Queer Quotes

“I guess it's true that us queers are starved for stories that mirror our lives. I can't remember a time when I saw a queer person in a movie or TV show or book that I didn't have to actively seek out myself.”
― Aaron H. Aceves, This Is Why They Hate Us

“The message I've gotten about guys who like guys and girls is that we're faking, that we couldn't possibly be attracted to girls if we're attracted to boys. Bi girls get the same thing, but for them it means they're perceived as straight and for us it means we're perceived as gay.”
― Aaron H. Aceves, This Is Why They Hate Us

“Am I the only one that worries about the nation filling up with gender challenged people?”
― Steven Magee

“But I couldn't relate to this widely held notion of community. We hear the word community all the time. Often it sounds like wishful thinking. Queer community is just as vague - just piling a confusing identity onto an elusive concept. Maybe community, as Famous says, excludes inherently.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“Those of us who suffer from severe anxiety and PTSD, in my case due to inferiority complexes and repeated emotional, physical and religious trauma from a young age, know that the fear of being found out by family is terrifying. Combine that with the fear of God’s wrath (something I can never seem to shake off completely, despite becoming an atheist many years ago), the fear of being jailed in a country where being queer is illegal, and the fear that your partner will sooner or later realise that you’re this shaken shell of a human being and leave you because of it –it all creates this ultra-alert yet sad and anxious, broken robot. One with zero confidence and zero self-trust, and who is incapable of vulnerability or even allowing themselves to have wants and desires. I existed to please others, not myself. I existed to crave love so hungrily. I had a hole inside me that nobody’s love could fill because I never learned to love myself. I didn’t know how to.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“The first thing Viviana noticed, on her first night as a vampire, was how much she wanted to fuck everyone. When she was alive she’d been drawn to the same few types, again and again, and she had always longed for a palate more adventurous, more brave. Now everyone she passed smelled wonderful, the hunger sharpening inside her with every breath, and she wanted to slide her mouth over the softness of every neck and take them all in. (from "Lips Like Sugar")”
― Cynthia Gómez

“you've drawn every line there could be while we wait for a circle”
― Yaffa As, Blood Orange

“we know it ends in flame because those with power were never taught to relinquish / we wait for them to / we forget you can't give up what wasn't yours to begin with”
― Yaffa As, Blood Orange

“I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well — by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Gender issues are an illness of the hormonal system.”
― Steven Magee

“Let’s switch clothes! I can be the bearded lady and you can be the big breasted man.”
― Steven Magee

“What is the transition from adolescence to adulthood when some of us will experience the effects of puberty twice: once against our will when we are younger and a second time with our consent when we are older? And whether or not we choose to pursue transition by a medical means, how are we served by a narrative of maturity equivalent to a reduction in risk when simply being trans in a transphobic culture is risky behavior?”
― Jesse D. O'Rear

“Every year a trans person lives past the age they expect to die is bonus time–time that is unexpected and often unplanned.”
― Finn LeFevre

“Weren't there already enough books about straight people discovering they like meaningful eye contact during sex?”
― Kelly Link

“So all I am today is not who I'm gonna be tomorrow, because of the things that happened to me today and later tonight.”
― Miss Major

“Pulling back, Oliver stared into Felipe’s eyes. In their depths, he thought he could count the years they would have together like rings on a tree. If he had his way, there would be many, but he wanted more. He wanted eternity with Felipe.”
― Kara Jorgensen, The Reanimator's Soul

“This is what I’ve learned: The art is greater than you and your feelings. You have to serve it. It is not you. Some people will never understand that, but you need to surround yourself with people who do understand it. And you need to understand it yourself. Whatever you’re creating may come from within you and your life, but then—almost like a child, it comes out of your body and it grows up and walks away. It walks away and affects other people you don’t know and have never met. That’s the beauty of it, and the reason I keep trying new things. You never know who it will effect.”
― Malinda Lo, A Scatter of Light

“A volte il dolore era come una tempesta che arrivava all’improvviso. La mattina d’estate più serena poteva finire con un diluvio. Poteva finire con lampi e tuoni.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“L’attenzione alle persone e alle parole era una cosa rara e bellissima.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Ognuno di noi è come un Paese. Per proteggerci, possiamo costruire muri intorno a noi, proibire l’ingresso a chiunque, bloccare tutte le visite, non accogliere nessuno, nascondere la bellezza dei tesori che sono in noi. Costruire solo muri ci porta a essere tristi e soli. Ma possiamo anche decidere di concedere dei visti e lasciare che le persone vedano tutte le ricchezze che possiamo offrire. Possiamo decidere che chi ci visita veda il nostro dolore e il coraggio che ci ha permesso di sopravvivere. Accogliere altre persone, lasciare che vedano il nostro Paese, è la chiave della felicità.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World

“Später war er so freundlich, mir in einem Satz zu erklären, warum er im Alltag immer einen Rock trug.
"Vor allem fühle ich mich, wenn ich einen Rock trage, wie die Zeilen eines schönen Gedichts.”
― Haruki Murakami, Die Stadt und ihre ungewisse Mauer

“Love is always a cybernetics of addiction. Ending up with an addiction to someone, for someone, making someone the object of the addiction, or becoming addicted to a third substance for someone. To her, to me, to testosterone. Testosterone and I. She and I. She or the testosterone. She = the testosterone. Producing or consuming testosterone. Stopping testosterone for her. Absorbing her testosterone.”
― Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era

“We come from a long line of deviants throughout history, all with the same final destination in the celestial order: death. But not every death is a life fully realized, nor is there any guarantee that you'll make it to the age of ninety. Any history that says I can't live forever is bullshit. Since I was five and as far as I can remember, really, I've hated every breath that I've ever taken. But gradually I started to understand. Do you know what I hate the most? It's time. Heh. How can you defy time and space? What does heaven hold for those who do? Hey, we're the chosen ones!”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I’m a writer of queer negativity. LGBTQ-.”
― Zilla Novikov, Query

“To be queer and Somali and neurodivergent is concentrated alchemy, and yet we constantly raid the cupboards of our souls like we are a people of lack. When you operate from a position of lack, you don’t realise you’re robbing yourself of everything worth preserving, and forgetting to toss away all the empty pursuits that lost their synthetic spell several generations ago. And suddenly, you’re wide awake in a new country, in a new decade, and you’re startled because you can’t remember how you got here or why you’re still feeling hunted by your own reflection. You can’t remember how or when or where or why you misplaced all your breezy dynamism—all that wildness of perception you used to project with such ferocity. Where did it all go? We have conveniently forgotten that we have always been fundamentally idiosyncratic and fantastic and fucking alive. Instead we feed ourselves and our children and our children’s children prosaic fuckery for what? Respectability politics? So that if we twist and try our damnedest to conform to standards that have never been coded into our collective DNA, that we’ll what? Somehow be less strange? Less weird and wonderful? That we’ll transcend the soul-snuffing snare that is the myth of the good immigrant? That if we mute all of our magic—everything that makes us some of the most innately interesting, individualistic and fun, funny beings in this boring, beige-as-fuck world—that we’ll win over whom? Folks who don’t season their food right or whose understanding of freedom is a shitty Friday night sloshfest at a shitty pub playing shitty music, chatting nonsense that no-one with a single iota of sense gives a fuck about? Is that who you are so deeply invested in trying to impress? If so, then go for it, but don’t fool yourself for a fucking second into thinking that trying desperately to shave off your elemental peculiarities through self-diminishment is salvation, because it simply isn’t, honey, and it never will be.”
― Diriye Osman

“[John] Money spent the rest of his childhood in a predominantly female household in consistent poverty. His childhood instilled in him a dislike of religious dogma and sexual prudery as well as a deep class-consciousness alongside his ambition to transcend his meager beginning, Science would become his religion.”
― Sandra Eder, How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea

“Money spent the rest of his childhood in a predominantly female household in consistent poverty. His childhood instilled in him a dislike of religious dogma and sexual prudery as well as a deep class-consciousness alongside his ambition to transcend his meager beginning, Science would become his religion”
― Sandra Eder, How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea

“For sure, nahalata na niya sa unang pagkikita pa lang namin na virgin pa ako. Almost everyone in our office knows about it even though I never did mention it. Hindi ko nga alam kung paano nangyayari iyon, eh. Naaamoy ba iyon? Gagi.”
― Mark Fermill, Nothing Wrong With This

“Nos toca ser nosotras y que nos dejen en paz, que a ver a quién le importa con quién te acuestas o a quién ames. Si a ver si no vamos a ser todas en el fondo iguales, que todas sufrimos, todas amamos, todas nacemos y nos morimos. (...) Más Ocañas nos hacen falta.”
― David Rosa, Florecillas en el barro

“[...]I was alive like them, real as they were: They could see it. I had proved it to them over and over again. But they chose to ignore it. They debated me, as if I were theoretical. I was a concept, not a person. And then, with their laws and their bans, they outcast me. An object.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea