S. Bear Bergman > Quotes

“One bright pansy popping through a sidewalk crack will get weeded or stepped on; it's not until twenty fabulous flowers bust through and the pavement is ruined anyway that someone decides maybe it isn't a sidewalk at all, but a flower garden. So please, for the love of gender--go bloom.”
― S. Bear Bergman, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

“I had great femme mentors, I had good role models of gentle men, I found ways to be a butch that did not require being an ass in public, ways of masculinity that were not misogyny - which is what I see more often than I used to these days, this way of butches distancing themselves from any and all things feminine by embodying the worst excesses of men, from relatively harmless ones like spitting on the street and wearing too much cheap cologne to behaving as though women were an entirely separate species of second-class citizen, the objects of jokes and derision.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun

“So please, for the love of gender- go bloom. Or water someone else while they do.”
― S. Bear Bergman, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

“I live in a constellation of intimates, and the shape of us is a family. We touch base and check in, with each other and also—I am so gratified to report—they sometimes check in with one another. Correspondences have sprung up and friendships have started to form beyond my influence. Family has begun to take on a transitive property as well.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Blood, Marriage, Wine, & Glitter

“Remember - the fault is in the garment, certainly not the girl. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with the shape of her. Some designers cut their clothes for certain body types and others for others. Occasionally the pattern will make her ass look strangely square or the fabric will cling in an unflattering way, but Not Cut Well is always the answer, and it has the extremely delightful quality of saving your ass and being completely true at the same time. Use it wisely.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun

“I am doing the best I can. I am hoping I am good enough. I am holding you close, as close as I can, hand cradling your head and breath on your hair, my whole body curved around yours, sheltering you as best I can, trying to remember that I cannot keep you safe, but I can keep you loved.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun

“A real friend, he'd say, is the one who, when you say you need for them to kill someone for you, asks only, "And where did you want me to dump the body?" I understood that it was hyperbole, but I saw him do barely less more than once, to exhaust himself in research and effort to him his people. Which is how he divided the whole world: his people and everyone else.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun

“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

“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, Blood, Marriage, Wine, & Glitter

“There are more locations than girl and boy, man and woman. Decamping from one does not have to mean climbing into another. There’s plenty of space in between, or beyond the bounds, or all along and across the plane or sphere or whatever of gender, and it is entirely okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, and so I shall be a boy.” But it must also be okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, so I shall set about changing what it means to be a girl,” and, yes, okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, and so I shan’t.”
― S. Bear Bergman, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

“But if I can’t go from the body I have to a body that I am certain would feel very right—right like having wings would be or even right like wearing spats would be—then I think, maybe not for me.”
― S. Bear Bergman, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

“You should move toward whatever changes, whatever surgeries, whatever renovations or alterations or restorations will create you in the glory you deserve, oh yes you should. And you should do it with your usual style, and you should do it without shame, and when you’re healed up and ready we can go shopping for something fabulous to showcase the many wonders of you.”
― S. Bear Bergman, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

“I’m just saying: I have never really felt like a girl is not the same as I have always felt like a boy. I mention this because when I have these tortuous inner conversations about how I may yet need to change my body and whether (and in what way) I am prepared to invest myself in the destination model of transition, I have to keep reminding myself of this important thing.”
― S. Bear Bergman, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

“When people speak admiringly of a butch, what I see is someone who has taken on the best gendered characteristics of both woman and man, left a lot of the stuff born of misogyny and heterosexism behind, and walked forward into the world without apology.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch is a Noun

“As she began to speak she stood and started to wrap herself, expertly, creating a binding in minutes that held without a wrinkle until the show ended. Peggy made a connection between binding her breasts and wrapping her hands in boxing wraps; this was what one did before battle, to protect one's self (and it is the Self, absolutely, that binding protects for many butches).”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun

“I don't switch much, don't really want many people to fuck me, because there's a whole code, unwritten but no less rigid than if it were chiseled in stone, about how Tops Must be, how Butches Must Be, and it does not include taking off one's pants. It does not include admitting to one's own desires, only quietly serving the desires of others. It certainly does not include taking a break once in a while to inhabit some other gender, role, or sensibility, even for half a delightful, sweaty hour, in the company of someone who feels like a mirror of me rather than a complementary piece I can fit myself against.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun

“This is partly my own ego, of course. I want to be visible as tough enough to possess and defend a femme who is entrancing enough to become the object of someone else’s desire, but it is equally a measure of protection for the femme in question. What if the same person sees her walking alone tomorrow?”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch is a Noun

“If I am seen as a butch, or a man, I am now—to some minds—walking with someone who is under my protection and who is in my possession. Whatever critiques of gender and culture apply to that assumption, and they are numerous as the grains of sand, they do not always assert themselves in the walkaday world.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch is a Noun

“And at the risk of answering the same question the same way over and over: it’s not a fucking binary. It would be easier for a lot of people if it were, but it just bloody well ain’t, and nothing any of us does can make it that way. Please take a deep breath. Or,”
― S. Bear Bergman, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

“in these moments, my focus narrows to this femme, this street, this time, protecting her as best I can, not walking back and forth in front of the fence and growling, just slowly raising my big head.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch is a Noun

“Instead of wishing for the Field Guide, be glad to live in the beautiful chaos of each of us finding our way into our own gendered menu, our own identity, and our own name for it, which—if you will just love us while we do this complex and fragile part—we will kiss into your mouth with such gratitude when we’re through.”
― S. Bear Bergman, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

“You do not see deviantly gendered people walking around with Nalgene bottles, getting our sixty-four recommended ounces as we go through our days. I am sure that somewhere there is an argument to be made that the trans community as a whole is a little cranky because we could all use a nice big glass of water.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun

“I look at the marks of my past family every day, the visible ones, the ones that live on my skin. They’ve long since healed over; they no longer open me to anything. But they’re a part of me, of my experience, as much a record of what has come before as any of the others and in some ways more so since I took them on purposefully. They’re choices I made. Even if it is true that we’re counselled to pack away our love letters and our old photos of our lost loves if we want to truly heal from breakups or divorce, my wearing the tokens I couldn’t just pack away ensured that I have struggled and mourned until I healed. That’s worth something. It’s also worth something to remember that even if things ended (and not even all that well), I loved and was loved, risked and was safely caught. In the end, I don’t want to cover that or erase it—I want to celebrate it and carry it forward. The tattoo of Stanley’s left foot on my right thigh is a centimetre at most from the constellation on the same thigh. Like an old tree, I wear every year that I’ve lived inside me, drought or flood, long winter or warm fall, all of them legible in my rings and—like on any old tree—once they become part of the whole, they’re beautiful.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Blood, Marriage, Wine, & Glitter

“I have a whole set of problem-solving behaviors and I am anxious to use them, in much the same way that I would stand up on the train to give my seat to someone who seems to need it more than I do: here is something I can address, and I do, and all is well.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun

“I don’t want to be a challenge, either; don’t want to be an alarm system and floodlights and a gate that makes someone want to test his skill and wit against it. I just want to be a big dog in the yard. Next time you come ’round, the dog might be inside. Might be at the vet, might be mama’s li’l puddin’ pup and no threat to anyone at all, but might also take a chunk out of your leg, and so better to try elsewhere.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch is a Noun

“Look for it in the wintertime, if you want to find The Light Of The Season—the real light, not the Hallmark one. Look for the location of resistance. Look for the darkness in which you can be a spark. Look for the opportunity to be bright, to light someone else’s way, to warm their hands, to shuttle them safely through the dark. Look for the crack you can fill or the shadow you can dispel by bringing a little bit of the light of resistance, carefully and precisely, to just the place where it is needed. Look for the place of being bright—of being bright and present outside your own house, or in the window, on the opposite side to the mezuzah, letting anyone who passes know. We are here.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Blood, Marriage, Wine, & Glitter

“I want to be seen in the world as safe instead of strong”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun

“And so I stand here in front of you, every day, seeing the love in your face and the look in your eyes, and there’s nothing in the world that I could deny you. You could carve your initials in me like a tree, cut me open and drink my blood; I wouldn’t dream of refusing, but I know that I can nourish you this way, by being exactly who I am in the world for you. By looking always for ways to make your life a little better, a little brighter, lighting your way a little more, giving you whatever you will accept from me for as long as you will accept it, which I hope will be a lifetime. Because without you, my butch life, my queer life, my strange and curved life has its hope, its triumphs, and its pleasures, but no home.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun

“I have seen all manner of men and boys melt away when I appear and rest my hand lightly but familiarly on a waist or neck, looking friendly and interested and present and big in my body. It rises up in me unbidden, every time, the knowledge that keeping this femme safe when I am not present may have something to do with the public perception of who might be in the wings to protect her.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch is a Noun

“We want to pass things down. We want heirs, and if I cannot have heirs of blood then I want heirs of spirit; I want you, when you are grown, when I am gone, to have parts of me.”
― S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun