Lgbt Acceptance Quotes

It’s okay. It may not seem like it right now, but you are going to be fine. I know it’s scary, but don’t be afraid. You are who you are, and you should love that person, and I don’t want anyone to have to go through 22 years of their life afraid to accept that.

With ignorance comes fear- from fear comes bigotry. Education is the key to acceptance.

You always point out the problems with the paintings or the drawings. But what about the things you got right?" "What about them?" "Don't they mean something?

I’ve lived in this world a long time, and you can’t change what you like, even if you’d want to.

I’m not crazy for feeling this way. They’re crazy for trying to stop me. And if it’s the last time I ever get to feel joy again, I won’t let them have it.

Perhaps once one realised how deeply one could bond with a creature as foreign as a dragon, all forms of human love seemed more acceptable.

We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell. I was Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown. However much we had to hide our love, however guarded we had to be about our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a thing so very sweet. Nor, in my gladness, could I quite believe that anybody would be anything but happy for me if only they knew.

Too late, too late, your love gave me life. Here am I the creature you made through your loving; by your passion you created the thing that I am. Who are you to deny me the right to love? But for you I need never have known existence.

There are too many people who love me, and accept me, and never try and change me, and who don’t condemn me in the slightest, for me to waste even one moment of my life anymore worrying about what other people will think.

I found power in accepting the truth of who I am. It may not be a truth that others can accept, but I cannot live any other way. How would it be to live a lie every minute of your life?

Better is one day in the company of those bullied by Christians but loved by Jesus than thousands in the company of those wielding scripture to harm the weak and defenseless.

If you think you need to earn enough points on someone’s rubric for them to accept you, then either you’re wrong to assume they won’t love you for who you are, or they never loved you in the first place.

Black lives matter is not a black people's movement - metoo is not a women's movement - pride is not a gay people's movement - it's all humanity's movement - a movement for being accepted as humans by the humans.

We’re not broken. We’re not in the wrong bodies. We’re not inadequate. We’re not lesser. We’re not unwanted. We’re not fraudulent. We’re not undesirable. That’s all just a set of lies we tell to soothe the experience of the prisons we put ourselves in.

I'm not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality.

Unnatural, unorthodox, amoral: those pretensions crumble when confronted by true happiness. You shouldn't give another the authority to draw a line defining the boundaries of acceptable joy.

THIS IS WHAT A MAN LOOKS LIKE. HE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE AESTHETICALLY PLEASING; HE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE MUSCULAR; HE DESERVES NOT TO BE PHOTOSHOPPED. HE IS HUMAN, AND HE HAS BLEMISHES. HERE HE STANDS, VISIBLE. HE SEES YOU ALL, COUNTLESS INVISIBLE OTHERS LIKE HIM. THIS BODY IS ACCEPTABLE — PUBESCENT, AWKWARD, MARRED. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE INVISIBLE. WE ARE ALL GOOD ENOUGH. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH OUR BODIES.

When you hear of Gay Pride, remember, it was not born out of a need to celebrate being gay. It evolved out of our need as human beings to break free of oppression and to exist without being criminalized, pathologized or persecuted. Depending on a number of factors, particularly religion, freeing ourselves from gay shame and coming to self-love and acceptance, can not only be an agonising journey, it can take years. Tragically some don't make it. Instead of wondering why there isn't a straight pride be grateful you have never needed one. Celebrate with us.

[Two respondents] minimized the assimilationist implications of the dominant account; Russ Silver rejects the idea entirely. 'I have no interest in being accepted. I consider this system corrupt, and I don't want to be accepted by it. We're in this together. Faggots, junkies, women, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians, don't you see it? Don't you see that our white male government doesn't care about us? When I say this it shocks coat-and-tie lesbians and gay men everywhere. Well, I'm sorry, folks; if you had AIDS you would know what I know: The government doesn't give a goddamn cent for a faggot's life.

Hello? Testing? My name is Jonathan Collins. I am seventeen years old. Today is... some day in July 1993. And I am okay. Scratch that, I am more than okay. I am... I am... I AM.

If someone called me fat, that affects me way more than someone calling me a f----t. I think just because I've accepted that, if someone calls me a f----t, it's like, I am gay and I'm proud to be gay so there's no issues there. If something calls you fat, that's something I want to change.

He didn't understand why Graeme wasn't a boy, but he recognized that he didn't need to understand a thing for it to be true.

After accepting the bitter truth of society, I set myself out to lead a life for myself entirely. I realized that the poisonous tentacles of society does not spare anyone, especially people like us. Once I realized that, I became strong from within.

I mean , I never even had to really come out to my parents. They always knew, and it was always okay. Or not even okay, better than that. Not something that had to be evaluated at all. It just was. Like having brown hair.

Just so you know, it makes no difference to me either way," Matt said, "except I would have seriously judged your taste a couple days ago." Neil assumed Andrew's territorial streak in Baltimore had a lot to do with Matt's change of heart. "Did he really choke Kevin?" "Took three of us to pull him off," Matt said. Neil didn't know what to say to that.

After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy's first invitation, and what the trouble had been with Charles. It was also the trouble, he perceived, with nine-tenths or the people here tonight. They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not to his sex, and bringing an extra humility to the hard study of human experience. They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb.

I'm quite certain now that I'm male and always have been, but I was told otherwise for so long that I accepted I couldn't be.

All should be accepted, not excluded from the world. Men who hate others shed hate upon themselves. All should have trust, not broken faith.

You need to love him. I don't care who you thought he was, or who you want him to be, you need to love him exactly as he is because your son is a remarkable human being. You have to understand that.

Demisexual?” Her face, that beautiful face, remains unchanged. Doesn’t shift to incredulity or boredom. Just understanding. Beautiful understanding and acceptance. “I know. I won’t press you into anything you don’t want. I love you, Lili. All of you and all of how you think and live and breathe. Demisexual just means loving differently, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s your everything I love. Not bits and pieces.” “My everything?” She nuzzles her forehead beneath my chin. “Yes, your everything. Silly siren.

As a young gay African, I have been conditioned from an early age to consider my sexuality a dangerous deviation from my true heritage as a Somali by close kin and friends. As a young gay African coming of age in London, there was another whiplash of cultural confusion that one had to recover from again and again: that accepting your sexual identity doesn’t necessarily mean that the wider LGBT community, with its own preconceived notions of what constitutes a "valid" queer identity, will embrace you any more welcomingly than your own prejudiced kinsfolk do.

Accepted social gender roles and expectations are so entrenched in our culture that most people cannot imagine any other way. As a result, individuals fitting neatly into these expectations rarely if ever question what gender really means. They have never had to, because the system has worked for them.

A defeat for humanity would be the failure to recognise the rights of two people who love each other. A defeat for humanity is that people accept such hatred and discrimination into their hearts. A defeat for humanity would be the failure of the church to recognise that nobody can control who a person loves. A victory for humanity would be the dissolution of a theocratic dystopia that promotes anti-equality (aka "the Vatican") which has no place in a modern society.

...We could have given you two some time to yourselves." I laugh one, short, humorless burst. "What could I have said, could you vacate the apartments for a while so Percy and I can engage in illicit activities?" "Not illegal." "They are where I come from." I shake my head staring down at my feet. "I couldn't have. I've been struck too many times." "Then maybe I should have said it to you sooner. You needn't hide around us," he says. "I'm sorry you ever felt you had to, and that the world make you feel as though you had to.

He introduced me to a Jesuit whom he kept in his employ, and said that although his name was Adam, he was not the first man.

My parents had always been accepting of homosexuals and had supported their fight to be treated as equals, but it was different when it was your own son.

Fuck the word tolerant. If I’m not accepted for real and not just a grin-and-bear-it acceptance for show? I don’t want you in my life.

It's not Straight ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ Love never see Religion, Age, Status and Gender barriers... All barriers might get accepted but the last one is still a TABOO in the society!

Pride is not an LGBT celebration, it's a human rights celebration - it's a celebration of equality - it's a celebration of inclusion - it's a celebration of acceptance.

The thing about failing as a girl is that I did want to succeed. I wanted to be liked and accepted like anyone, but it wasn't like learning how to play the guitar or to roller-blade. It was something that was always just out of my reach, something I could never really learn to do well, no matter how much I practiced.

It is immensely gratifying to hear from fans from around the world where being a gay or lesbian teen, having feelings for someone of your own gender is simply not acceptable. We noticed that our show fills a huge void for large audiences in many different countries. That’s why our choice of format for the show, the web series, is such a fortunate one as it allows viewers in those countries to feel acknowledged. While the series is not exclusively dealing with gay and lesbian issues, the fact that we don’t sanitize it gives us truly global appeal, especially with the gay and lesbian community. In fact, demand is such that we are subtitling the show in French and perhaps other languages to even better reach those audiences.

Even for those who have chosen to fully accept and affirm their 2SLGBTQIA+ siblings in Christ, until we let go of our narrow and prideful belief in the supremacy of the “normal”, we will not only continue to perpetuate harm to the already vulnerable, but we will deny the Church the opportunity to encounter aspects of the Divine only found in those who “transgress” those false and narrow boundaries.

What's it like for a young teen of barely 14, trying to cope with all the normal problems of adolescence, and wrestling with the realization that he's gay on top of all that? Juvenalius struggles with accepting himself and with the idea of coming out, as well as trying to find a boy who he can love and be loved back in return. Narrated by him, find out how he deals with it all and how those important to his life help.

The movement for Jesus was always from the outside in. His message was always one of inclusion, communicated through speaking to people, healing them, and offering them what biblical scholars call “table fellowship,” that is, dining with them, a sign of welcome and acceptance in first-century Palestine. In fact, Jesus was often criticized for this practice. But Jesus’s movement was about inclusion. He was creating a sense of “us.

It doesn't matter what a person's race, orientation is. No matter how evil this world may seem, we must keep loving them. Hatred has no place in this world; we should accept each other and keep moving forward. Stop being so intolerant of all different lifestyles. The problem grows when we politicize everything. Every human being was born to be compassionate and accepting toward one another, not condemning them and holding them down.

Equal marriage makes a huge impact, because people see gay people being allowed to be happy,” he says. “And these events involve families – and not just families but caterers and florists and hotels. And all these people are forced to accept that here are two people who are in love and want to build a family together . . . But I’m not complacent. Progress can falter, and rights can be taken away, and people can be repressed again very easily.

What God was giving the eunuchs, through Isaiah's proclamation, was not just a place in society, and not just hope for a future. By giving the eunuchs the same kinds of gifts given to Abraham and Sarah--a name, legacy, family, acceptance, and blessing--God was consciously associating the two stories in the minds of the people. God was giving the eunuchs a story to connect to--a story that set a president, grounded in divine grace. That was the story I needed to hear. I needed to know that my problems were like the eunuch's problems, which were like Abraham and Sarah's problems, and that all of these complications were overcome by God's great love.

Get your sticky fingers away from my cookies,” Ben ordered, without turning his head, to see Jaxton trying to steal one from the cooking tray. “You weren't saying that last night,” Jaxton retaliated, coming up to Ben's side, to give him a nudge. They were both smiling, while looking down at the counter, where Ben was making his delicious rosemary cookies. “In fact, I seem to remember you grabbing my sticky fingers and putting them in your mouth,” he teased, speaking quietly, so that Lyon wouldn't hear them at the other side of the room. Ben turned to Jaxton and abandoned his baking, to catch his face in flour covered hands and plant a deep kiss on his lips. Jaxton opened his mouth, in acceptance of his kiss. ~ From the Heart

As for us, we saw the police as a natural catastrophe— like floods, fires, earthquakes. There was nothing you could do about these things except to try and escape them. We had no analysis, no understanding that society could be changed. We simply tried to survive, as ourselves, as kamp girls, natural rebels. We did not feel that the police might not be entitled to hunt us, but accepted them as inevitable. I was beaten up for suggesting that a woman ask for a lawyer. It was seem as a stupid— even dangerous— suggestion. Fighting back with threats of lawyers would only make the police even angrier at us. But part of me felt that what was happening was unfair and unjust, though I had no idea how things could ever be different. Melbourne and Adelaide were exactly the same. The public lesbian scene was dangerous and difficult. There were many other New Zealand lesbians around, too. In spite of everything, I loved it. The “mateship” was amazing and close, important enough for any risk. And the freedom to be ourselves, to be real, to be queer, affirmed us. There were private, closeted scenes too, but they were hard to find and cliquey. They were fearful of being “sprung” by kamps who were too obvious. They were mainly older middle-class women. I knew some of them, learnt many things from them— like how to behave in a nice restaurant if you are taken to dinner. But they too had no sense of anything being able to change— except for the one strange woman who danced naked to Beethoven and lent me de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. She sowed some wild ideas, more than a decade too early for them to make any sense.

There is a lingering pain that comes with some people’s LGBT identity, especially in a society that has shamed their desires and forced them to fight for an opportunity to declare pride. Some of this shame can be deeply internalized, even if it’s overcome in practice (and mostly so in attitude). LGBT people may believe the asexual people who want their support have never fought this type of shame and may not accept that “your orientation doesn’t exist” can be as damaging as “your orientation means you’re bad.” Asexual people are usually perceived as sexually conservative or sexually abstinent, and LGBT people may have been attacked for the sex they may desire, so it could be very difficult for them to accept that someone who embodies a supposedly “ideal state” they’ve been pressured to emulate could possibly have comparable problems in Western society.

The deaths [from AIDS] of these 81,542 New Yorkers, who were despised and abandoned, who did not have rights or representation, who died because of the neglect of their government and families, has been ignored. This gaping hole of silence has been filled by the deaths of 2,752 people murdered by outside forces. The disallowed grief of 20 years of AIDS deaths was replaced by ritualized and institutionalized mourning of the acceptable dead. In this way, 9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS. The replacement of deaths that don't matter with deaths that do. It is the centerpiece of supremacy ideology, the idea that one person's life is more important than another's. That one person deserves rights that another does not deserve. That one person deserves representation that the other cannot be allowed to access. That one person's death is negligible if he or she was poor, a person of color, a homosexual living in a state of oppositional sexual disobedience, while another death matters because that person was a trader, cop, or office worker presumed to be performing the job of Capital.

But I did it. I imagined myself, muscular, lean and deliciously male, in a suit, holding my completed dissertation. I was accepted to the PhD program in History at Yale University today, as well as starting hormone replacement therapy: subcutaneously-injected testosterone in a solution with cottonseed oil. The universe, fate, or what I chose to call God, has an incredible way of working things out like that. And then I plunged the needle into my skin. I did it with clear intention and the surest, most earnest heart I have ever felt beat inside my chest...I breathed in and exhaled as I pushed the testosterone into my body for the first time. Little pinch. A leap of faith into the rest of my life.

Do you have any idea," Kent continued,with a smoldering rage," how many young men i have prayed over in the last two years,boys, torn apart by that stupid, senseless war, or cut down by disease? Yet, somehow, someone somewhere decided that shooting a man in the head or stabbing him with a bayonet is more acceptable than touching him with love.(...) But it's God i must answer to, not the whimsical laws of men.

Thereafter, they met up at off times, after practices or on the terrace of the pavilion when nightly feasts were breaking up, in what Aerander gradually recognized as a romance, though he wondered at times if it was possible for him to have such luck or, rather, if he was misinterpreting things; it was so hard to tell with boys. He accepted Calyiches' ring in a soft and private moment, nuzzling behind a garden trellis; it came as naturally as laying his head on Calyiches' shoulder. They were bonded. Two boys in love.

Some of my favorite people are gay, and some of my least favorite people are gay and can't accept it. They're the dangerous ones.

Humanity has always been controlled by two sides and never did its accomplishments been ignored but overseen and manipulated by those in power. The truth, however, is never accepted by those who keep on paying the price for the untruth they embrace. In doing so, they keep the most important truths hidden from themselves, for their level of consciousness cannot go beyond their ego — the belief that they have not been massively fooled. These high truths can only bypass the filter of the ego and mass media control when found in a book. And yet, you may never finish such book, or find it, if you cannot handle the truths found within it and reflecting within yourself. Among such truths, is the fact that what you believe to be a postmodern world, did not liberate anyone, but rather imprisoned mankind furthermore within the mind — the only physical center, for now, where control can be operated from an external source: The real purpose of the feminist movement was to force women to give away their children earlier to the state, as the earlier they are indoctrinated, the more easily controlled they'll be as adults; the real purpose of the LGBT movement and the women's liberation movement is to increase the levels of depression in society; and these, among other tactics, massively increase the profit of those in control, for they are the same behind the financing of Universities researching humanity at a psychological, biological, and chemical level.

Why was unconditional love given to some, but not all? Why would my mother only love me, and why did society only accept me, under the condition that I agreed to pretend to be someone I wasn’t? Why was acceptance offered to some, but not all? And who had decided all these rules, anyway?

In many ways, the Isle of Wight I know could be described as a place where differences were not welcome, where you must never speak of them. They cannot be acknowledged because keeping up the appearance of civility was more important than acceptance.

Pinetree dreams of a glorious, non-violent revolution. Between the dreams he is proficient in the practical. He is certain that he has enough money, which means he always has more than he needs. He is certain that he has a place to live, which means he always has several places to live. He stays in solitude a lot to keep his dreams of the glorious, non-violent revolution alive and he wishes Lilac and the others would stay with him and his dreams. To make his dreams real he lives quietly through his reactionary emotions. He experiences desires to control his environment and he experiences jealousy when his pleasures are threatened and he experiences possessiveness of property. He accepts these emotions much as he accepts depression and the men's brutality. They have to be acknowledged and gotten through. To make his dreams real he celebrates his revolutionary emotions. He experiences joy in sharing and he experiences completeness in loving and he experiences satisfaction in work for others done with compassion. These emotions he writes about on papers stuck to walls and tells strangers about on boats. These he will not forget. If he can live as if the glorious, non-violent revolution has happened long enough, he will awake one day to find that it has happened. Sometimes he is confused about the meaning of what he feels. Then he is depressed and afraid and longs for his friends Lilac and Loose Tomato and Moonbeam to sit with him.

If loving you means I'm gay, then I'm gay, too." - Cake

How do we move from vitriolic polemics to the love that we are commanded to show to a love-starved world? How do we represent Jesus to a group of people who have largely written off the church? I remember reading a survey that was taken among members of the LGBT community in San Francisco. They were asked a series of questions about what the factors were that kept them actively involved in their community. The top two answers were acceptance and belonging

This recalibration of the “victim–oppressor dynamic” is exactly what Christian conservatives, with the aid of right-wing bloggers, put into motion after Brendan Eich resigned as CEO of Mozilla. They cast him as a victim of ruthless, organized gay activist groups that were taking away his “religious liberties”—a claim that could not be further from the truth. Too many gay opinion makers fell right into the trap, accepting this reframing, becoming fearful, and running away, fretting about the “optics” rather than challenging the accusation for what it was: a vicious lie and a deception, part of a plot to recast enemies of LGBT equality as victims while they trample hard-won rights. These LGBT thought leaders spoke for all of us who have been overcome with victory blindness and have impulsively reverted to covering our anger and our conviction. And we can’t let that happen again.

He was tired of being called a fag and teased for his sexuality by one of the guards, so he tried to hang himself, twice The kid got a little closer the second time, but I won’t be around to see a third

His brothers accepted his fluid nature as something Darian simply was. He had been so all his life; suspended between male and female, one rising, the other ebbing without pattern or reason. The Queen, daughterless and doting, had gladly let her youngest son wear gowns, bows, and curls far longer than appropriate, until his father had intervened with violent persuasion. At court, he now moved as a man. In private, he never stopped wearing gowns or ribbons when the softer she inside him waxed like the full moon. He allowed her complete rein. In truth, he no longer knew where he ended and she began. They were the same.

Over the past thirty-five years, untold numbers of gay Christians have turned from God in their "failure" and "inability to please God," who, they were told, could not accept them as a gay person. Some felt so rejected and depressed that they turned to self-destructive behaviors, including suicide; some went deep in the closet to try to fit in at church; some became vehemently opposed to all things religious; some decided to seek God in other religions, or no religion; and very few individuals were able to find a church community in which they could worship and serve God without being rejected.

What is faith, if not an acceptance that there are things out there that cannot be explained? You know what you know, because you've never lived a life without that truth. That you are different, that your gender did not compute with that label assigned at birth. It does not matter how large a percentage of the general population is perfectly fine with their identity. That does not change you, how you responded to the mechanisms that made you who you are.

In a world full of haters...over there, on the other side of that wall made between them are the good people , the open ones that are looking for a change, for a better world in which acceptance is no longer just a world but something that really exists in our lives, something that is used by everyone and is making everyone happy...something strong that someday, somehow will destroy that endless wall made by hate and each side will get together and live in peace.

En acceptant notre situation ultraminoritaire, nous ne faisont pas preuve de fatalisme quant à nos possibilités de libération, nous acceptons simplement de ne pas avoir pour finalité de notre émancipation l'assimilation, par une forme ou une autre, à la majorité. Nous ne renonçons pas à l'objectif d'une émancipation totale, seulement nous la savons plus complexe à atteindre.

hook-up culture and shows like Sex and the City or Girls that glamorize the lifestyle of “going through men” have made heterosexual sin so banal that more exotic forms of eroticism have become trendy, particularly homosexuality, which opened wide the doors to the now readily accepted LGBT movement.

The freedom that so many LGBT people now enjoy is based on centuries of sacrifice and success. Enlightenment thinkers questioned why leaders criminalised sexual identity. Some psychologists fought to define homosexuality as a normal part of life rather than a mental illness. Activists, artists and politicians spoke out, even when faced with the risk of humiliation and violence. David Hockney treated homosexuality expressly in his paintings, and James Baldwin bravely shared the isolation of being gay in a heterosexual world. Drag queens at the Stonewall Inn said they would not accept oppression any longer, and defied policemen who carried clubs and guns. Harvey Milk campaigned for gay rights in San Francisco, and was murdered. Each of these people has honoured the memory of the LGBT people who came before them, usually in a world that was harsher and less accepting of difference. From the gay men burned at the stake during the Middle Ages to those eliminated by the Nazis and to the LGBT men and women living in oppression in parts of the world today, progress is never even or permanent.

Judith Butler, a feminist and LGBT scholar and activist who was foundational to the development of queer Theory, epitomizes the opposite approach to this dilemma. In her most influential work, Gender Trouble,17 published in 1990, Butler focuses on the socially constructed nature of both gender and sex. For Butler, “woman” is not a class of people but a performance that constructs “gendered” reality. Butler’s concept of gender performativity—behaviors and speech that make gender real—allowed her to be thoroughly postmodern, deconstruct everything, and reject the notion of stable essences and objective truths about sex, gender, and sexuality, all while remaining politically active. This worked on two levels. Firstly, by referring to “reality-effects” and social or cultural “fictions,” Butler is able to address what she sees as the reality of social constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality. For Butler, the specific constructions themselves are not real, but it is true that constructions exist. Secondly, because the “queer” is understood to be that which falls outside of categories, especially those used to define male and female, masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual, disrupting and dismantling those categories is essential to activism. “To queer” can therefore be used as a verb in the Butlerian sense, and the “queering” of something refers to the destabilization of categories and the disruption of norms or accepted truths associated with it. The purpose of this is to liberate the “queer” from the oppression of being categorized.

Individuals may fluidly accept or change their gender, which may not align with the one assumed at any point throughout the life course. Yet when it comes to sex chromosomes and their immense effects on our lives, there’s no choice.

I experience a kind of serenity, a general rightness with the world, and acceptance of my being and my eventual fate now that I finally have achieved true selfhood. I don’t hate myself anymore, I’m no longer apologetic for my very existence. I walk with pride, I feel exceptionally fortunate, grateful to whatever force cracked my egg before it was too late, I was saved from drowning.

Let me say it again so that there is no mistake: Even for those who have chosen to fully accept and affirm their 2SLGBTQIA+ siblings in Christ, until we let go of our narrow and prideful belief in the supremacy of the “normal”, we will not only continue to perpetuate harm to the already vulnerable, but we will deny the Church the opportunity to encounter aspects of the Divine only found in those who “transgress” those false and narrow boundaries.

I returned to Denmark in 1975 and was part of a group trying to set up an international lesbian front. To my surprise all kinds of new lesbians were “coming out” of the women’s movement. Although we had wanted this to happen it was surprising when it did, and difficult to adjust to. I had known some of the women as heterosexual feminists and it was hard to accept them as the new experts on lesbian political theory. They seemed in some way to lack what I felt was a lesbian identity, though I was unable to analyse quite why. I went to a lesbian conference in Amsterdam, with women who didn’t know and couldn’t have cared that there had been one there ten years before, and how important it had been. I sought out some of the 1965 lesbians and found them now quite anti-political. “We can’t stand all these new lesbians,” they said, “they’re so negative.” I disagreed, of course, on principle, but somehow there was less joy in the air. Unemployment was starting to happen in Europe, political discussions seemed different, we talked more about rape and violence, about men and what they were doing to the world. We talked less and less about sisterhood until finally we didn’t talk about it at all, because none of us could really believe in it quite the way we had when the sun shone and it was always summer, and the whole world was poised on the brink of change. I asked one of the new lesbians to dance at a social after a meeting. Then I tried to kiss her, gently, as we had been doing for the previous five years. She pushed me away roughly and said I was behaving like a man. I felt hurt and didn’t understand. I got drunk in a corner with some twenty-year-olds, crying into the schnapps bottle and trying to explain to them that there was something happening now that wasn’t what I thought I’d fought to achieve. Something uptight, critical, rejecting. Something not quite— lesbian. I was only 35, but I was beginning to feel like an old woman of the movement. Most of the lesbians my age were not to be found in the lesbian movement. Many were back working in the mixed homophile organizations, now changing their names to associations of gay men and women. Or they were branching out to start women’s refuges, getting involved in the peace movement, active in the political women’s movement. I had moved to Norway and found that the only lesbian group I wanted to work in was called The Panthers, involved in social and cultural activites of lesbian poetry, discussions, and sing-alongs. I got involved with the Norwegian F48 and a huge split over Marxist-Leninist politics, which resulted in the formation of the Worker’s Homophile Association (AHF)— which turned out to be not at all marxist anyway. It all made for interesting political intrigues, but I grew tired and began working very hard so that I could spend part of each year back in Aotearoa/New Zealand. My work as a tour guide made saving money easy, especially doing lots of trips through the USSR, where there were few consumer temptations. I did, of course, and dangerously, search for Soviet lesbians whenever I could.

It’s naive not to believe that powerful individuals within the major power centers of society—Hollywood, media, government, academia, religion, and science—are committed to brainwashing the masses into believing lies about reality, human nature, and behavior. They are already planning to persuade humanity to go along—willingly or unwillingly—with the elite’s socialist-utopian vision of the future. Why would they do that? The secretive ruling elite want to turn our world into a global socialist or communist state, which will enable them to acquire dictatorial power and amass even greater wealth. Their globalist game plan has nothing to do with what is fair or best for everyone. It is strictly about what is better for them, because they literally view themselves as the rulers of the planet and see us as “useless eaters” who exist to serve them. Many will find this difficult to accept, because they have been brainwashed to believe the globalist elite want to share their wealth and a create a better world for all mankind. Unfortunately, that is a total lie and not even on the menu.14 Do you really think when a major politician such as Hillary Clinton described a large segment of American voters as “deplorables” that her remark was just a slip of the tongue? This is what Clinton said at a LGBT fund-raiser before introducing actress Barbra Streisand: “To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.”15 That’s how the globalist elite view much of the world. They speak of the need to “cull the herd”—a truly chilling turn

I have a dream - that one day, black people won't be black - white people won't be white - brown people won't be brown - gay people won't be gay - straight people won't be straight - women won't be women - men won't be men - the trans won't be trans - believers won't be believers and non-believers won't be non-believers - instead, we all will be just human.

I'm sure lots of schools have students who are able to form bonds of friendship across sexual identity stereotypes... even in Iowa

We all wanted El to be something he could never be. And we thought us wanting that was somehow acceptable, but it’s not. It’s not about El fitting into some idea of what he should be. Tolerance isn’t conditional. It’s absolute.

Let’s go back to the apparent contradiction of conservatives advocating for deportation of illegal immigrants as a group while providing individuals with food, water, and toys. H&N conservatives may be hostile to the idea of immigration, but they have an innate ability to connect on an empathic basis to actual immigrants. This ability—one might even call it an unconscious impulse—has been used by Hollywood writers to increase acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. They do it through the power of story.

Closer examination of the hate crime framework reveals substantive flaws in this approach. A central shortcoming is its exclusive focus on individual acts of violence rather than on dismantling the systemic forces that promote, condone, and facilitate homophobic and transphobic violence. Hate or bias-related violence is portrayed as individualized, ignorant, and aberrant—a criminal departure by individuals and extremist groups from the norms of society, necessitating intensified policing to produce safety. The fact is many of the individuals who engage in such violence are encouraged to do so by mainstream society through promotion of laws, practices, generally accepted prejudices, and religious views. In other words, behavior that is racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant, and violence against disabled people, does not occur in a political vacuum. And it is not always possible to police the factors that encourage and facilitate it.

Where the homophile movement had stressed the importance of gays acting “responsibly” in order to win mainstream acceptance, GAA emphasized building pride in subcultural difference and organizing a political bloc to demand equal rights.

Jim acknowledges that he and the other GLFers were so strident that the old-timers felt as if they had been literally assaulted. He and his friends had no patience with counsels of moderation and no appreciation for the work previously done, against great odds, to bring the gay movement to its current level of visibility. “We wanted to end the homophile movement” is how Jim later put it. “We wanted them to join us in making a gay revolution.” And he adds, with retrospective compassion, that “we were a nightmare to them. They were committed to being nice, acceptable status quo Americans, and we were not; we had no interest at all in being acceptable.

By accepting the pro-sex work position that prostitution is a ‘choice’, advocates have consigned prostituted women to a segregated class of women who are kept in systems of sexual exploitation that pass for benevolent institutions, especially in those countries and states where the prostitution industry is legalized or decriminalized. So-called ‘progressive’ LGBT+ organizations are in the vanguard of advocating the decriminalizing of prostitution, where brothels, pimping and sex buyers are the building blocks of an ever-expanding sexual exploitation industry that has ravaged the lives of women through a romanticizing of ‘free choice’, a ‘choice’ that is not free for the thousands of women who are abused in the industry.