Best 134 quotes in «queer quotes» category

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?)

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.

Oh, right, I keep forgetting, for lots and lots of people in the world, the notion of “falling in love” has (of all things) sexual connotations. No, that’s not what I think is happening. For me, what falling in love means is different. It’s a matter of suddenly, globally, “knowing” that another person represents your only access to some vitally transmissible truth or radiantly heightened mode of perception, and that if you lose the thread of this intimacy, both your soul and your whole world might subsist forever in some desert-like state of ontological impoverishment.

Once again I was the center of an intoxicating whirlwind. The French Gestapo contained the following two fascinating elements: treason and theft. With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassailable! It would possess the three virtues which I set up as theological, capable of composing so hard a body as Lucien’s. What could be said against it? It was outside the world. It betrayed (to betray: signifying the breaking of the laws of love). It indulged in pillage. And lastly, it excluded itself from the world by pederasty. It therefore established itself in an unpuncturable solitude.

[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.

One might—if one were, say, a gay sex writer—make a case that there's still a vibrant role for queer dirty words. While highly commodified mass-market DVD porn and its kinkier "specialty" cousins shows how sex looks, erotic texts are still the best mode to convey how sex—and its pesky cousin, desire—feels, and what it all means.

Otherwise: the dark, and our bodies, two strange women trying to touch each other.

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.

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.

Perhaps the most radical aspect of queer politics was its claim not only to transcend the homo/hetero boundary but to do so in such a way as to challenge the sexual regulation and repression of heterosexual desire, above all female desire. Queer politics, it was claimed, had a lot to teach those accustomed to the narrow confines of ‘male’ and ‘female’ heterosexual roles in relationships. The re-working of notions of monogamy and the send-up of marriage through queer weddings, the greater sexual adventurism, the rejection of the concept of gay men and lesbians as ‘victims’ in favour of assertiveness and redefinition, and the emphasis on the creation of more egalitarian relationships in the domestic, sexual and social spheres, were all cited as examples of how queer could contribute to a new sexual agenda of empowerment.

People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly un-charted territory—whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the "fag hag" label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are -patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our-parents or schools or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends' tricks and tricks' bar friends and gal pals and companions "in the life," queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from many straight people. Who among us would give them up? Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room. (In some circles this is a common party sport already.) You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends.

People should just be allowed to look in the mirror and see all kinds of possibilities.

Strangely, the subsequent AIDS works that have become iconic in our culture rarely mention the movement, or the engaged community of lovers, but both formations were inseparable from the crisis itself. Now, looking back, I fear that the story of the isolated helpless homosexual was one far more palatable to the corporations who control the reward system in the arts.The more truthful story of the American mass - abandoning families, criminal governments, indifferent neighbors - is too uncomfortable and inconvenient to recall. The story of how gay people who were despised, had no rights, and carried the burden of a terrible disease came together to force the country to change against its will, is apparently too implicating to tell. Fake tales of individual heterosexuals heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue helpless dying men with AIDS was a lot more appealing to the powers that be, but not at all true.

Poetry is queer really, just by nature.

Radu had been wrong all this time. He had felt guilty for the way his heart yearned for other men. But it was not his own love that was poisonous and destructive. His love destroyed nothing, hurt no one. [...] Nazira was right. His love had no evil in it.

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

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.

Something difficult to stomach in this life is the fact that we might all learn and grow at a pace that will hurt people

Sometimes, in a thunderstorm, a lance of white fire would spear down from heaven and split the stone heart of an ancient tree, a crack so deep it seemed to come from the core of the earth. You could feel the skin of the world tense against it. Robin's kiss felt like that.

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?

Sex does not need to be primordial in order to be legitimate. Civilization doesn't just repress our original sexuality; it makes new kinds of sexuality. And new sexualities, including learned ones, might have as as much validity as ancient ones, if not more.

She noticed a large grease stain on the front of her coveralls as she stood up. A few half-hearted wipes told her it was a lost cause. That’s what she got for wearing her good coveralls for a teardown. What had possessed her to even do so? Brionie hadn’t noticed. It would take more than that to get her attention

Si el transfeminismo –queer o pensamiento no-binario– une de una forma específica pilares fundamentales para el feminismo, como deseo, género, sexo, sexualidad, identidad o sujeto político, es seguro que tiene muchas herramientas que ofrecer para comprender y gestionar la cuestión de la violencia sexista. Lo que a nosotras nos gusta llamar un pequeño giro paradigmático que justifica que hablemos de TransFeminismo.

[Single or lesbian motherhood] can be seen as [one] of the most violent forms taken by the rejection of the symbolic ... as well as one of the most fervent divinizations of maternal power - all of which cannot help but trouble an entire moral and legal order without, however, proposing an alternative to it

Some people are born in the mountains, while others are born by the sea. Some people are happy to live in the place they were born, while others must make a journey to reach the climate in which they can flourish and grow. Between the ocean and the mountains is a wild forest. That is where I want to make my home.

