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"The queer ruin persists, as [Henry] Miller had noted a quarter century earlier, 'despite all the efforts to clean it up!' ... As New York continued to reel from its industrial and economic decline, its heteronormative fabric also began to fray at the edges."

"...desire cannot stop itself from desiring." (Merton)

Saltz talks about the birth of modernism, and I love wide cultural analysis like this: "It was an age that saw countless institutions collapse. This psychic shattering is reflected in the creations of ... Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein', Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'colossal Wreck' of 'Ozymandias', the Black Paintings of Francisco Goya, the cryptic visions of William Blake, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony" (7).

Loving this. More soon.

In the 1950-60s, because of the homophobia of the NY State Liquor Authority, who would shut down gay bars as "disreputable," places like Stonewall were run by the Mafia, who used them to avoid paying taxes. "The city raised little objection ... when gangsters began to underwrite a new network of clandestine and unpretentious gay bars." In 1966 the mob "put up $3,500 to reopen the Stonewall [Inn] as a gay club."

It's really interesting reading this and "Cruising the Dead River" by Fiona Anderson at the same time, since this was written in the place and the era (and the radical queer milieu) Anderson is documenting. Lots of conversation happening between these books.

"Trans joy is so often forgotten. It exists despite systems that seek to destroy us. It exists in the relationships we have and in our courage to be and create. ... It is the turn of the seasons, always driving, always pushing things to grow and change, always gloriously, achingly beautiful. Always on its way, across and beyond. Trans joy exists because we exist. Trans joy is resistance."

"They said we couldn't have children, but I have seen them. They said we would never have peace, but I have seen it. They said joy wasn't something our lives would know, but I have felt it. They said no so many times that we stopped asking permission and just tried instead, our literal bodies becoming sites of resistance, of creation, of hope."

"In the shadow of structural abandonment, political alienation, family rejection, chronic illness, state violence, and medical neglect, queer friendship saves us. Queer friendship — that thing that is sometimes called mutual aid, solidarity, disability justice, care, organizing, abolition, or maybe just love — is what raised me..." (From the introduction, page XVI, by Morgan Bassichis)

"I truly love that about my friends — their desire to keep tangible our joy. To preserve it and keep it present in our everyday lives. I have coasters and embroideries and walls full of artwork and poetry and notes. ... We are like living museums of our love for one another and our community. Our protection, our preservation, lives among us."

"[During Covid-19] people began to organize, to remember how to live in community and support one another. For my community, and many other oppressed communities, this was not new. We were already surviving through mutual aid. So then it was us leading, teaching, passing on our wisdom. Trans people have so much to teach, about how to build safety networks, about how to redistribute, about how to care for people."

"Our glamour is not superfluous to changing the current order, it is instrumental. Our glamour, our joy, our magic, are not commodities to be ripped off and sold back to us by corporations, they are ours. When they try to steal our essence, we slip away like snakes and leave them only the shedded skin." (From the preface, page X, by Tourmaline)

"...sureness is a trap. Nobody can achieve the level of certainty that is demanded of us, not really, but any admission of this may be used in evidence against you. The sureness is a deterrent, it makes you too afraid to take action. It makes people too afraid to wonder, to explore, to try things out. It creates a world in which you can't trust your own body, your own thoughts, your own pain."

"I have spent long periods of my life feeling hopeless, like nothing could change. When I look back now, I can see that I survived all of these times by trying anyway. I didn't always believe that I could change things, but I kept trying. I never thought I could be happy, but I kept moving as if one day it might happen."

"Being trans is not something I need to diminish, it is what pushes me to imagine, to create, to build. We are dreamers and makers because that is how we forced ourselves."

"Even in the worst and bleakest material circumstances, there can be joy. Even under great threat, at the hands of systemic violence and harm, while suffering deep personal trauma and pain, joy manages to make space for itself."

Currently it's pretty breezy and aggressively apolitical in the way a lot of pop sociology is, but the exploration of how airlines double-sell the same space through strategic ambiguity (it's mentioned in every review of this book) gives me hope they'll be more direct as the book continues...