Lesbian Pride Quotes

Amazing how eye and skin color come in many shades yet many think sexuality is just gay or straight.

Only by speaking out can we create lasting change. And that change begins with coming out.

June, you have killed my sincerity too. I will never again know who I am, what I am, what I love, what I want. Your beauty has drowned me, the core of me. You carry away with you a part of me reflected in you. When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You are the woman I want to be. I see in you that part of me which is you. I feel compassion for your childish pride, for your trembling unsureness, your dramatization of events, your enhancing of the loves given to you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madness.

Your friendly smile of acceptance - from the safe position of heterosexuality,' " Jane reads aloud, " 'isn't enough. As long as you cherish that secret belief that you are a little bit better because you sleep with the opposite sex, you are still asleep in your cradle... and we will be the nightmare that awakens you.

The game never changes, you must be in the secret before you are shown to the public.

Lesbian rights.

It's not conversion 'therapy;' it's conversion brainwashing.

Being your friend and knowing that you're happy, even if it's with someone else, even if my heart is breaking, is worth it. But if you love me? If you love me Mia, then be brave and love me.

No one should ever be faulted for feeling love.

So often, beauty had absolutely nothing to do with the way something looked and everything to do with how it made you feel.

If the world was perfect, maybe we wouldn’t need labels. But the world isn’t perfect, and labels can really be a source of pride—especially when we’ve got to deal with so much crap. I’m really freaking proud to be a lesbian.

It’s also joy. The joy to be here, to be free and finally able to walk around with pride and dignity as a lesbian woman in the midst of all these life-affirming rainbows, without worrying about who might see and possibly judge me.

I make it a point not to talk about the past. But you're special.

Children are never too young to learn that love is love.

Within the history of lesbianism from the archaic Greek poet Sappho from the Isle of Lesbos, who is the symbol of lust, passion and sensuality between women, to Sister Benedetta Carlini’s deeply erotic love affair with another nun, to the 10th century Arab erotic work, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, which gives the account of a love affair between a Christian and an Arab woman, to modern day same-sex marriages and Pride parades, there is certainly place for Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

The prevalence of anti-patriotic attitudes among liberal intellectuals led some of them to warn their fellow liberals of the consequences of such attitudes for the future not of America but of American liberalism. Most Americans, as the American public philosopher Richard Rorty has written, take pride in their country, but 'many of the exceptions to this rule are found in colleges and universities, in the academic departments that have become sanctuaries for left-wing political views.' These leftists have done 'a great deal of good for . . . women, African-Americans, gay men and lesbians. . . . But there is a problem with this Left: it is unpatriotic. It repudiates the idea of a national identity and the emotion of national pride.' If the Left is to retain influence, it must recognize that a 'sense of shared national identity . . . is an absolutely essential component of citizenship.' Without patriotism, the Left will be unable to achieve its goals for America. Liberals, in short, must use patriotism as a means to achieve liberal goals

The children in my dreams speak in Gujarati turn their trusting faces to the sun say to me care for us nurture us in my dreams I shudder and I run. I am six in a playground of white children Darkie, sing us an Indian song! Eight in a roomful of elders all mock my broken Gujarati English girl! Twelve, I tunnel into books forge an armor of English words. Eighteen, shaved head combat boots - shamed by masis in white saris neon judgments singe my western head. Mother tongue. Matrubhasha tongue of the mother I murder in myself. Through the years I watch Gujarati swell the swaggering egos of men mirror them over and over at twice their natural size. Through the years I watch Gujarati dissolve bones and teeth of women, break them on anvils of duty and service, burn them to skeletal ash. Words that don't exist in Gujarati : Self-expression. Individual. Lesbian. English rises in my throat rapier flashed at yuppie boys who claim their people “civilized” mine. Thunderbolt hurled at cab drivers yelling Dirty black bastard! Force-field against teenage hoods hissing F****ing Paki bitch! Their tongue - or mine? Have I become the enemy? Listen: my father speaks Urdu language of dancing peacocks rosewater fountains even its curses are beautiful. He speaks Hindi suave and melodic earthy Punjabi salty rich as saag paneer coastal Kiswahili laced with Arabic, he speaks Gujarati solid ancestral pride. Five languages five different worlds yet English shrinks him down before white men who think their flat cold spiky words make the only reality. Words that don't exist in English: Najjar Garba Arati. If we cannot name it does it exist? When we lose language does culture die? What happens to a tongue of milk-heavy cows, earthen pots jingling anklets, temple bells, when its children grow up in Silicon Valley to become programmers? Then there's American: Kin'uh get some service? Dontcha have ice? Not: May I have please? Ben, mane madhath karso? Tafadhali nipe rafiki Donnez-moi, s'il vous plait Puedo tener….. Hello, I said can I get some service?! Like, where's the line for Ay-mericans in this goddamn airport? Words that atomized two hundred thousand Iraqis: Didja see how we kicked some major ass in the Gulf? Lit up Bagdad like the fourth a' July! Whupped those sand-niggers into a parking lot! The children in my dreams speak in Gujarati bright as butter succulent cherries sounds I can paint on the air with my breath dance through like a Sufi mystic words I can weep and howl and devour words I can kiss and taste and dream this tongue I take back.

