Leia Sedai

“As a friend of mine, a Black gay man in his sixties, recently told me when we were discussing his life during the AIDS crisis, “I have whole phonebooks of people I lost.” He said it so matter-of-factly. Every time I think of this conversation a profound sadness overcomes me. The unfairness of it, the tragedy. When I meet gay people now, and specifically gay men who are old enough to have been teenagers or adults through the 1980s and the 1990s, I have an immediate sense of respect. It’s possible that this is a similar feeling that others get when they meet a war veteran. Many of our queer elders fought for their lives, and for our rights, and only some survived to tell the tale.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“Blood is blood, though. He’s still family.” I shake my head. “No, blood isn’t family. Blood is just a liquid, like water or honey. It’s not special.” “You really think that?” He sounds genuinely surprised. “You don’t? Your uncle is trying to sell out the orchard that’s been in your family for generations,” I remind him. “I never said family was necessarily good,” he says. “Just that it exists.” “Not because of randomly shared DNA, though. It’s more than that. It has to be.”
― Misha Popp, Magic, Lies, and Deadly Pies

“people must recognize that many of them who are not visibly queer in some way are afforded some modicum of heterosexual privilege—an argument that also comes up often when gay people discuss bisexual, polysexual,[19] and pansexual[20] people, who might be seen as straight by society part of the time depending on whether their relationships happen to be cross-gender (or perceived that way) at the time.”
― Julie Sondra Decker, The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality

“Queer theory” is an academic term which, as queer theorist Annamarie Jagose has explained, is committed to “demonstrating the impossibility of any natural sexuality.” In other words, it challenges the idea that any sexuality, but most notably heterosexuality, is somehow better or more natural than any other.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality