Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore > Quotes

“If we eliminate the pressure to pass, what delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation might we create?”
― Matt Bernstein Sycamore, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

“For folks who have that casual-dude energy coursing through their bloodstream, that's great. But gays should not grow up alienated just for us to alienate each other. It's too predictable, like any other cycle of abuse. Plus, the conformist, competitive notion that by "toning down" we are "growing up" ultimately blunts the radical edge of what it is to be queer; it truncates our colorful journey of identity.

Said another way, it's like living in West Hollywood and working a gay job by day and working it in the gay nightlife, wearing delicate shiny shirts picked from up the gay dry cleaners, yet coquettishly left unbuttoned to reveal the pec implants purchased from a gay surgeon and shown off by prancing around the gay-owned-and-operated theater hopped up on gay health clinic steroids and wheat grass purchased from the friendly gay boy who's new to the city, and impressed by the monstrous SUV purchased from a gay car dealership with its rainbow-striped bumper sticker that says "Celebrate Diversity." Then logging on to the local Gay.com listings and describing yourself as "straight-acting."

Let me make myself clear. This is not a campaign for everyone to be like me. That'd be a total yawn. Instead, this narrative is about praise for the prancy boys. Granted, there's undecided gender-fucks, dagger dykes, faux-mos, po-mos, FTMs, fisting-top daddies, and lezzie looners who also need props for broadening the sexual spectrum, but they're telling their own stories.

The Cliff's Notes of me and mine are this: the only moments I feel alive are when I'm just being myself - not some stiff-necked temp masquerading as normal in the workplace, not some insecure gay boy aspiring to be an overpumped circuit queen, not some comic book version of swank WeHo living. If that's considered a political act in the homogenized world of twenty-first century homosexuals, then so be it.

— excerpt of "Praise For The Prancy Boys," by Clint Catalyst

appears in first edition (ISBN # 1-932360-56-5)”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation

“The key to getting out of a bad relationship is being able to imagine something more fulfilling. --D. Travers Scott”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform

“A lot of people are afraid of critique because they think it means you aren't supporting them. For me, the most important thing in any kind of relationship is the critical engagement.”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

“We have commoditized wellness & creativity, and so gay men are up against these much larger contexts that aren't particularly conducive to the strongest, healthiest, most holistic approaches. Access to basic healthcare, and a healthcare system that is not homophobic and that is responsive to the needs of gay men, would radically change the pressures and therefore the opoprtunities for those of us who work primarily within the HIV/AIDS sector of healthcare, whether in research, programming and cultural production, or advocacy.
Similarly with the arts: if we had sufficient and adequate funding for community-based arts programming--of all kinds, not just related to gay men and HIV--then it wouldn't seem so shocking and misappropriated to allocate some of those funds for gay men to tell their stories. So it's in this larger, structural context that we gt forced into very painful conversations about prioritizing of funding, or what's most important, and it's always a reductive conversation because of limited resources. --Patrick "Pato" Hebert”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform

“Every time a trick hangs up on me, I gain a renewed faith in humanity—someone really cares!”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

“cruise the ones in the flesh, not the ghosts on the internet”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform

“We all cultivated critique--we were dogmatic in our alliances, self-righteous in our beliefs. But the broader Mission dyke culture we called queer, so much of it was about loyalty at any cost. Loyalty could mean safety but it could also mean reenacting high school popularity contests and taking on the victors' roles. High school was only a few years in the past for most of us, even if we might have been scandalized if anyone had mentioned that. Accountability only occurred when people would get in dramatic fights, and it was more about whose team was stronger or more popular than about what actually happened.”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, The End of San Francisco

“I realize that I will always find respite amongst the migrants, the refugees, the expatriates, the homeless, the pirates. I will always be the fence-sitter. I will pass as I see fit and fail to pass when I was really hoping I would and refuse to pass when it serves my purposes.”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

“For people who might struggle to survive at basic levels, it may be more fulfilling to claim an identity like butch, which does not necessarily require engagement with institutions like medicine or academia, which have historically sought to kill, pathologize, or ignore people of color and poor people (and queers). Most transgender scholarship leaves little room for groups of people or ways of being that do not fit a narrow definition of what is scholarly enough or trans-gressive enough.”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

“U.S. society, after all, continues to be starkly segregated along class and race lines, never allowing people to have the sort of interactions necessary to undo prejudices, stereotypes, and oppressions.”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

“Now I think about how much shutting off was required, just to exist in day-to-day experience. You couldn’t express shock at everyone dying right in front of your eyes, because shock felt like a form of cruelty. So you would act like everything might be okay, even when nothing was okay.”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis

“After all, isn’t anyone who would actively seek to inhabit femininity frivolous, foolish, and therefore responsible for her own oppression? This stereotype in itself is pretty damn misogynistic; it also points out the misogyny inherent in many who would call themselves feminists, who, rather than reimagining femininity, buy into the dominant discourses that devalue it and do all they can to divorce themselves from that which they fear will make them weak and powerless.”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

“What do you like to do”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, The Freezer Door