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

ten reasons to love being queer viii. the people within our community are so supportive and so caring and so loving, most of the time towards people they don’t even know and it is in moments like that when you realize that the queer community is more than a community we are a family

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.

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

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

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...

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.

Then, she stepped hard on something soft. “Ouch!” exclaimed an urgent, musical voice behind her followed by another blast of that scent. That voice rang out in the night like a small bell. Damn, thought Carmen. These late-night stragglers always show up just as I am closing! “We’re closed,” she commented impatiently, not even bothering to turn around. “I can’t get you anything, my cash register is empty. And, I definitely can’t get you any gasoline. The pumps are shut down.” “You’re on my foot!” said the small, feminine voice again, protesting more loudly. “Get off!” The girl laughed. The street lights came on, as if the pressure of stepping on this person’s foot had turned them on. Carmen laughed at the synchronicity. She felt a small hand on her waist as she moved her foot off the soft place it had landed. It had been years since she had felt a woman’s touch. The feminine voice said quietly, “That hurt.” Carmen whirled around to face the girl she had stepped on, and almost lost her balance. Her eyes met the huge violet eyes of the most beautiful country girl she had ever seen standing directly behind her. Obviously, she had stepped on her. She apologized until she was speechless. Then, she coughed and indicated her truck. The girl had straight, healthy blue hair, delicately shaved over one ear and well-done light makeup with a few rhinestone studs in her ears and nose. Carmen had sucked her breath in audibly at the girl’s appearance. This diminutive girl was stunning. She was a real beauty, set in the dark country night like a diamond against the warm obsidian of the sky. And that fragrance!

...there are lesbian sex parties that happen in the city and how they will often have No Bio-Cock Policies, meaning, No Trans Women. Or, optimistically, Trans Women: Keep Your Pants On. Meanwhile trans guys are welcome to brandish whatever cocks they want. Kind of frustrating, kind of problematic... The term bio-cock has become shorthand for the fact that trans women aren't sexually welcome in any communities anywhere.

[...] the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing that happens between men and women.

They're gonna keep telling you are a crime of nature and you're gonna look at all your options, and choose conviction, choose to carve your own heart out of a side of a cliff, choose to spend your whole life telling secrets you owe no one till everyone, till there isn't anyone who can insult you by calling you what you are.

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.

They'll say you are bad or perhaps you are mad or at least you should stay undercover. Your mind must be bare if you would dare to think you can love more than one lover.

This feels like a big deal.' This makes me laugh. 'It is a big deal. I'm describing how my heart beats.

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.

This was another thing Vale’s mother never understood: Vale was aro-ace, both aromantic and asexual. She’d told her parents she just wasn’t interested in dating any number of times… But they never seemed to get it. To them, Vale’s sexuality was a ‘phase’ that they were certain she would one day outgrow. Their obliviousness was a raw spot for Vale.

To be clear, I’m not, like, a drag queen. I’m not trans. I just like how I look with my eyes outlined in dark colors, or sometimes some color on my eyelids or lips. Call me femme if you want, or a queen, but whatever it is, it’s just me. And after sitting in a room with a dozen other kids and knowing thousands of other kids are also sitting in rooms, taking the same test, making us all anonymous little filled-in dots on answer sheets, I desperately want to feel like me again. I deserve to. So I buy me, or at least the things that make me feel like me. Capitalism must be so proud of what it’s made me into.

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

To feeling no shame in fear, no doubt in survival, and no silence in anger.

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.

Touching her fingers, touching skin to skin. Her mouth, her breath, the shape of her flushed face. A tender hand on a naked waist, exploring the new feelings. The inner-soul scent of her hair, burying your mind in it. Inside of me, always inside of me. Memorizing the feelings and perfumes. Something one can keep. Carmen thought, Trust… Something growing. Something true. Something reaching out.

Wanna know how I know I'm straight? On a 3 week road trip through Scotland right after high school, my best friend (gayyy!) and I slept in the same bed at quaint little B&Bs every night. And nothing ever happened in bed between us, except for the occasional fart. If I was gay, I would have totally fucked the shit out of his cute little gay ass.

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

Tutto nel mondo parte sempre da una curiosità. Dalla curiosità può nascere il desiderio e dal desiderio il bisogno.

What I’m interested in is the exploration of the body and desire as a self-actualising or fulfilling component on the individual’s life journey instead of as a part of the social, political, or economic structure of a “society” or “civilization.” In this sense all desire is queer desire because it moves against these mechanisms of control. The hard part, the painful part, is for us ourselves to learn how to love one another, have affection for one another, support and be kind to one another. You can spend a life learning how to do it properly.