Gabriel H.

“To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“Outsiders call the streets and alleys that comprise her world the slum. For her, it is just the place where she stays. You’d never happen onto her block unless you lived there too, or had lost your way, or were out on an evening lark seeking the pleasures yielded by the other half. The voyeurs on their slumming expeditions feed on the lifeblood of the ghetto, long for it and loathe it. The social scientists and the reformers are no better with their cameras and their surveys, staring intently at all the strange specimens.”
― Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

“A glib wisdom holds that people like this just don’t want relationships. They have “problems with intimacy.” But the salient fact is: These were relationships. In Tommy’s case, in Gary’s, and in several others they were relationships that lasted years. Intimacy for most of us is a condition that endures, however often repeated, for minutes or for hours. And these all had their many intimate hours. But, like all sane relationships, they also had limits.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

“In order to dismantle such a discourse we must begin with the realization that desire is never “outside all social constraint.” Desire may be outside one set of constraints or another; but social constraints are what engender desire; and, one way or another, even at its most apparently catastrophic, they contour desire’s expression.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue