You can stop waiting, you know,’ she says. ‘For what?’ ‘For God to strike you down.

The eye of youth is very observant. Youth has its moments of keen intuition, even normal youth — but the intuition of those who stand mi-way between the sexes is so ruthless, so poignant, so...

Our creed [atheism] is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don’t.

Why, these men would destroy the Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor. They found a tooth in a sand pit in Nebraska with no other bones about it,...

Every time someone reaches out to you, even if it’s to point out your sin and they seem to be judging you, it is a token of God’s mercy. He sees the past, present, and...

Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don’t guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With...

There’s something very… I don’t know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You’ve never changed sex, have you?’ He shook his head. ‘Or slept with a man?’ Another shake. ‘I thought so,’ Yay said. ‘You’re strange,...

When he appeared before the lord, his lordship was smitten immediately with the boy’s unadorned beauty, like a first glimpse of the moon rising above a distant mountain. The boy’s hair gleamed like the feathers...

Not to do as the child wishes would be wrong because he is born on a path, and it would be evil, a crime against nature to make him deny his spirit.

If I was gay, I wouldn’t need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a...

I’m more a collector of identities and words that feel right to me. To me this is an inarguable point. I am who I say I am and that’s not up for debate.

Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.

Part of me wants to make this boy bruise, bleed, and sob, and part of me wants to soothe him and care for him. The tipically complex yearnings of the kinkily queer.

Maybe I grew up too fast, maybe that’s my trouble. I feel so lost out here…hung up between two worlds; half-kid and half-adult, half-boy and half-girl. And sometimes it seems like I get the dirty...

[O]nce we give up on the idea that only heterosexuality is normal and that all human bodies are clearly either male or female, more and more kinds of bodies and desires will come into view....

It was queer meeting him there—odd I mean—and what are the odds we’d meet at a gay bar? I was there to meet a woman, I think.

Harper: You, the one part ofthe real world I wasn’t allergic to.

A text by a minority writer is effective only if it succeeds in making the minority point of view universal. (‘The Universal and the Particular’)” … In claiming the lesbian point of view as universal,...

When a man does a queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder

I am not here to entertain straight people.

All monsters are queers. Who is able to bring the dead back to life? God and the Devil. The Devil makes dead men into monsters: immortal, immoral—and queer.

As though I had displeased the gods with my erotic hubris, I managed to be the only bisexual girl in the history of colleges who failed to arouse the interest of the campus queers immediately...

We can’t ignore right-wing demagogues who insist that the word of the doctor who proclaims a child’s sex at birth somehow holds more sway over the reality of the body than the word of the...

If it weren’t for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.

One might—if one were, say, a gay sex writer—make a case that there’s still a vibrant role for queer dirty words. While highly commodified mass-market DVD porn and its kinkier “specialty” cousins shows how sex...

Laugh and cry and tell stories. Sad stories about bodies stolen, bodies no longer here. Enraging stories about the false images, devastating lies, untold violence. Bold, brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the...

Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you’re hurting.

I see fashion as a proclamation or manifestation of identity, so, as long as identities are important, fashion will continue to be important. The link between fashion and identity begins to get real interesting, however,...

The African continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged.

She didn’t know that my heart was a sandstorm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn’t know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her,...

I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I’m looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don’t know where I’m going;...

In my early teens, I heard about Naked Lunch and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, Naked Lunch was my first...

When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience – with all their expectations, prejudices, and presumptions – completely off the hook. – Scott Turner Schofield

Partner struck me as an ugly euphemism. Euphemism in the sense that people don’t like to talk about sex, so they displace it on to some kind of business model. Since I have a distaste...

To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider… To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be...

To engage in activism that envisions alternatives ways of organizing society and alternative ways of being is to risk membership in society, a sense of belonging, however partial it may be. Activism can make us...

plot point” that you can play with. Gay kids are real, actual kids, teenagers, growing up into awesome adults, and they don’t have the books they need to reflect that. Growing up, my nose was...

It wasn’t that I wanted to know her now. I wanted to have already known her. I wanted her fears and her desires to have shaped my life. I know this is not love, of...

I felt old. Again. It had been happening a lot lately. I did not live the life of an old lady, but I could hear it beckoning to me, like a mermaid on a rock.”—...

I’ve had more difficulty accepting myself as bisexual than I ever did accepting that I was a lesbian. It felt traitorous. A few years ago, I admitted to myself that I was still interested in...

Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures’ magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his extraordinary gift.

How many of these children would one day be queer? How many would be felled by the acronym? How many by something else? How many would forget the circus? How many would never see it...

You have some queer friends, Dorothy,’ she said.The queerness doesn’t matter, so long as they’re friends,’ was the answer

In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where...

What I love about being queer is… Everything. I like that it makes me different, and I like that it makes people uncomfortable sometimes. I like that it makes people ask me lots of questions...

Not many boys like boys; but they like being a boy, showing it, being it together” (22)(rbt: where does this come from? this being a boy, which is also a doing — this being wrapped...

The only queer people are those who don’t love anybody.

By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were….Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You...

We both disliked rude rickshwalas, shepu bhaji in any form, group photographs at weddings, lizards, tea that has gone cold, the habit of taking newspaper to the toilet, kissing a boy who’d just smoked a...