Queer Community Quotes

“I hadn't met a lot of openly queer people before. There'd been a crowd of people at school who Pip hung out with with from time to time, but there could only have been about seven or eight of them, max. I don't know what I expected. There was no particular type of person, no particular style or look. But they were all so friendly. There were a few obvious friendship groups, but mostly, people were happy to chat to whoever.

They were all just themselves.

I don't know how to explain it.

There was no pretending. No hiding. No faking.

In this little restaurant hidden away in the old streets of Durham, a bunch of queer people could all show up and just be.

I don't think I'd understood what that was like until that moment.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“But I couldn't relate to this widely held notion of community. We hear the word community all the time. Often it sounds like wishful thinking. Queer community is just as vague - just piling a confusing identity onto an elusive concept. Maybe community, as Famous says, excludes inherently.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“This is why the concept of chosen family is woven so deeply into the fabric of queer community culture: where the bonds of blood have failed us time and again, we hope that our friends, lovers, and mentors will fill the void.
We dream of relationships that stand against the test of time and gay drama, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. Shut out of the heteronormative institutions of marriage and the nuclear family for most of history, queers have traditionally turned to more daring and creative notions of kinship and sharing the future.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

“Meet actual famous trans writer. Feel indicted when famous trans writer says that they think all trans people want to be celebrities. That the drive to celebrity is an endemic problem that fractures trans communities. That we are all so alone for so long, the only way to survive is to nurture a private sense of specialness and uniqueness—all the while fearing that this sense of specialness is our only lifejacket as we swim in a culture where tokenization tells us that we must be the only one, the fiercest, most brutal one, the special one.”
― Torrey Peters, How to Become a Really Really Not Famous Trans Lady Writer

“But humans aren’t meant to survive divorced from the help and hope and love of others, and neither are the drones. We must reject calls for self-sufficiency, self-care, and self-actualization. We help the drones, but we have to help each other too.”
― Ann Leblanc