queerquotes

I've heard of many people who claim they'd as soon their children were dead as gay. What took me a long time to believe is that these people are saying no more than the truth. They even speak for others too delicate to use the cruel words. For there is all the evidence. The preponderance of school systems, public and parochial, where teachers are fired, routinely, for so much as intimating the right to existence of queer people, desires, activities, children. The routine denial to sexually active adolescents, straight and gay, of the things they need - intelligible information, support and respect, condoms - to protect themselves from HIV transmission. [...] The systematic separation of children from queer adults; their systematic sequestration from the truth about the lives, culture, and sustaining relations of adults they know who may be queer. The complicity of parents, of teachers, of clergy, even of the mental health professions in invalidating and hounding kids who show gender-dissonant tastes, behaviour, body language. [...]

Seemingly, this society wants its children to know nothing; wants its queer children to conform or (and this is not a figure of speech) die; and wants not to know that it is getting what it wants.

- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies

guess there's something wrong with me
guess i don't fit in
no one wants to touch it
no one knows where to begin
i've more than one membership
to more than one club
and i owe my life to the people that i love

- Ani DiFranco, "In or Out"

Be proud of not being ashamed.
- Quentin Crisp

And what is she (quoth he) whom thou do'st love?
Look in this glasse (quoth I) there shalt thou see
The perfect forme of my faelicitie.
When, thinking that it would strange Magique prove,
He open'd it: and taking of the cover,
He straight perceav'd himselfe to be my Lover.

- Richard Barnfield

I am reminded of a colleague who reiterated 'all my homosexual patients are quite sick' - to which I finally replied 'so are all my heterosexual patients.'

- Ernest van den Haag, psychotherapist

The radical right is so homophobic that they're blaming global warming on the AIDS quilt.

- Dennis Miller

War. Rape. Murder. Poverty. Equal rights for gays. Guess which one the Southern Baptist Convention is protesting?

- "The Value of Families"

Soldiers who are not afraid of guns, bombs, capture, torture or death say they are afraid of homosexuals. Clearly we should not be used as soldiers; we should be used as weapons.

- Letter to the editor, The Advocate

If you want to live in a world where you can hold your boyfriend's hand walking down the street, then hold your boyfriend's hand walking down the street.
- Tammy Baldwin

People...do not believe there can be tears between men. They think we are only playing at a game and that we do it to shock them.
- James Baldwin