Pride and bravery kill more than weapons.

Our lives were made infinitely better when we each accepted who we were and when we went for what we wanted.

Yes, it was trying to get her under, this world with its mighty self-satisfaction, with its smug rules of conduct, all made to be broken by those who strutted and preened themselves on being what they considered normal. They trod on the necks of those thousands of others who, for God knew what reason, were not made as they were; they prided themselves on their indignation, on what they proclaimed as their righteous judgments. They sinned grossly; even vilely at times, like lustful beasts—but yet they were normal! And the vilest of them could point a finger of scorn at her, and be loudly applauded. 'God damn them to hell!' she muttered.

If you think homosexuality is a sin, then your very life is a sin. If you think homosexuality is disgusting, then your very mind is disgusting. If you think homosexuality is a disease, then your very existence is a disease.

To all my friends who constantly talk disparagingly about the supposed 'homosexual lifestyle' and stereotype gay people and the community, I'd like to get this straight. There are essentially two worlds – the 'gay scene' and the gay (or LGBTIQ) community. The 'scene' is like the tip of the iceberg; what is seen by others because it is visible on a street, suburb or pride parade. Like the ninety percent of the submerged iceberg, the community is larger and less visible. It consists of organisations, groups, support networks and also gay and lesbian singles and couples living 'normal' lives in the suburbs. Occasionally there is an overlap but not often. Some live, socialise and work in both. Many never enter each others worlds. The values, lifestyles and culture of these two worlds are as different as Asian culture is to western is to African is to Middle Eastern. Dig down even deeper below the surface and you find it is not a single community but diverse communities and subcultures that are separate but not necessarily divided. The common thing that binds them together is their experience of inequality, discrimination and their desire to make a better world for themselves, others and future generations. If you believe that all gays and lesbians are shallow and obsessed with sex, body image, partying, nightclubs and bars then you are obviously an observer from the outside or mixing in the wrong circles.

Thus is the defining characteristic of gay millennials: we straddle the pre-Glee and post-Glee worlds. We went to high school when faggot wasn’t even considered an F-word, when being a lesbian meant boys just didn’t want you, when being nonbinary wasn’t even a remote option. We grew up without queer characters in our cartoons or Nickelodeon or Disney or TGIF sitcoms. We were raised in homophobia, came of age as the world changed around us, and are raising children in an age where it’s never been easier to be same-sex parents. We’re both lucky and jealous. As the state of gay evolved culturally and politically, we were old enough to see it and process it and not take it for granted–old enough to know what the world was like without it. Despite the success of Drag Race, the existence of lesbian Christmas rom-coms, and openly transgender Oscar nominees, we haven’t moved on from the trauma of growing up in a culture that hates us. We don’t move on from trauma, really. We can’t really leave it in the past. It becomes a part of us, and we move forward with it. For LGBTQ+ millennials, our pride is couched in painful memories of a culture repulsed and frightened by queerness. That makes us skittish. It makes us loud. It makes us fear that all this progress, all this tolerance , all of Billy Porter's red carpet looks can vanish as quickly as it all appeared.

For all of you out there, visible & invisible. Closeted or out & proud. Femme & Masc & every glorious stripe on the rainbow in between. You incandescent queens, deliciously undefinable androgynous souls, chivalrous butches, tomboy dykes, drop-dead yet still invisible femmes. You with your flare, your flamboyance, your rugged individuality, your glorious diversity, your insistence on being seen, your quiet but steady presence in the places that matter. You, the cliche and every unexpected exception. The world’s stereotypes brought to blazing life & you who smashes the boxes & changes the paradigms & refuses to be painted into place. You, who knows that queer looks, speaks, sounds & moves through this world in a million different ways. You, the grieving. You the dancing. You, the proud & the humble & the defiant & the free. Whatever label you choose & define for yourself. Whatever identity feels like home to you. However you have come to know & name yourself & your good, good, love. You are my family. I see you.

Shortly after becoming a Christian, I counseled a woman who was in a closeted lesbian relationship and a member of a Bible-believing church. No one in her church knew. Therefore, no one in her church was praying for her. Therefore, she sought and received no counsel. There was no “bearing one with the other” for her. No confession. No repentance. No healing. No joy in Christ. Just isolation. And shame. And pretense. Someone had sold her the pack of lies that said that God can heal your lying tongue or your broken heart, even cure your cancer if he chooses, but he can’t transform your sexuality. I told her that my heart breaks for her isolation and shame and asked her why she didn’t share her struggle with anyone in her church. She said: “Rosaria, if people in my church really believed that gay people could be transformed by Christ, they wouldn’t talk about us or pray about us in the hateful way that they do.” Christian reader, is this what people say about you when they hear you talk and pray? Do your prayers rise no higher than your prejudice? I think that churches would be places of greater intimacy and growth in Christ if people stopped lying about what we need, what we fear, where we fail, and how we sin. I think that many of us have a hard time believing the God we believe in, when the going gets tough. And I suspect that, instead of seeking counsel and direction from those stronger in the Lord, we retreat into our isolation and shame and let the sin wash over us, defeating us again. Or maybe we muscle through on our pride. Do we really believe that the word of God is a double-edged sword, cutting between the spirit and the soul? Or do we use the word of God as a cue card to commandeer only our external behavior?

Humans appear to have an inbuilt, almost irresistible tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them,” good guys and bad, in-groups and out-groups. We see this everywhere: in politics, in religion, in sports and national pride. For Jesus, the poor and downtrodden were the in-group and the Pharisees and the rich the out-groups; for Marxists (much as for Jesus), the working class was the in-group and the ruling class the out-group; for the Nazis, the Aryan race was the in-group and Jews the main out-group; and for some radical feminists and “lesbian separatists,” women are the in-group and men the out-group.

What the most advanced researchers and theoreticians in all of science now comprehend is that the Newtonian concept of a universe driven by mass force is out of touch with reality, for it fails to account for both observable phenomena and theoretical conundrums that can be explained only by quantum physics: A quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In what Wheatley calls “this exquisitely connected world,” the real engine of change is never “critical mass”; dramatic and systemic change always begins with “critical connections.”14 So by now the crux of our preliminary needs should be apparent. We must open our hearts to new beacons of Hope. We must expand our minds to new modes of thought. We must equip our hands with new methods of organizing. And we must build on all of the humanity-stretching movements of the past half century: the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the civil rights movement; the Free Speech movement; the anti–Vietnam War movement; the Asian American, Native American, and Chicano movements; the women’s movement; the gay and lesbian movement; the disability rights/pride movement; and the ecological and environmental justice movements. We must find ourselves amid the fifty million people who as activists or as supporters have engaged in the many-sided struggles to create the new democratic and life-affirming values that are needed to civilize U.S. society.

Because I love you, Mia Sharpe. You are my route to happiness. All of my routes to happiness lead to you, and I haven’t ever found anyone else that has even come close. I love that you are willing to sit in an empty apartment until you find just the right piece of antique furniture that speaks to you even if it takes months. I love the way you call me Beckett most of the time, and Ellie only when it really matters. I love the way you tell people what their gift is when you hand them a wrapped present. I love that you became a firefighter so that you can save people from suffering what you’ve suffered. And I love you so much, that I’ll love you through all of the times where you find it hard to love yourself. Every day. Because there isn’t a piece of you that’s ruined inside, no matter what you might think on your worst days.

Slowly, but steadily, my feelings did start to change- feelings about myself as a woman and feelings about what sexuality really is and what it really isn't. I -like most everyone who identified as gay or lesbian -felt very comfortable, very at home in mu body in my lesbianism. One doesn't repent for a sin of identity in one session. Sins of identity have multiple dimensions, and throughout this journey, I have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord, and always to the Lord himself with different facets of my sin. I don't mean different incidents or examples of the same sin, but different facets of sin -how pride, for example, informed my decision-making, or how my unwillingness to forgive others had landlocked my heart in bitterness. I have walked this journey with help. There is no other way to do it I still walk this journey with help.

The other had come from that very same taiga gryphon. They'd been young and playing on a frozen lake. Both were adults with their hunting grounds. Both were new adults with their first hunting grounds. The taiga gryphon had seen her try to pounce a bog hopper and miss. The light snow had concealed the ice underneath, and Satra had gone sliding. The taiga gryphon's name was Mignet, but Satra hadn't known that yet. Satra heard the laughing and growled - well, squeaked, her voice giving out - a challenge. Mignet had flown down and landed daintily on the ice. She'd been beautiful, graceful. While taiga gryphons included several designs and shapes, she's been the one most strangers conjured up if asked to describe the taiga pride: white with black bars and rosettes. She was Satra's first, and only, crush.

Having visibility – and real-life role models – really matters.

Trans and gender non-conforming people have stood by lesbians throughout the gay rights movement. We now need to support them as they fight for their equality.

Pride Soc isn't just about doing queer staff,' Sunil continued, and that got him some laughs, 'It's not been about finding potential hook-ups. No, it's about the relationships we form here. Friendship, love and support while we're all trying to survive and thrive in a world that often doesn't feel like it was made for us. Whether you're gay, lesbian, bi, pan, trans, intersex, non-binary, asexual, romantic, queer, or however you identify - most of us here felt a sense of belonging while we were growing up, But we're all here for each other

When Franklin Graham recently called for a boycott of gay-friendly companies on his Facebook page, it quickly became apparent that to follow through on his own initiative, he’d need to delete his Facebook account (he didn’t), stop using any Microsoft software, and shut down all Apple devices. When he publicly moved the bank accounts of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to BB&T Bank in protest of a Wells Fargo ad featuring a lesbian couple and their daughter, it generated this Miami Herald headline: “Billy Graham Group Moving Money to BB&T, Sponsor of Miami Beach Gay Pride Fundraiser.”110

If I had taken the initiative to seek out information about the LGBT rights movement, I would have found that it was a Black trans woman, Marsha P. Johnson, a Latinx trans woman, Sylvia Rivera, and a butch lesbian, Stormé DeLarverie, who were the catalysts of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City, which led to the first ever Pride march, which birthed the Gay Rights Movement, which became the LGBT movement. But I didn’t, largely because I assumed that, much like the majority of the history that we are taught in the British academic syllabus, it was cisgender, white, gay men that initiated that movement.

What did you do while I was gone? Jo asked, voice elevated against the wind. "Missed you.

I see you, Ashton. I always have. You're not Brynn's sister. You're not Lily's best friend. You're Ashton Fucking Levengood, and you're spectacular.

I've seen and loved every version of you. Always. I loved pink converse Lizzie, and I loved when you cut your hair short, and I love your hair long, and I love you in sweaty workout shirts and prom dresses and flats and sparkly heels. You never have to change who you are for me to love you, because I always have.

I love you. And I was wrong and pigheaded and felt a little blindsided, but I don't want to lose what I have with you. I don't want to miss out on anything we could possibly have because of my pride or my fear of inadequacy, or my stubbornness because the fact is you are the best thing that ever happened to me and I'm willing to fight for that.

And you begin to see how wide the closet door is and how big it is inside and how many people who don’t appear to be in the closet actually are for the major part of their lives.” Ian McKellen’s dual life, as actor and activist, has shown him that playing any part in life requires a simple prerequisite: rigorous honesty with oneself. “The big bonus of coming out,” Ian says, “I don’t think is necessarily the way you’re perceived or the jobs you might get, but rather is self-fulfillment and self-contentment and self-awareness and self-confidence, all wrapped up together. It means taking pride in being able to say, ‘I’m gay.’ And out of that self-confidence has come an emotional freedom that directors and friends have detected in my work. There’s nothing that I can’t do, and I don’t think that I could have felt that if I hadn’t come out. Get out, say it, and having said it, you can get on with living your life. You won’t be alone.

But is it a coincidence that just when women, blacks, Chicanos, gays, lesbians, and members of other groups marginalized in American and Western European societies began to assert an identity, to present themselves as subjects, white male theory argues that there is no subject, or rather that the subject is a discursive effect and product of a misrecognition? Having denigrated other races for years, whites realize--just when other races are developing racial identity and racial pride--that race is a delusive trope, a dangerous fiction. [....] It may also be true, however, that reflection on the imperfect constructedness of identity does not so much counter the claim to identity by historically oppressed groups as encourage the postulation of identities by emphasizing that the identities hitherto foisted on groups were not natural and inevitable. If so, then the critique of identity may be less a ploy of domination than a contribution to the politicization of identity and a contribution also to possibilities of resistance to the identities leaders construct for those they would lead.

G: Did you ever go through a period of trying to imitate boys? F: When I thought it was wrong to be a lesbian, what I did then was really go over into trying to cut off all of my male behavior, to the point of shaving my arms! I thought that anybody who looked at my arms would know immediately that I had hair on them and that was a sure sign of lesbianism! So I went the other way really. I didn’t go into the male role. I went into trying to hide it from everybody else until I figured it out. G: So you figured it out? F: Yeah, it was like a secret that I didn’t want anybody else to know until I was able to handle the situation and cope with my feelings about it. And during that period, I changed into being-- into acting the female role. During that time I would just go off by myself for long periods of time. And this happened for several years. G: When did you really feel that you were strong enough to openly be what you were? F: That went on until Jeanne happened. And then I had it all together. Jeanne was all I needed to know it was right. And then I had thought it all out, all the angles of it. Enough to hit anybody who went against it. G: How old were you when that happened? F: Twenty.