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“In loving him, I saw a cigarette between the fingers of a hand, smoke blowing backwards into the room and sputtering planes diving low through the clouds. In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

“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, Valencia

“I'm a prince who likes dresses.”
― Jen Wang, The Prince and the Dressmaker

“Do you prefer him or her? Either one's cool-I'm genderfluid.”
― Mvxx. Amillivn, Sappho Intl

“I felt that blush in my chest as we talked stupid talk never quite revealing our queerness to each other but somehow wordlessly generating volumes of desire like some kind of sublanguage that makes you want to splash into it even with all its tensions.”
― David Wojnarowicz, The Waterfront Journals

“Filip was from San Jose, but his painfully good looks excused that. He was tall, six-foot-something-or-other, intensely blue eyes, chiseled features, massive package. Didn't have Prince Albert in a Can, but he did have a thick gauged one through his cock head. His name really wasn’t Filip, it was Brent, an all-American moniker about as dark and mysterious as pastel-colored bobby socks. Initially, I joked about his choice of sobriquet, changing his name to go off to the big city, transform into Mr. Big Stuff, until it dawned on me I’d done the same damn thing with my ‘Catalystâ€� surname. So I shut up.

He comported himself with rigid shoulders and stiff gestures, as if he had a secret. Turns out he did. Filip was married, had a wife for more than a year now, but they had some kind of crazy arrangement. Days they were a couple; evenings they were free to do as they pleased. Where’d they come up with that idea, Jerry Springer?
�

“If you wanted to go back to your place, we could,â€� Filip suggested. “But only until dawn.â€� Yeah, right. An affair is an affair, the way I see it. What difference is there between 5 and 7 a.m.? Was their marriage some sort of religious fasting thing, starve until the sun sets then binge and party down? I'd never sunk my teeth into married meat, but figured it was a logical progression from my I'm Not Gay But It's Different With You saga. And if I was going to sin, I was gonna sin good. That means no peeking to see whether it’s still dark outside.”
― Clint Catalyst, Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person

“Nosotras habíamos nacido ya expulsadas del armario,esclavas de nuestra apariencia.”
― Camila Sosa Villada, Las malas

“Androgyny doesn't look a certain way, though gender is ingrained in society such that liberal readings are applied to everyone, sprinkling gender on everything from haircuts to careers to alcoholic beverages. In this way, presentation, when considered for the purpose of legibility feels futile... As long as I am subjected to this unconsented reading of my body, I will desire nothing more than facelessness”
― Sachiko Ragosta, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

“The chain booksellers, like Barnes and Noble, began to dominate the market, and they instituted a “gay and lesbianâ€� section in many of their branch stores. This section was never positioned at the front of the store with the bestsellers. It was usually on the fourth floor hidden behind the potted plants. What this meant in practical terms was that those of us who had the integrity to be out in our work found our books literarily yanked off of the “Fictionâ€� shelves and hidden on the gay shelves, where only “gayâ€� people wanting “gayâ€� books would dare to tread. It was an instant undoing of all the progress we had made to be treated as full citizens and a natural, organic part of American intellectual life.

…I felt very strongly, and still do, that authentic lesbian literature should be represented at all levels of publishing, including taking its rightful place as a natural organic part of mainstream American intellectual life. The corporate lockdown went into overdrive just at the moment that this integration was beginning to take place. This positioning is essential for so many reasons, least of which is the right of writers of merit to not be excluded from financial, emotional, and intellectual development simply because they have the integrity to be out in their work. Second is the right of gay people to be in dialogic relationships with straights - where they read and identify with our work as we are asked to with theirs. And finally, that even at the height of the strength of the lesbian subculture, most gay people find out about gay things through the mainstream media.”
― Sarah Schulman

“When I left, I took everything with me...I reached under my bed where there were two leather-bound journals that had gold lettering on the front covers and that fastened with a flimsy lock. I read the lettering out loud to myself and gingerly placed the books into my backpack. Diary.”
― Tanya Marquardt, Stray: Memoir of a Runaway

“As for us, we saw the police as a natural catastropheâ€� like floods, fires, earthquakes. There was nothing you could do about these things except to try and escape them. We had no analysis, no understanding that society could be changed. We simply tried to survive, as ourselves, as kamp girls, natural rebels. We did not feel that the police might not be entitled to hunt us, but accepted them as inevitable.

I was beaten up for suggesting that a woman ask for a lawyer. It was seem as a stupid� even dangerous� suggestion. Fighting back with threats of lawyers would only make the police even angrier at us. But part of me felt that what was happening was unfair and unjust, though I had no idea how things could ever be different.

Melbourne and Adelaide were exactly the same. The public lesbian scene was dangerous and difficult. There were many other New Zealand lesbians around, too. In spite of everything, I loved it. The “mateship� was amazing and close, important enough for any risk. And the freedom to be ourselves, to be real, to be queer, affirmed us.

There were private, closeted scenes too, but they were hard to find and cliquey. They were fearful of being “sprungâ€� by kamps who were too obvious. They were mainly older middle-class women. I knew some of them, learnt many things from themâ€� like how to behave in a nice restaurant if you are taken to dinner. But they too had no sense of anything being able to changeâ€� except for the one strange woman who danced naked to Beethoven and lent me de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. She sowed some wild ideas, more than a decade too early for them to make any sense.”
― Julia Penelope, Finding the Lesbians: Personal Accounts from Around the World

“August, we're adults. Just say you got your back blown out.”
― Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop

“Ellwood knew there was a quotation for this particular, painful speechlessness, but it did not come to him. All his words were gone. There was something surging gloriously in his chest, and he had no way to express it.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“We were magical and alive - we cared about music and conversation, sex and spit and blood, holding on tight to the space between youth and adulthood. When I look back at that time, my nostalgia can be blinding. Because we weren’t night dwellers, vampires who would live forever. We were a bunch of kids playing at being Lost Boys, looking for our version of Neverland.”
― Tanya Marquardt, Stray: Memoir of a Runaway

“I could have gone into the philosophy and history of cross-dressing, expounding my own views and feelings on the subject, bringing up the fact that not a few straight men get a kick out of wearing silky panties, heels, and nail polish, not to mention that some women, too, choose to dress in masculine clothing on occasion, among them Marlene Dietrich and George Sand... But I couldn't be bothered.”
― Mehmet Murat Somer, The Gigolo Murder: A Turkish Delight Mystery

“In Haraway’s work, queering animals means not only showing that animals sometimes have unreproductive sex. It means showing the political value of unhinging animality from its heretofore seamless relationship to the concept of a ‘natureâ€� that is stable, predictable, and controllable.

Feminism has barely begun to denaturalize or queer animal sexualities. For instance, Carol Adams persuasively argues that the sexual objectification and consumption of animals and of women follow the same models…She proposes that feminism approach the animalizing of women and the feminization of animals in patriarchal culture as a unique opportunity, namely the chance to study the oppression of animals as a particular symptom of androcentric social organization. However, Adams’s work on the visual culture aspect of meat consumption is devoted to exposing the logic and structure of a pattern of oppression and exploitation, a position depending on one important assumption: that humans are the only actors in this practice. The structure of her argument makes power and privilege pretty unambiguously distinguishable from subjugation. In that sense, it offers rather limited resources for a post- or neo-Foucauldian feminist analysis of power, desire, and norms, the production of truths and practices, and the complexities of self-care.”
― Margret Grebowicz, Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway

“It means you're perfect just the way you are. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.”
― Evelyn Benvie, I Am Not Your Chosen One

“I sometimes wonder if straight people have any idea that getting to read books with queer sex scenes isn’t just erotic. It’s life-giving.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“Blood slides from the sill and onto the wall, where it inches toward the floor. I'll let it stain, because it's exactly what he wanted: a mark on Vietnam.”
― Trang Thanh Tran, She Is a Haunting

“This is how it goes in life: sometimes you’re born with a cleft palette or rickets, like my bow-legged Granddaddy, or a touch short on brains, like my Great Aunt Cal who everyone called ‘Stool.â€� Me? I’m a double hitter. In addition to being what folks call “large boned,â€� I came into this world with homosexual tendencies—though back then I thought of it only as my strange, strong affections for some female friends, having no such notion of “homosexual tendenciesâ€� as a thing, at least not in Midland, Texas.

Notions of this nature found footing in me eight months before I ran away to work in the kitchen at Sugarland Prison, when I got a job at the egg store. The egg store was all wood. Wood floors, wood ceiling beams, wood shelves—that rugged, knotty, reddish wood. The simple kind of wood they used to bury folks in before the floods, when rotting coffins popped from the ground like splinters and dead bodies dropped out in maggoty heaps.

The egg store smelled like wood, too, which I liked. That and just the tiniest hint of smoke from Bibby’s metal pork smoker two streets over. I swear he ran that thing day and night, crazy redneck. And that’s where I fell in love for the first time, there in the egg store that smelled like wood and smoked pig fat.”
― tammy lynne stoner, Sugar Land

“You know, there are some people who want something, crave it even, but they're too proud to admit it, even to themselves. Then they despise, or belittle, or harm whatever it is. Almost as though mocking the object of their desire will stop them from wanting it. Do you get what I mean, sweetie?”
― Mehmet Murat Somer, The Gigolo Murder: A Turkish Delight Mystery

“I returned to Denmark in 1975 and was part of a group trying to set up an international lesbian front. To my surprise all kinds of new lesbians were “coming outâ€� of the women’s movement. Although we had wanted this to happen it was surprising when it did, and difficult to adjust to. I had known some of the women as heterosexual feminists and it was hard to accept them as the new experts on lesbian political theory. They seemed in some way to lack what I felt was a lesbian identity, though I was unable to analyse quite why.

I went to a lesbian conference in Amsterdam, with women who didn’t know and couldn’t have cared that there had been one there ten years before, and how important it had been. I sought out some of the 1965 lesbians and found them now quite anti-political. “We can’t stand all these new lesbians,� they said, “they’re so negative.� I disagreed, of course, on principle, but somehow there was less joy in the air. Unemployment was starting to happen in Europe, political discussions seemed different, we talked more about rape and violence, about men and what they were doing to the world. We talked less and less about sisterhood until finally we didn’t talk about it at all, because none of us could really believe in it quite the way we had when the sun shone and it was always summer, and the whole world was poised on the brink of change.

I asked one of the new lesbians to dance at a social after a meeting. Then I tried to kiss her, gently, as we had been doing for the previous five years. She pushed me away roughly and said I was behaving like a man. I felt hurt and didn’t understand. I got drunk in a corner with some twenty-year-olds, crying into the schnapps bottle and trying to explain to them that there was something happening now that wasn’t what I thought I’d fought to achieve. Something uptight, critical, rejecting. Something not quite� lesbian.

I was only 35, but I was beginning to feel like an old woman of the movement. Most of the lesbians my age were not to be found in the lesbian movement. Many were back working in the mixed homophile organizations, now changing their names to associations of gay men and women. Or they were branching out to start women’s refuges, getting involved in the peace movement, active in the political women’s movement.

I had moved to Norway and found that the only lesbian group I wanted to work in was called The Panthers, involved in social and cultural activites of lesbian poetry, discussions, and sing-alongs.

I got involved with the Norwegian F48 and a huge split over Marxist-Leninist politics, which resulted in the formation of the Worker’s Homophile Association (AHF)� which turned out to be not at all marxist anyway. It all made for interesting political intrigues, but I grew tired and began working very hard so that I could spend part of each year back in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

My work as a tour guide made saving money easy, especially doing lots of trips through the USSR, where there were few consumer temptations. I did, of course, and dangerously, search for Soviet lesbians whenever I could.”
― Julia Penelope, Finding the Lesbians: Personal Accounts from Around the World

“Representation is chump change, darling. I'm sorry to break it to you. People who hold power don't like to put themselves at risk. And that's why Queer people have generally been the visionaries. Because when your everyday life is a risk, you start to think about it all differently. You start to realize that organizing your days around keeping yourself protected is dumb as shit and that there's a whole universe of meaning and connection when you get beyond that.”
― Agnes Borinsky, Sasha Masha

“I tried not to think of all the things I had imagined we would do together â€� return to our lake next summer, move in together someday." - Swimming in the Dark”
― Thomasz Jedowski

“Live them for the people who didn’t get to enjoy being a
teenager. For the people who never lived past being a teenager.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“You deserve better" I say, and then, unlike all the times I failed partners in the past, when I was too young to know how malleable I was, I become better.”
― Marisa Crane

“Happiness is two-hour long baths during an energy crisis because it's fantastically irresponsible and fabulous for your soul. Happiness is fresh Spanish perfume on your collarbone and sipping ice-cool Caipirinhas with fun people whilst Mariah Carey's 'Babydoll' plays in the background on a booming system. Happiness is never giving a fuck about becoming fat because you will always fuck, and instead enjoying delicious, deeply satisfying suya and switching your phone off for a whole weekend. Happiness is bad bitches who no longer front like insanity is not festering on every floor of the Western Promise and finally stop giving a fuck. That's happiness.”
― Diriye Osman

“Happiness is not spending a single second reading endless—and I mean, endless—shitposts in 'The Guardian' masquerading as reportage about the kind of very, very boring morons you actively go out of your way to never meet. Happiness is The Wellcome Collection, but never the Hayward. Happiness is Kylie Minogue and Graham Norton because they're both dope, but not Dua Lipa or Calvin Harris because even though they both seem to be everywhere, all the time, I swear I cannot for the life of me name a single song of theirs.”
― Diriye Osman

“Embedded within these systems of family, friendship, and community, these creepy men may appear harmless, their evil obscured by a benign collective presence, a fog of sorts. This softness swaddles and protect them. This fog abets.”
― Myriam Gurba, Creep: Accusations and Confessions

“He wanted to make him bleed, and then tend to the wounds.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam