Lgbtqia+ Quotes

Race, gender, religion, sexuality, we are all people and that's it. We're all people. We're all equal.

There's this idea that if you're not straight, you HAVE to tell all your family and friends immediately, like you owe it to them. But you don't. You don't have to do anything until you're ready.

I don’t want anyone to hold back who they are. It’s not okay… it’s not a good thing

This is why homophobia is a terrible evil: it disguises itself as concern while it is inherently hate.

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.

I’m not gay,” said Raphael. “I’m not straight. I’m not interested.” “Your sexuality is ‘not interested’?” Alec asked curiously. Raphael said, “That’s right.

My brain is such a traitorous beast.

You're not under attack when others gain rights and privileges you've always had.

I fell like a star and she was the end of the world. A cataclysmic crash of two people. Never to be the same. Never getting back up. Not unless we were doing it together.

What do you say when The Girl tells you that you're The Girl to her?

You know, friend, this is a goddamn bitch of a unsatisfactory situation.

No person, no matter how important society deems their relationship to you, has the right to denounce you for who you are.

Everything feels yes.

To every LGBTQIA+ person who has questioned their place in life: You're strong. You're important. You're a lion. Let the world hear you roar.

To the boys who get called girls, the girls who get called boys, and those who live outside these words. To those called names, and those searching for names of their own. To those who live on the edges, and in the spaces in between. I wish for you every light in the sky.

Love should never mean having to live in fear.

Privilege is when you contribute to the oppression of others and then claim that you are the one being discriminated against.

I am small. So are stars from a distance. It's all a matter of perspective.

Privilege is not knowing that you're hurting others and not listening when they tell you.

Dad says I’m a late bloomer.' 'Maybe. Or maybe you’re blooming now, and you’re just not the kind of flower he was expecting.

What does total androgyny look like, when gender isn't even anything to do with appearance and voice?

I imagined a time when being gay is as unquestioned and un-judged as is having blue eyes. Some might call it fantasy or science fiction. I’d like to think it’s the future.

The things that I love about you aren't going to go away when you go on your book tour, and they're not going to go away when you go on your mission. I'll still be here, and I'll still be thinking about all those things. I'll still be working on being a better person, a better friend, a better son. I'll still be wondering what it would be like to be a better boyfriend for you. And you will be on your mission, thinking about how much you wish your weren't gay.

It is strange... the reasons one feels he doesn't deserve things.

Tolerance of intolerance enables oppression.

High school is such an incestuous little pool.

Don't try to be brave all at once. Take it in steps.

It wasn’t that she hated the idea of sex, just . . . she didn’t want it. Didn’t need it. But no one else ever seemed to feel that way

It was as though each of them had discovered something unexpected but infinitely desirable. They were not yet sure of each other, but they wanted to be.

I am a monster beneath him, with arching hips, an octopus with hands everywhere at once. I don't think anything in the history of time has felt this good.

There won't be any sex for the first three hundred thousand words... that's how you know this is an asexual-to-demisexual story.

We deserve to experience love fully, equally, without shame and without compromise.

Alec, with his heartbreaking contradictions, shy and brave, relentless and tender. Alec’s midnight-blue eyes, and the look on his face when they had their first kiss. And their last.

Light bursts behind my closed eyes, so intensely I nearly hear the popping sound. It's my brain melting, or my world ending, or maybe we've just been hit by a meteor and this is the rapture and I'm given one last perfect moment before I'm sent to purgatory and he;s sent somewhere much, much better. It isn't his first kiss - I know that - but it's his first real one.

I love the story of a thing. I love a thing for what it means a thousand times more than for what it's worth.

I'm a prince who likes dresses.

Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, madam. And one can't be stingy with these things, because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed you are. - Agrado from "Todo Sobre Mi Madre

Maybe I'm crying because I'm terrified that he's come here to do more damage, to reactivate what I feel only to let me down easy again, missionary style.

Now, listen. I would. Rather. Hug you. Than be with. Anyone else. Just. Hug you. Do you. Want to. Hug me. Back.

Alec’s breath caught. He found he could not stop holding it, as if he could save it for the child Magnus had been.

The only time she's come close to being "known" was when she accidentally came out as bisexual during sophomore English class while talking about her favorite poem.

What does love mean if we would deny it to others?

Bye bye binary. For gender, for sexuality, for everything. ... Lots of people can like lots of people. And could everyone please get over it and update their idea of normal.

His voice is both low and quiet, and it has this hypnotic rhythm to it. I wonder whether someday he'll give sermons with that voice, whether he'll throw down judgement with that voice.

If I were free, as a physician, to say what I pleased, I would tell every abused person I see that there is an entire world out there that is nothing like the one you’re living. Go discover it.

We can't just sit on our asses and not live our lives while we're trying to expose a corrupt government.

There’s a million reasons why someone won’t come out. What might seem like no big deal to one person is the whole universe to another.

The scrutiny on our bodies distracts us from what's really going on here: control. The emphasis on our appearance distracts us from the real focus: power.

Inside my chest, my lungs are wild animals, clawing at the cage. "Oh, man," Autumn mumbles from beside me. "His smile makes me stupid." Her words are a dim echo of my own thoughts: His smile ruins me. The feeling makes me uneasy, a dramatic lurch that tells me I need to have him or I won't be okay.

What matters most is not 'what' you are, but 'who' you are.

Building bridges takes us further than building walls.

God, Shall I compare thee to an icebox pie? Couldn't be gayer if she tried.

One can learn from what is not said.

Sometimes I still feel that there are two of me: one clean, flawless picture, the other imperfect and cracked; one boy, one girl; one voice that speaks aloud and one that whispers in my ear; one publicly known to have been troubled but be on the mend, the other who has privately lost something to do with innocence and gained something to do with knowledge and adulthood that can never be undone. I feel sometimes there are things that tear me in two directions, that there are two sets of thoughts that grow side by side. But then I realize that I am whole, whatever that means and does not mean; I am complete without the need for additions or alteration.

As for why... I didn't want to admit that I was female. It wasn't that I wanted to be a boy, more like I hated the whole idea of belonging to a gender... That somehow before I was ''me'' I was a ''woman'', like I was scared of being overly defined by those expectations, I guess...

Because most people have great difficulty recognizing the humanity of another person if they can't recognize that person's gender, the gender-changing person can evoke in others a primordial fear of monstrosity, or loss of humanness.

Traditions are just peer pressure from dead people.

I don't want to go on dates with anyone. People are pretty, sure, and I like to look at pretty things, but I don't want to go on a date with a painting.

For some of us, politics means fighting for our right to exist

It could've been easy to say I was hurt because I'm trans, because someone singled me out for my identity, but there's something weird about that - something off, about suggesting that my identity is the thing that brought me any sort of pain. It's the opposite. Being trans brings me love. It brings me happiness. It gives me power.

When we hide discrimination under the guise of 'religious freedom,' we make a mockery of human rights.

People think that LGBTs adopting children will hurt them, but it's not being in loving homes that hurts children most.

Who knows, perhaps after I've seen your true face, we develop passionate, torrid emotions for each other, have a one night stand, and I won't think of you afterwards again. But the way you are now...makes me want to live out the rest of my life with you instead.

I love you and we don’t need the other world to keep that.” He glanced at the small window in the door to see if the guard was watching, then leaned over quickly and pressed their foreheads together. “It’s just true,” he said. “It always has been. In this world and the next. They could take everything away and leave us with nothing, and I would still love you.

Males do not represent two discrete populations; heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats, and not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behaviour, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.

Her own hair was a glory of copper fire that morning, shining like a whisky still, long and loose in gentle flames down her back.

Because of you, Michael, my heart begins to grow wings.

TERFs were kicked even deeper into the dumpster where they belong.

When you've never felt like you really belonged somewhere, it's almost impossible to know what it will feel like to finally feel at home.

But now your mess is my mess, too.” He tilted his head toward Yadriel and spoke softly. “It’s bound to be easier if we’re both cleaning it up, right?

Those who tied love to sex, or even love to romance, didn’t own the emotion itself.

I thought sex was to breach new ground, despite terror, that as long as the world did not see us, its rules did not apply. But I was wrong. The rules, they were already inside us.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like Magnus’s clothes, but Magnus wore them like armor, a layer of protection between him and a world that didn’t always meet someone like him with open arms.

We are two queer women, and we're going to use this drive back to the cabin to do what queer women do." Blood pressure: rising. "And, uh, what's that?" "We're going to talk about our feelings" Well. That's worse than I predicted.

And what is my definition of feminism? It is not what we have between our legs but what we have between our ears. It’s a philosophical posture and an uprising against male authority. It’s a way of understanding human relations and a way to see the world. It’s a commitment to justice and a struggle for the emancipation of women, the LGBTQIA+ community, anyone oppressed by the system, including some men, and all others who want to join. Welcome! The greater our number the better.

We're only three class sessions in and I'm already behind? And to hear it from him? This buttoned-up Bible-thumper I can't get out of my head?

Don’t ignore half of me so you can fit me into a box. Don’t do that.

How are you supposed to be believed about the harm that you experience when people don't even believe that you exist? The assumption is that being a masculine man or a feminine woman is normal, and that being "us" is an accessory. Like if you remove our clothing, our makeup, and our pronouns, underneath the surface we are just men and women playing dress-up.

When trust is violated, it's like you're left with an empty piggy bank. Building trust again, she said, is like putting big, fat nickels into the slot. They clank against the bottom, and that sound is jarring. But in order to heal, you have to keep adding those nickels, and soon enough, there will be coins to cushion the nickel's fall and make the sound not so grating.

There are times when I feel like I can’t be me. I can’t simply exist. I have to offer something in exchange. Something that absolves me of being fat and gay and even worse—both of those things at once.

I don't want to lie about who I am, even if it doesn't matter. It's who I am. It's part of me.

To her, not packing our lunches every day or joining the PTA is a feminist rallying cry.

It's not just about us. It's about those who'll come after us. If I need to pick up a damn brick like our lord and savior Marsha P. Johnson, then that's what I'll do.

They kissed slowly. Gently. Like they couldn't believe they were allowed to.

I wondered how it would feel to be touched and not be afraid.

This same system could condemn injustice, but instead it chooses to condemn something as simple and fundamental as the search for the second half. We are all born wanting this. Why does it matter what shape this second half takes, provided it is the thing both sides seek?

This was another thing Vale’s mother never understood: Vale was aro-ace, both aromantic and asexual. She’d told her parents she just wasn’t interested in dating any number of times… But they never seemed to get it. To them, Vale’s sexuality was a ‘phase’ that they were certain she would one day outgrow. Their obliviousness was a raw spot for Vale.

Creed scowls. "Hardly. All he does now is mope like a goddamn teenage girl. Anytime I'm home, he's in his room with the door locked. I'm telling you guys, he got worked over really bad in San Diego. I thought the whole point of having a gay brother was that they were supposed to be all cool and shit. I got a defective gay.

Jack kissed him so carefully that August thought he would fall to pieces. Kissed him with the weight of knowing the price of risk. Then he gazed back at August like his heart was already breaking. It was the same face that Jack had made on the roof, in the middle of the night, when they rolled in the grass, when he sat back with August’s blood and ink on his hands, when his face was lit orange with flames, when he’d opened the door to Rina’s room, when he stared across the gym at the homecoming dance, when he pulled him from the river and breathed him back to life. Jack had been waiting. He’d been trying. He was scared. There were tears in his eyes and it took August’s breath away.

Gay rights aren't predicated on being born gay or having the right gene. Gay rights are predicated on having choice and consent. If you're a man and you can find another man that consents to have sex with you, it's the consent that gives you the right to have sex with him. Genetics are irrelevant when it comes to sexual rights. Just as gay rights are based on choice and consent, so are prostitution rights. All sexual rights are based on choice and consent.

Just because you didn't experience sexual attraction didn't mean you didn't you didn't experience romantic feelings. But those romantic feelings didn't look like they did in the movies because, well, Hollywood didn't make movies about ace people. Period. So they could be a little hard to figure out.

It felt like a puzzle, mostly put together but with a piece missing, waiting to be filled. There were plenty of pieces to fill it- gay, straight, bisexual- but none fit quite right. Sometimes I thought I could make one fit if I pressed hard enough, but it would never lie flat. The word asexual took the puzzle piece and turned it, letting it click into place where before it'd been better to just leave the space empty. I wasn't broken. I wasn't empty. I wasn't nothing at all. Just a little differently shaped.

