Michael Bronski > Quotes

“Shame...is a first rate form of social control. Shame is what keeps us in line, what prevents us from discovering not so much who we are, but what we might become.”
― Michael Bronski, Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality

“Full citizenship was, and to a large degree still is, predicated on keeping 'unacceptable' behavior private. This complicated relationship between the public and private is at the heart of LGBT history and life today.”
― Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States

“A coalition of disgruntled Mattachine members, along with lesbians and gay men who identified with the pro–Black Power, antiwar New Left, called for a meeting on July 24, 1969. The flyer announcing the meeting was headlined, “Do you think homosexuals are revolting? You bet your sweet ass we are.” This”
― Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States

“Anything that liberates is not without risk.”
― Michael Bronski, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“It is impossible to understand American history—including the position of LGBT people—without acknowledging the overwhelming, debilitating effect that slavery has had on this country”
― Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States

“A closely connected idea is historian George Chauncey’s argument that gay and lesbian communities found their earliest manifestations in poor and working-class cultures, because wealthier classes could maintain a greater degree of personal privacy. For LGBT people, the luxury of privacy was antithetical to forming communities, which are, by their nature, public in bringing similar people together.”
― Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States for Young People

“Entertainment in its broadest sense- popular ballads, vaudeville, films, sculptures, plays, paintings, pornography, pulp novels-- has not only been a primary mode of expression of LGBT identity, but one of the most effective means of social change. Ironically, the enormous political power of these forms was often understood by the people who wanted to ban them, not by the people who were simply enjoying them.”
― Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States

“The second decade of the twenty-first century—just 150 years after Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kurtbeny, early LGBT rights theorists, ignited the idea of same-sex freedom in 1868—we find ourselves in a heady, global maelstrom of unimaginable liberation and continued stark oppression.”
― Michael Bronski, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“... the slow, complicated evolution of how we as humans decide to define and act on an agreed definition of human rights that would be functional and useful for all national cultures. So far this has been an impossibility.”
― Michael Bronski, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“In eighteenth-century Great Britain, “molly” was used so frequently to describe men, often gender deviant, who desired other men that the private homes or tavern rooms in which they congregated were called Molly Houses.”
― Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States

“The progress of LGBT rights is often directly tied to—sometimes through indirect routes—multiple fights for human dignity and freedom.”
― Michael Bronski, Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World

“When describing Tarzan’s killing habits, Burroughs is quite clear about what makes an ideal man: He killed for food most often, but being a man, he sometimes killed for pleasure, a thing which no other animal does; for it has remained for man alone among all the creatures to kill senselessly and wantonly for the mere pleasures of inflicting suffering and death.19”
― Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States

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