel right to me. To me this is an inarguable point. I am who I say I am and that's not up for debate. Ian Harvie

Every time someone reaches out to you, even if it's to point out your sin and they seem to be judging you, it is a token of God's mercy. He sees the past, present, and future. He knows that you're headed for an eternity of pain and sorrow and He's begging you to turn to Him for salvation. Jesus is the only way to Heaven: the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He is your only hope. He is your Creator and He loves you more than you could ever love yourself. Please turn to Him. Please don't be deceived into thinking your way is better than His. God's way is perfect. J.E.B. Spredemann

It wasn't that I wanted to know her now. I wanted to have already known her. I wanted her fears and her desires to have shaped my life. I know this is not love, of course. What it is is a queer feeling of nostalgia for an impossible future, for what can never be. That's fantasy. Love is different. John Dufresne

When a man does a queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder Arthur Conan Doyle

Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you're hurting. Paul Monette

Suicide. This is the exact opposite of last time, for this time I'm experiencing a kind of pleasure in life, in being alive, a pleasure in living that I've never experienced before, and I'm hopeful and confident that I can become someone with dignity. I know now why I couldn't change certain characteristics and certain things about myself, but it's not a problem anymore. Certain pathways I failed to open in the past have now opened. My whole self is radiating light. I see with clarity. I understand the cause and effect of the last year. What I had imagined I've now attained. It's as if I can see my life right in front of my eyes, and all I have to do is reach out and draw it in.. Now I don't feel the acute pain I felt before; I feel enlightened, at peace. It's as if I've instantly found the secret of "Suffering", how to bear it and how to endure it.. Yes, this time I've decided to kill myself not because I can't live with suffering and not because I don't enjoy being alive. I love life passionately, and my wish to die is a wish to live.. Yes, I've chosen suicide. The endpoint of this process of "Forgiveness". Not to punish anyone or to protest a wrong. I've chosen suicide with a clarity I've never possessed before, with a rational resolve and sense of calm, in order to pursue the ultimate meaning of my life, act on my belief about the beauty between two people.. I take complete responsibility for my life, and even if my physical body disappears upon death, I don't believe my spirit will disappear. As long as I have loved people fully, then I can be content fading into "Nothingness". If I'm using death to express my passion for life, then I still don't love her enough, don't love life enough. and I will reincarnate in a different form to love her and to be part of her life.. So the death of my flesh really doesn't mean anything. Doesn't solve anything. Is this a tragedy? Will there be tragedy? . Qiu Miaojin

The whole point of literature, I think, is that it’s the best technology we have for communicating what another person’s life feels like from the inside. Garth Greenwell

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

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

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

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

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

[O]nce we give up on the idea that only heterosexuality is normal and that all human bodies are clearly either male or female, more and more kinds of bodies and desires will come into view. Perhaps also, one body may, in one lifetime, move through many identities and desires. The use of, queer’ then, is a deliberate political move, which underscores the fluidity (potential and actual) of sexual identity and sexual desire. The term suggests that all kinds of sexual desire and identifications are possible, and all these have socio-cultural and historical co-ordinates. . Nivedita Menon

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. Unknown

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. Unknown

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

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

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

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. Unknown

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

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

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

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

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

You could cut...all that Mel Bossa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 OFlynn

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

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 Unknown

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

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

I am not here to entertain straight people. Sarah Schulman

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

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

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

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. Unknown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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