But what I've been noticing about people I haven't invited into my queerness is that it introduces a barrier between us. What do I talk to these people about? How do I share feelings and intimacies without revealing this huge part of myself? Who am I without this queerness that now pervades my life, my politics, my everything?

The truth is, that we are in a state of emergency. In the past few years, we have seen an onslaught of legislation... targeting gender non-conforming people... Our communities are under attack. Regardless of whether these pieces of legislation pass, the fact that they're even being considered suggests just how disposable we are considered to be.

He was a boy breaking out and into himself at once. That's what I wanted—not merely the body, desirable as it was, but its will to grow into the very world that rejects its hunger. Then I wanted more, the scent, the atmosphere of him, the taste of French fries and peanut butter under the salve of his tongue, the salt around his neck from two hour drives to nowhere and a Burger King at the edge of the county, a day of tense talk with his old man, the rust from the electric razor he shared with that old man, how I would always find it on the sink in its sad plastic case, the tobacco, weed and cocaine smoke on his fingers mixed with motor oil, all of it accumulating into the afterscent of wood smoke caught and soaked in his hair, as if when he came to me, his mouth wet and wanting, he came from a place on fire, a place he could never return to.

I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.

There have to be trans extraordinaries. Do you think we'll get to meet them?" "Probably," Jazz said, "I've personally met an absurd amount of queer extraordinaire." "Poor straight people, they really don't get to have much. Except for fake white Jesus, do they?" They took a moment of silence for the heterosexuals of the world. When enough time had passed (six seconds--straights didn't need that much sympathy), Nick clapped his hands and said, "Okay! I think I'm ready to do this.

And it was hard to explain. That they didn't want to be a man, but that they had never felt quite right as a girl. That they only started to feel really okay when they understood they could be their own thing. That they could exist in a space that was all their own, that they could shift and adjust until it felt right. They had settled on nonbinary feeling right for them, even though they knew others like them had their own names that felt right to their own experiences. And that was comforting too. That each person could choose what brought them closer to belonging, the power in that. Knowing that one day, people might discover even better words for it. That there was only ever freedom in continuing to find new names for who we were, who we could be.

The path to accepting your sexuality has to start somewhere. For those identify as heterosexual, the childhood bliss of an early crush is typically encouraged and praised. Milestones such as your first date and the prom are celebrated by parents and friends. But when you’re anything other than straight, it’s more complicated; your growth gets shrouded and stunted. That’s why a lot of queer people, when they fall in love and get into a relationship for the first time, revert to a kind of prepubescent puppy love: spontaneous, impulsive, obsessive, and ecstatic. I’ve heard many people express annoyance at friends who “just came out and it’s totally cool and whatever, but do they have to talk about it all the time?” My answer to that is “Yes. Yes, they do. Don’t you remember puppy love? Well, imagine if you had to hide it for twenty years. So yeah, if they wanna gush about it, let them gush. There’s a first time for everything.

I don't like kissing." "I suppose it is a matter of taste."[...]"I wondered, did anyone ever," shrug, "you know, hurt you so you don't like kissing? love?" "Nope."[...] "I thought maybe someone had been bad to you in the past, and that was why you don't like people touching or holding you." "Ah damn it to hell," she bangs the lamp down on the desk and the flame jumps wildly. "I said no. I haven't been raped or jilted or abused in any fashion. There is nothing in my background to explain the way I am." She steadies her voice, taking the impatience out of it. "I'm the odd one out, the peculiarity in my family, because they are all normal and demonstrative physically. But ever since I can remember, I've disliked close contact...charge contact, emotional contact, as well as any overtly sexual contact. I veer away from it, because it always feels like the other person is draining something out of me. I know that's irrational, but that's the way I feel." She touches the lamp and the flaring light stills. "I spent a considerable amount of time when I was, o, adolescent, wondering why I was different, whether there were other people like me. Why, when everyone else was facinated by their developing sexual nature, I couldn't give a damn. I've never been attracted to men. Or women. Or anything else. It's difficult to explain, and nobody has ever believed it when I have tried to explain, but while I have an apparently normal female body, I don't have any sexual urge or appetite. I think I am a neuter.