Queerness Quotes

“Queer' not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
― bell hooks

“I hate that word. Straight. At the very least, those of us who are nonstraight should get called curvy. Or scenic. Actually, I like that: 'Do you think she's straight?' 'Oh no. She's scenic”
― Nina LaCour, You Know Me Well

“I've had more difficulty accepting myself as bisexual than I ever did accepting that I was a lesbian. It felt traitorous. A few years ago, I admitted to myself that I was still interested in men in more than a "Brad Pitt is slick hot sexy" kind of way. But I worried what my friends, exes, and the Community would think. I never even broached the subject with my parents. Because what bothered me the most was that people would think that being a lesbian had been a phase for me, when that was so very not the case. What I feared was that I would no longer be part of a community, that I might be seen with my boyfriend and not be recognized as something not the same.”
― R. Gay

“It takes strength to be proud of yourself and to accept yourself when you know that you have something out of the ordinary about you.”
― Abigail Tarttelin, Golden Boy

“Conformity requires us to minimize our differences for the greater good. We fear that if we don't conform, we will be abandoned, but there is no loneliness like having people only see you after you've erased yourself.”
― Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary

“We come to a corner where there are a few people protesting the festivities. I don't understand this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired.

In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love with a gender. I have fallen for individuals. I know this is hard for people to do, but I don't understand why it's so hard, when it's so obvious.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“There's a whole spectrum of reactions to coming out. Getting kicked out is one extreme–being accepted wholeheartedly is the other. But in the middle, there's this. The awkwardness, the refusals to acknowledge, the uncomfortable weirdness of turning away.”
― Andrew Joseph White, Compound Fracture

“Androgyny doesn't look a certain way, though gender is ingrained in society such that liberal readings are applied to everyone, sprinkling gender on everything from haircuts to careers to alcoholic beverages. In this way, presentation, when considered for the purpose of legibility feels futile... As long as I am subjected to this unconsented reading of my body, I will desire nothing more than facelessness”
― Sachiko Ragosta, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

“I don't remember how I hurt myself,
The pain mine
Long enough for me
To lose the wound that invented it”
― Jericho Brown, The New Testament

“Our definition of queer is that which fundamentally transforms our state of being and the possibilities for life. That which is queer is that which does not reproduce the status quo.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines

“The path I've been led down is one of senseless catastrophe, a classic Hollywood tale of the man who plummets to rock bottom just moments before he would have crested the peak. [...] I'm living out this queer tragedy as they write it for me - just one more tormented, half-in-the closet gay character whose dark descent can serve as a cautionary tale AND move tickets. But that's certainly not the only queer genre convention out there, no by a long shot. And while tragedies are important stories to tell, our appetite can be satiated with more than just suffering. If the story is good, it will find an audience. Whether it's a tragedy or a triumph doesn't matter.”
― Chuck Tingle, Bury Your Gays

“You always reminded me of a suncatcher, the way you held onto a kind of light.”
― Kai McCarthy, Holding The Moon With Lavender Hands

“Maybe for the ones who get good at pretending, it won't come out for years and years...Or they'll, quite without warning, walk into the ocean until their life disappears. And everyone will be stunned. And everyone will blink in perplexed anger. She was so happy. Always so happy.”
― Stephanie Oakes, The Meadows

“But when I think about ponds infested with gallon-big goldfish, I feel a kind of triumph. I see something that no one expected to live not just alive but impossibly flourishing, and no longer alone. I see a creature whose present existence must have come as a surprise even to itself. Imagine having the power to become resilient to all that is hostile to us. Confinement, solitude, our own toxic waste... Imagine the freedom of encountering space for the first time and taking it up... A dumped goldfish has no model for what a different and better life might look like, but it finds it anyway. I want to know what it feels like to be unthinkable too, to invent a future that no one expected of you.”
― Sabrina Imbler, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

“It’s not just about telling queer stories," I continue, louder now as I find my footing. "It’s about telling all kinds of queer stories. Yes, there can be tragedy and death and darkness, there's an important place for that, but don't forget about queer beauty and queer catharsis and queer joy! Every gay character doesn't need to die in the first scene, or in a third-act blaze of glory to save everyone else. Support queer heroes, not just onscreen, but offscreen too!”
― Chuck Tingle

“My queerness isn’t just a matter of who I sleep with, bigger than sexuality, a subversive reclamation of life outside of the lines”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“I have used the word ‘tolerance’ in this chapter because it is the term that the people I am writing about use with real intent. Tolerance here, I think, is not what Goethe brilliantly diagnosed when he wrote, ‘Tolerance should really only be a passing attitude: it should lead to recognition. To tolerate is to offend.’2 So often, as Goethe knew, to talk of tolerance is a sign and symptom of the failure to integrate – and a hierarchical, patronising attitude towards others. We will tolerate you if you fit in with us: an attempt to keep power relations in place, while disavowing their force. But tolerance towards queerness is a much more unstable dynamic, which requires a different, more radical form of hospitality to otherness, and an acknowledgement of the impact of queerness on one’s own sense of self, and a consequent loss of bearings. Tolerance in this sense is an exploratory value, and not just a gesture of political self-congratulation.”
― Simon Goldhill, Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History

“If you're a boy who plays with dollhouses, you're already dead!”
― Derek McCormack, Castle Faggot

“find solace between blues and pinks
of sunset, lavender haze
creep up on time before it
does so to you”
― j. g. bova, Not Ghosts, But Spirits III: art from the women's & lgbtqia+ communities

“To queer, as a verb, means to disrupt, to defy the binary.”
― Carlie Pendleton

“We all carry unseen stories under our skin. We hold identities around ethnicity, gender, ability, or religion that remain invisible and are discounted by the world around us. We wish for a sense of belonging without negotiation, explanation, or being required to somehow prove our validity. In a world of separation and division, we need to learn to be better at seeing (and believing) each other.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“What kind of useless anger / can cause hatred towards love?”
― Kai McCarthy, Holding The Moon With Lavender Hands

“Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I harbor. Rage colors me as it
presses in through the pores of my skin, soaking in until it becomes the blood that courses through
my beating heart. It is a rage bred by the necessity of existing in external circumstances that work
against my survival.”
― Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage

“Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I harbor. Rage colors me as it presses in through the pores of my skin, soaking in until it becomes the blood that courses through my beating heart. It is a rage bred by the necessity of existing in external circumstances that work against my survival.”
― Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage

“In the body I was born with, I had been invisible as the person I considered myself to be; I had been invisible as a queer while the form of my body made my desires look
straight. Now, as a dyke I am invisible among women; as a transsexual, I am invisible among dykes. As the partner of a new mother, I am oft en invisible as a transsexual, a woman, and a lesbian. I’ve lost track of the friends and acquaintances these past nine months who’ve asked me if I was the father. It shows so dramatically how much they simply don’t get what I’m doing with my body. The high price of whatever visible, intelligible, self-representation I have achieved makes the continuing experience
of invisibility maddeningly diffi cult to bear.”
― Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage

“In the body I was born with, I had been invisible as the person I considered myself to be; I had been invisible as a queer while the form of my body made my desires look straight. Now, as a dyke I am invisible among women; as a transsexual, I am invisible among dykes. As the partner of a new mother, I am often invisible as a transsexual, a woman, and a lesbian. I’ve lost track of the friends and acquaintances these past nine months who’ve asked me if I was the father. It shows so dramatically how much they simply don’t get what I’m doing with my body. The high price of whatever visible, intelligible, self-representation I have achieved makes the continuing experience of invisibility maddeningly difficult to bear.”
― Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage

“The Sex Wars are over, I've been told, and it always makes me want to ask who won. But my sense of humor may be a little obscure to women who have never felt threatened by the way most lesbians use and mean the words "pervert" and "queer." I use the word queer to mean more than lesbian. Since I first used it in 1980 I have always meant it to imply that I am not only a lesbian but a transgressive lesbian -- femme, masochistic, as sexually aggressive as the women I seek out, and as pornographic in my imagination and sexual activities as the heterosexual hegemony has ever believed.”
― Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature. SIGNED.

“Out there, we understand, there is another way to want, to have, to be. Sometimes, even when we do not venture out to find it, when we try to want only what we are given, the object comes to us. And the world, without our consent, breaks open and expands.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“And their queerdo tale? It never followed a straight line—just a deliciously messy path from plot twist to plot twist.”
― Ken Breniman, a three body solution: A Daringly Subversive & Juicy Tale of Love, Evolution, & Humanity's Last Hope

“There's a word for that, you know. In English."
"I'd rather not know it, then," said Vern.
Gogo nodded. "Why not?"
"Because without a name for it, it's just something I am. A part of life. Once it's got a name, I know that means someone has studied it, dissected it, pulled it apart. When something has a name, they can say it's bad," said Vern, and she didn't want to hear anybody else's thoughts on what was bad anymore.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland