Queer Liberation Quotes

“Anyone who’s been deemed ‘unnatural’ in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of ‘nature’ has nothing to offer us–the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. [Xenofeminism] is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology–the sooner it is exorcised, the better.”
― Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation

“I came out at 32.

Married my college sweetheart. Stay-at-home mama to 2 small children. Small town preacher's daughter living in a bubble of privilege she had no idea existed. Playgroups & sippy cups & easy predictability. An eternal restless, seeking edge telling me there was something more.

There was that life. It was good. Safe. Stable.
Then it was gone.

“How did you not know you were queer?”

My kids asked me this over the years. Their life in a sex-positive, queer-friendly, liberal utopian bubble made my lack of self-awareness utterly perplexing.

It is hard to know a thing when you are given no context for it.

You know there is a misfit, something not entirely right. But without options beyond compulsory heterosexuality & with a deep desire for approval, one does what one sees.
At least, that is what one does until one no longer can.

Being queer was like holding the golden ticket to a club nobody wanted to go to. I had no idea that once I blasted down those closet doors, with their bouncers of fear & religion & internal bias, the club would be lit. The way a party can be when everyone inside finally knows what it means to come home.

My queerness is a Tupperware container (thank god) that nobody will ever find a lid for. A box that cannot be closed. The reclamation of wholeness over goodness, transforming the perpetual misfit into one holy hell of a celebration.

Owning my queerness was like learning the desert floor was once the bottom of the ocean, meaning the towering 200-year-old saguaro watching over me was somehow born underwater.

It is the dogged insistence on coloring outside of every single line. It is the refusal to accept a singular definition that makes the word witch at me finally feel at home in the spaces where words are left behind.

My queerness rests its foundation on a ground named freedom. I speak it loudly because I have the freedom to do so without fear of reprisal or harm.

I claim this life of mine under the rainbow & the complexity of the history it has given me fiercely.

To love a woman in a world that said I must not will never be anything but a revolution.

And when I kiss her, trust me, entire galaxies are mine”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“Drive us underground
We will always surface
Singing words you can never own
Because you don’t have the range to hear them.
Go ahead, take away our words,
We will birth a whole new language
You’ve been sending your armies for us since the beginning of time
But we were born for battle.
You wonder why we are still here?
You made us this strong.
Do you think getting rid of a word will silence us?
You’d have to ban them all.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc