Amy Goodloe

“There is no formula when it comes to gender and sexuality. Yet it is often only people whose gender identity and/or sexual orientation negates society’s heteronormative and cisnormative standards who are targets of stigma, discrimination, and violence. I wish that instead of investing in these hierarchies of what’s right and who’s wrong, what’s authentic and who’s not, and ranking people according to these rigid standards that ignore diversity in our genders and sexualities, we gave people freedom and resources to define, determine, and declare who they are.”
― Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
― Audre Lorde

“To me, “queerness” is an alienation from a heteronormative code that governs bodies, genders, and their processes — sexuality, birth, death, and inheritance — in order to preserve social, economic, and political power for those who have it [and] to continue it into future generations.”
― Kazim Ali, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire