Queer Community Quotes

But belonging meant denying who he was. Living as something he wasn't had nearly torn him part from the inside out. But he also loved his family, and his community. It was bad enough being an outsider; what would happen if they just couldn't--or wouldn't--accept him for who he was?

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 men in more than a "Brad Pitt is slick hot sexy" kind of way. But I worried what my friends, exes, and the Community would think. I never even broached the subject with my parents. Because what bothered me the most was that people would think that being a lesbian had been a phase for me, when that was so very not the case. What I feared was that I would no longer be part of a community, that I might be seen with my boyfriend and not be recognized as something not the same.

ten reasons to love being queer viii. the people within our community are so supportive and so caring and so loving, most of the time towards people they don’t even know and it is in moments like that when you realize that the queer community is more than a community we are a family

The greatest barrier preventing us from fully challenging sexism is the pervasive antifeminine sentiment that runs wild in both the straight and queer communities, targeting people of all genders and sexualities. The only realistic way to address this issue is to work toward empowering femininity itself. We must rightly recognize that feminine expression is strong, daring, and brave - that it is powerful - and not in an enchanting, enticing, or supernatural sort of way, but in a tangible, practical way that facilitates openness, creativity, and honest expression. We must move beyond seeing femininity as helpless and dependent, or merely as masculinity's sidekick, and instead acknowledge that feminine expression exists of its own accord and brings its own rewards to those who naturally gravitate toward it. By embracing femininity, feminism will finally be able to reach out to the vast majority of feminine women who have felt alienated by the movement in the past.

I was not and had never been a part of a queer community, how to access such a thing was not just a mystery but an impossibility. The loss of which was sizable. Agony in isolation, the shame and pain that I thought was mine alone. My heart aches for my younger self. A tiny bug running to the rim of an upside-down juice glass. What a difference it would have been to sit with queer and trans pals and have them say "I feel that way, too. I felt that way, too. We don't have to feel that way. You don't have to feel that way.". Not a magic eraser of shame, but it would have undoubtedly quickened things up.

But artists aren’t the only marginalized folks controlling real estate. Think about the colonizing role that wealthy white gay men have played in communities of color; they’re often the first group to gentrify poor and working-class neighborhoods. Harlem is a good example. Gays have moved in and driven up rents, as have renegade young white students, who want to be cool and hip. This is colonization, post-colonial-style. After all, the people who are “sent back” to recover the territory are always those who don’t mind associating with the colored people! And it’s a double bind, because some of these people could be allies. Some gay white men are proactive about racism, even while being entrepreneurial. But in the end, they take spaces, redo them, sell them for a certain amount of money, while the people who have been there are displaced. And in some cases, the people of color who are there are perceived as enemies by white newcomers.

Queer indispensability?” Manal asks. “It’s a concept I heard about at a play I went to a few months ago—a solo performance piece by a queer Sri Lankan trans man,” I tell her. “At one point, he talked about something he noticed, not only in himself, but in his queer friends and com“community—this way in which queer people tend to make themselves indispensable in their relationships and friendships. They’re so afraid of being left that they make themselves unleavable.

And in most queer communities, regardless of one's sex or identity, people who are more masculine in gender expression are almost always viewed as more valid and attractive than their feminine counterparts.

When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, & activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier.

If there’s one thing the queer community is, it’s resilient. ​Soon

First, people who are bisexual experience double discrimination. This means that people experience biphobia not just from the heterosexual community but also from members of the queer community.

Queer people have had to actively make their culture and community and institutions, because the non-queer world is not going to do it for us. And I love that, I love the idea that you have to create what you need, you know?

Queerness isn't about individual answers as much as collective questions.

Welcome to the town of Repression. Population: the entire queer community.” “It’s a sucky place to live.

I hadn't met a lot of openly queer people before. There'd been a crowd of people at school who Pip hung out with with from time to time, but there could only have been about seven or eight of them, max. I don't know what I expected. There was no particular type of person, no particular style or look. But they were all so friendly. There were a few obvious friendship groups, but mostly, people were happy to chat to whoever. They were all just themselves. I don't know how to explain it. There was no pretending. No hiding. No faking. In this little restaurant hidden away in the old streets of Durham, a bunch of queer people could all show up and just be. I don't think I'd understood what that was like until that moment.

...there are lesbian sex parties that happen in the city and how they will often have No Bio-Cock Policies, meaning, No Trans Women. Or, optimistically, Trans Women: Keep Your Pants On. Meanwhile trans guys are welcome to brandish whatever cocks they want. Kind of frustrating, kind of problematic... The term bio-cock has become shorthand for the fact that trans women aren't sexually welcome in any communities anywhere.

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.

Sometimes it feels like my queerness was always there but I was too shell-shocked and splintered by violence to see it. When I finally did? It saved me. Opening up to my queerness saved me. Once I began to identify as queer, I began to require this dreaming and commitment to change from my partners. I define myself to claim myself, to foster a curated community of support

This is why the concept of chosen family is woven so deeply into the fabric of queer community culture: where the bonds of blood have failed us time and again, we hope that our friends, lovers, and mentors will fill the void. We dream of relationships that stand against the test of time and gay drama, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. Shut out of the heteronormative institutions of marriage and the nuclear family for most of history, queers have traditionally turned to more daring and creative notions of kinship and sharing the future.

But I couldn't relate to this widely held notion of community. We hear the word community all the time. Often it sounds like wishful thinking. Queer community is just as vague - just piling a confusing identity onto an elusive concept. Maybe community, as Famous says, excludes inherently.

Online discussion boards and Facebook groups, where covert communities of queers, feminists, and Christians of color gather and find solace—to Matt these replicate the early church in the New Testament, where gatherings were organic and happened in homes or in secret, for fear of persecution.

Other than the time with Paula at Reflections, and a nerve-racking experience at a bar in Paris with Alia (a story for another book), I had not stepped foot into a gay bar. I was not and had never been a part of a queer community, how to access such a thing was not just a mystery but an impossibility.

In so many hip queer communities that are not explicitly disabled, it's not okay to not be okay. We pay lip service, but how many times do you ask someone how they're doing at a party and hear anything but how great things are going, or feel like you can be honest about how things are really going for you?

Many asexuals know that they are different at a very early age, just like many others in the queer community. They should not have to grow up feeling isolated, alone and wrong. I would encourage the broader queer community to consider the history of homosexual and bisexual rights and community; to open their arms to the asexual community.

Punk has been portrayed as music by and for angry white males, but in its inception, it was a rebellion against all rock cliches. Gender, ethnic, sexual and class taboos were all challenged by our early punk community and that is a story which is not very often told. People of color, queer folk, women—all were present from the very beginning of Punk.

Boundaries are an important aspect of a heathy psyche, a healthy community, and a healthy witchcraft.

Queer identity may be discerned in relative isolation, but it comes to life in community.

i hope you are holding space

despite the all-encompassing acronym. Though trans youth seek community with cis gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer teens, they may have to educate their cis peers about what it means to

Strangely, the subsequent AIDS works that have become iconic in our culture rarely mention the movement, or the engaged community of lovers, but both formations were inseparable from the crisis itself. Now, looking back, I fear that the story of the isolated helpless homosexual was one far more palatable to the corporations who control the reward system in the arts.The more truthful story of the American mass - abandoning families, criminal governments, indifferent neighbors - is too uncomfortable and inconvenient to recall. The story of how gay people who were despised, had no rights, and carried the burden of a terrible disease came together to force the country to change against its will, is apparently too implicating to tell. Fake tales of individual heterosexuals heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue helpless dying men with AIDS was a lot more appealing to the powers that be, but not at all true.

New York city wasn't yet the post-Giuliani, Bloomberg forever, Disneyland tourist attraction of today, trade-marked and policed to protect the visitors and tourism industry. It was still a place of diversity, where people lived their lives in vibrant communities and intact cultures. Young people could still move to New York City after or instead of high school or college and invent an identity, an art, a life. Times Square was still a bustling center of excitement, with sex work, "adult" movies, a variety of sins on sale, ways to make money for those down on their luck".

In the same way that we need to look out for women in ethical non-monogamy, we also need to look out for queer folks, trans people, people with disabilities, the young, the old, the poor, and people of color.

Stereotypes are the most reductive kind of story: They reduce others to single, crude images. In the United States, the stereotypes are persistent: black as criminal, brown as illegal, indigenous as savage, Muslims and Sikhs as terrorists, Jews as controlling, Hindus as primitive, Asians of all kinds as perpetually foreign, queer and trans people as sinful, disabled people as pitiable, and women and girls as property. Such stereotypes are in the air, on television and film, in the news, permeating our communities, and ordering our institutions. We breathe them in, whether or now we consciously endorse them. Even if we are part of a marginalized community, we internalize these stereotypes about others an ourselves.

The abused woman has certainly been around as long as human beings have been capable of psychological manipulation and interpersonal violence, but as a generally understood concept it - and she - did not exist until about fifty years ago. The conversation about domestic abuse within queer communities is even newer, and even more shadowed. As we consider the forms intimate violence takes today, each new concept - the male victim, the female perpetrator, queer abusers, and the queer abused - reveals itself as another ghost that has always been here, haunting the ruler's house. Modern academics, writers, and thinkers have new tools to delve back into the archives in the same way that historians and scholars have made their understanding of contemporary queer sexuality reverberate through the past. Consider: What is the topography of these holes? Where do the lacunae live? How do we move toward wholeness? How do we do right by the wronged people of the past without physical evidence of their suffering? How do we direct our record keeping toward justice?

Lesbian communities tend to be more intricate and intimate than other communities because of this lack of attachment to outcomes. You might hit on a girl and find out she’s monogamously partnered, but you end up falling in love with her ex, who’s also the nanny of her kids. This kind of thing isn’t weird at all in many queer communities. So embrace the possibility of nuance in relationships. Flirt and play with the intention of connection in its myriad ways, and odds are, you’ll find something that works for both/all of you.

A constant refrain from those who think of or turn to suicide is loneliness, especially among queer people. It is incredibly damaging to feel like you have no community, no one to talk to, or that you’re a pariah in a straight world that discriminates, bullies, and harasses.

I’m Sorry to do it this way, but I had to be safe,” Melku explains. “I won’t waste any more time. Our collective’s mission is to support the solidarity movement. Often, that has meant supporting marginalized peoples. Some of you are part of the queer and trans community, like me. Many of the most valuable monsters are also a part of these communities., which is why redefining to include them is so important. In that spirit, I think we should extend our support to monsters since it is likely that they’re already in the movement but have chosen to remain silent.

I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve betrayed her somehow, by dating a boy. It doesn’t make any sense, especially for me—gender is truly not the thing that makes me attracted to someone. Silvie knows that. But this girl vs. boy thing is complicated. The image thing is complicated. And okay, maybe I still feel the need to justify it to myself too. I always assumed I’d just date women. Like, forever. It’s what I know, and I know I like it, and I’m so entrenched in the queer community already … I’ve always been totally okay with boys being nothing more than a possibility.

The only reason they tolerated the transgender community in some of these movements was because we were gung-ho, we were front liners. We didn’t take no shit from nobody. We had nothing to lose. You all had rights. We had nothing to lose. I’ll be the first one to step on any organization, any politician’s toes if I have to, to get the rights for my community.

these glaring disparities, about how those with the most access within the movement set the agenda, contribute to the skewed media portrait, and overwhelmingly fail at funneling resources to those most marginalized. My awakening pushed me to be more vocal about these issues, prompting uncomfortable but necessary conversations about the movement privileging middle- and upper-class cis gay and lesbian rights over the daily access issues plaguing low-income queer and trans youth and LGBT people of color, communities that carry interlocking identities that are not mutually exclusive, that make them all the more vulnerable to poverty, homelessness, unemployment, HIV/AIDs, hyper-criminalization, violence, and so much more.

Perhaps we expect gay public figures and other prominent queer people to come out, to stand and be counted, so they can do the work we’re unwilling to do to change the world, to carry the burdens we are unwilling to shoulder, to take the stands we are unwilling to make. As individuals, we may not be able to do much, but when we’re silent when someone uses the word “gay” as an insult, we are falling short. When we don’t vote to support equal marriage rights for all, we are falling short. When we support musicians like Tyler, the Creator, we are falling short. We are failing our communities. We are failing civil rights. There are injustices great and small, and even if we can only fight the small ones, at least we are fighting.

A closely connected idea is historian George Chauncey’s argument that gay and lesbian communities found their earliest manifestations in poor and working-class cultures, because wealthier classes could maintain a greater degree of personal privacy. For LGBT people, the luxury of privacy was antithetical to forming communities, which are, by their nature, public in bringing similar people together.

I guess I think of it as what we called each other in college when we didn't want to use gay to refer to everyone who's not straight and cisgender." Seth ducks his head. "I understand that. It doesn't bother me so much when other people talk about the community, about themselves. I suppose, since I didn' come out until I was older, I just never had much of a chance for positive associations with being called queer.

I will not stop living my queerness out loud. I will not stop raining my good queer love down on the world until we all have a seat at the table. Until expressions of love and identity are met with the wonder with which we should meet all evidence of goodness in a world as harsh and lonely as this one can be. Until the glitter of generations of fragmented hearts just like mine are finally welcomed all the way home.

In the summer after my father died, I spent days unable to get out of bed. I had vivid nightmares of monstrous women lurching out of televisions or crammed into attics, bones cracking out of place. I had nightmares that I was monstrous too. I thought these dreams were further punishment, a reflection of who I had become. But now I wonder how much the things that scare us are always trying to form their own communities too.

Kenta Sakura, a professor of social work specializing in queer and trans community-based research, calls this "paving pathways through pain," and his phrasing suggests that paving such pathways is less about restoring the self to an unharmed state and more about utilizing negative affect to drive world making projects. Resilience is thus not about bouncing back, or about moving forward, but rather a communal alchemical mutation of pain into possibility.

From the erasure and delegitimization of bisexual and transgender identities to the infantilization of asexuals to the “white-centric” expressions of relationships and identities to the prevalence of monosexism in LGBTQ+ circles, the continued centering of gay and lesbian relationships as the primary and best indicator of individual queer representation is doing harm. It robs us all of the complex and beautiful diversity of how we experience sexuality, gender, and community.

Meet actual famous trans writer. Feel indicted when famous trans writer says that they think all trans people want to be celebrities. That the drive to celebrity is an endemic problem that fractures trans communities. That we are all so alone for so long, the only way to survive is to nurture a private sense of specialness and uniqueness—all the while fearing that this sense of specialness is our only lifejacket as we swim in a culture where tokenization tells us that we must be the only one, the fiercest, most brutal one, the special one.

Older age can be challenging for LGBTQ people when living an independent life becomes more difficult. Having lived in a same-sex relationship for many years there are limited choices about living in a retirement home where some people may feel that they have to supress their sexuality in order to appease others. I hear less these days about this aspect of LGBT life, being forced back into the closet in order to live in close proximity to others, that can cause depression particularly where there may be no close relatives or friends having lived a long life

The friendship I had with Wendi, though, is not the typical experience for most trans youth. Many are often the only trans person in a school or community, and most likely, when seeking support, they are the only trans person in LGBTQ spaces. To make matters worse, these support spaces often only address sexual orientation rather than a young person’s gender identity, despite the all-encompassing acronym. Though trans youth seek community with cis gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer teens, they may have to educate their cis peers about what it means to be trans.

Love of other people may take many forms, from brotherly love between members of a faith community to the love that inspires us to mete out justice fairly, clothe the naked, and feed the hungry. When an earthquake strikes, it is an act of love to give of our time and resources to those who are suffering. When injustice takes place, it is an act of love to shout in protest. And when a population is vilified, subjugated, and despised; when the members of that group are mischaracterized and slandered; when selective teachings of religious faith are used as cudgels—then the mandate to love compels us to learn more, engage more, and finally to stand up for those who have been wronged.

Mona West remarks on the importance of this text for the LGBT community: It is a significant story for queer people of faith because the eunuch is a sexual minority in the context of Jewish religion during this time…. Queer people of faith would read this story as our own. We are kept from full participation in the Church because of what is perceived as our outsider sexual status. We have been denied ordination and communion. Our relationships are also not blessed by the Church. At best we are allowed to attend worship if we “leave our sexuality at the door.” We are allowed marginal participation in the body of Christ if we adopt a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, or if we promise not to be a “practising” homosexual.

And secondly, admit defeat. Socialism (or anarchism) is not going to happen. And there is no national resurgence of organic community coming our way. There will be no night-watchman state and libertarian utopia where the public sector is all but removed. There will be no ecological-spiritual awakening spontaneously growing from the goodness of your heart. And no, Mr. Conservative, there will be no rolling back of gay rights, bike paths, vegan diets, animal rights and queer perspectives—they are all here to stay and expand. You can give up on all of that nonsense. Those were whispers of another time. Let them die hard. Clear your head of these hallucinatory fantasies. They are about as meaningful today as belief in ghosts or Jesus walking across King Herod’s swimming pool.

The quintessential "self-made man" (and it is almost always a man) is self-sufficient, confident, stoic, righteously industrious, performatively heterosexual, and power. His success is signified through acquisition--home ownership, marriage, and children--and display of taste and things--craft beer and Courvoisier, Teslas and big trucks, bespoke suits and I-don't-care CEO hoodies. On the surface, it looks like that idea has evolved some. We have our Beyonces, Baracks, and Buttigiegs. But that doesn't mean the American Dream has become liberated from its origins or that its promise of freedom is more free. It just means more of us are permitted entry to the club if we do the double duty of conforming to its standards and continuing to meet the ones set for us--women must lean in, queer couples must get married, people of color must be master code-switchers.

Gay men were at the forefront of that community of misfits, happy to have found in Garland a performer whose tragedy and resilience (like their own) went hand in hand. Those “boys in the tight trousers,” her “ever-present little bluebirds” 10 as Time magazine euphemistically referred to them at the time (William Goldman was not so kind, outright talking about the “flutter of fags” 11 that filled up Garland’s closing night at The Palace in 1967), were drawn to Garland precisely because she spoke their language. As queer theorist David M. Halperin notes in his cheekily titled book How to Be Gay, this had little to do with a synchronous identification: Garland “wasn’t a gay man,” he writes, “but in certain respects she could express gay desire, what gay men want, better than a gay man could. That is, she could actually convey something even gayer than gay identity itself.” 12

Church is kind of a “borderland,” as Gloria E. Anzaldúa writes: “It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.”[3] When I read her words, I think about how much Jesus crossed over into what is prohibited and forbidden in his ministry, in all his dining, traveling, consorting, working, living, drinking, and partying with those who would fit that category of banned. And every time he crossed over, he created community by making space for everyone. Yet our communities and these spaces are not without struggle. There’s a struggle for lines to mark one’s home or yard or walls or room, so that who you are makes sense. There’s a struggle for love. The struggle is what binds us together, and we perform and embody it through words, sacrament and song, pews and prayers, cup and communion. It’s how we resist the darkness. This is church. This is church for everyone.

When we do disability justice work, it becomes impossible to look at disability and not examine how colonialism created it. It becomes a priority to look at Indigenous ways of perceiving and understanding disability, for example. It becomes a space where we see that disability is all up in Black and brown/queer and trans communities—from Henrietta Lacks to Harriet Tubman, from the Black Panther Party’s active support for disabled organizers’ two-month occupation of the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation to force the passage of Section 504, the law mandating disabled access to public spaces and transportation to the chronic illness and disability stories of second-wave queer feminists of color like Sylvia Rivera, June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, and Barbara Cameron, whose lives are marked by bodily difference, trauma-surviving brilliance, and chronic illness but who mostly never used the term “disabled” to refer to themselves.

I love the care and mutual aid we give each other in queer, trans, sick and disabled and working class and queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people of color (QTBIPOC) communities. As a sick and disabled, working-class, brown femme, I wouldn’t be alive without communities of care, and neither would most people I love. Some of my fiercest love is reserved for how femmes and sick and disabled queers show up for each other when every able-bodied person “forgets” about us. Sick and disabled folks will get up from where we’ve been projectile vomiting for the past eight hours to drive a spare Effexor to their friend’s house who just ran out. We do this because we love each other, and because we often have a sacred trust not to forget about each other. Able-bodied people who think we are “weak” have no idea; every day of our disabled lives is like an Ironman triathlon. Disabled, sick, poor, working-class, sex-working and Black and brown femmes are some of the toughest and most resilient folks I know. You have to develop complex strengths to survive this world as us.

Heavenly Blue worried all the time. He worried about the bills and the roof that needed repairing and the strange men who always watched the house and what the neighbors might do next and about Hollyhock's unhappiness. He worried most of all that he would go mad. His worrying got the bills paid and the roof fixed and drove the men away and calmed the neighbors down and helped Hollyhock be happier. And finally his worrying drove him mad. It was the madness of looking inward and being afraid. There had never been enough love and warmth around him and he thought he had gradually dried up inside. He wanted out but he did not know where out was. Lilac and Pinetree and Moonbeam and Loose Tomato and Hollyhock gathered. They held Heavenly Blue in their arms for days, they let him cry and stare and slobber and scream and be silent. They paid the bills and looked after the roof and watched the street for strange men and talked to the neighbors and Hollyhock kept himself happy. Their house filled up with comfort and routine and gladness until Heavenly Blue could no longer resist and became response-able again.

What have you done to allow yourself to express your preferred gender identity? Have you been "cross-dressing" in private? Have you gone out "dressed"? Engaged in any other activities (such as theatre, sports, etc.) that allowed you to express your feminine or masculine self? How do you feel when you are dressed in the clothes you like? Do you like how it makes you look? Do you just like the feel of the fabric? Is it sexually arousing? Do you dress primarily for comfort and relaxation? What were you told about being gay or lesbian growing up? What were the attitudes of the people around you, and how were those conveyed? Were you called queer or gay? How did you feel about that? Did you know anything about transgender people growing up? What images did you come across? Transvestite stereotypes? Jerry Springer? Do you know anyone now who's transgender? What stories have you heard or read? What are your sources of information about transgender life? What are your own thoughts, feelings, prejudices about gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people? Do you ever find yourself not wanting to associate with, or be associated with, others in the community? Who are you uncomfortable with? Can you identify where those prejudices came from?

The thing is, I don't really have any coming-out narratives of my own. I never felt as though anyone was entitles to a red-carpet presentation of who I am and how I identify. When I initially found myself attracted to women in college, for example, I simply showed up at the next family function with my first girlfriend in tow and introduced her as such. I didn't call each family member ahead of time and instruct them to brace themselves, nor did I write lengthy letters detailing the intricacies of my new desires. Likewise, when I'm meeting people for the first time at parties or other social engagements and they post the inevitable, "So what do you do?" I respond as routinely as possible: "Oh, I work in the sex industry. You?" I'm not trying to be provocative; rather, I've always believed that being "out" is the most powerful tool of activism available to disadvantaged minority communities, sex workers included, I find that when you approach a supposedly radical issue (queerness, nonmonogamy, atheism, gender nonconformity) with the same nonchalance as you would a less controversial topic (accounting, marriage, the weather), you give the other party permission to treat it with the same accepting ambivalence. We're pack animals, and we're constantly comparing ourselves to one another. We look for approval from our peers, and in many cases we use their reactions and opinions to help guide our own. I often observe people, who I've just disclosed to, pause to shift their eyes and gauge the receptiveness of those around them before responding. It'd be a fascinating study if it weren't so disheartening.

The different strategies and visions of ‘reformists’ and ‘radicals’ are not the only subject of major debate within lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer politics. The fact is that only a tiny minority of non-heterosexuals are involved in any sort of political activism. Various writers and activists have noted with rising alarm an almost mass depoliticisation of lesbian and gay communities in the 1990s. The crass commercialism of the gay scene and the rise of the so-called pink pound and of ‘lifestyle’ as a signifier of sexual identity (and human worth) has allowed huge profits to be reaped. Playing on the insecurities of people sells ‘packages’ which can include everything from ‘gay apartments’ to ‘gay holidays’ and ‘gay clothes’ to designer drugs.

They were waiting for a bus when Oliver said to Lee, 'Being gay is like being invisible. No one ever tells you about the loneliness, the isolation of it. Your whole life is on the outside looking in. Everyone is straight and happy - and then there you are. We don't have any spaces. They think just because we can marry, just because we can wear rainbow pins on our shirt that we're equal. And it's not even the straights - it's the queer community too. We're horrible to each other. There's no kinship, no matter how much we say there is. I had someone tell me that two men loving one another is uncomplicated nowadays. I wanted to shake her and shout, What? Uncomplicated? Are you that egotistical? Can you not see? Personally I think one of the biggest lies that we tell gay youth is that it gets better. That narrative needs to cease. It doesn't get better. You only learn to deal with things better...

The queer Christian community is moving past apologetics, beyond having to justify our sexuality to the church or defend our faith to our secular LGBTQ friends. For so long our community has been focused on the issue of acceptance that we have, perhaps, become shortsighted about what lies beyond it. That is what we seek to explore in this book; lives and relationships as they break free from a history of hostility and emerge into an era of acceptance.

Translation: happiness becomes proximity to whiteness. Camel Gupta (2014) notes how it is sometimes assumed that brown queers and trans folk are rescued from unhappy brown families by happy white queer and trans communities. We are not a rescue mission. But when you deviate, they celebrate. Even happy brown queers would become unhappy at this point.

On the Training of Doctors is dedicated to everyone in the world that defies conventions. It is dedicated to those that take the chance to be themselves in a world that demands compliance to norms. We dedicate this book to everyone in the queer, BDSM Lifestyler/kinkster, geek/nerd, neurodivergent, pagan, artistic, writing, transgender communities, and any other community that dares to defy the “norms”. There is nothing that takes more courage than to stand up and be yourself when those around us demand that we conform. We refuse to conform. We refuse to comply. We are beautiful and unique. We are never going to go away, and we are going to change the world.

For some, "community" was an overarching term that encompassed huge numbers of people based on identity (for example, "the feminist community"). For others, "community" referred to a specific set of arbitrary values, practices, or relationships (for instance, "I don't know them well, but we're in community with each other"). Some defined "community" simply by geographic location, regardless of relationship or identity (such as "the Bay Area community"). We found that people romanticized community, or, though they felt connected to a community at large, they had significant and trustworthy relationships with very few actual people who may or may not be part of that community. For example, someone might feel connected to "the queer community," but, when asked, could name only two or three people from that "queer community" they felt they could trust to show up for them in times of crisis, vulnerability, or violence.

I’m not even in the back of the bus. My community is being pulled by a rope around our neck by the bumper of the damn bus that stays in the front. Gay liberation but transgender nothing!

Now queer communities are an entirely different thing. That would be like if you decided to round up all of the people who have ever bicycled through the Posey Tube and put them all in the same room together. At first, you would all bond over your shared experiences traversing and surviving the tunnel. There would be expressions of Posey Tube Pride abound, and it would no doubt be a wonderful affair. But fairly shortly after that, you would all start to realize that you have nothing in common with one another aside from this one thing. After all, you each come from different backgrounds and have different personal and political views. Not to mention different bicycles!

I didn’t admit to my mom that I had no idea how to be a part of my community, because there seemed to be a whole second step after coming out, and that was finding your people. I mean, I had cis gay male friends, I did community theater growing up, but they didn’t really feel like my community. And Nova certainly hadn’t invited me into her community, and even if she had, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a part of it. But that night at Candace’s felt like I had inched closer to the thing that I wanted. They were just. So. Gay. Effortlessly so. Each with their own iconic style and vibe and fluent in a language that made my head spin. But unlike Nova’s elitist group of self-proclaimed Celesbians, I felt welcome here. Wanted. It was thrilling, and terrifying. It had been four months since that queer hang, and I finally looked forward to having weekend plans. Candace invited me everywhere, like Gay Bowling Tuesdays at the alley in town, and queer book club, and she binged all of Atypical with me in two nights. But even though we were close, there was still something that made me feel distant from everyone else. Like if I got too close, something terrible would happen.

Then, there's the gift of queerness. As poet Brandon Wint wrote in a much quote social media post several years ago, "Not queer like gay. Queer like escaping definition. Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitless all at once. Queer like a freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like, and to pursue it.

I feel like I am also in a weird spot in the queer community because I'm not, like, queer enough

Like gender, drag is really just whatever you can get away with. So call yourself a "queen"! There's strength in agreeing to a single word for ourselves, even though we don't conform to singular ideas about its meaning. We should take pride in the full expanse of our community-queens, kings, and queers, and what we've all been through. We are still here, and we will always find a way forward!

I wrote this book to give a little record of one more queer person...I lived, I loved, I was here-mess and all. I wrote this book to prove without a doubt that drag is natural and can disrupt boundaries of masculine and feminine, self and community, art and revolution, past and present, success and failure. Drag belongs on the world stage, like queer people belong in the world! Now I'm passing this archive on to you. If you are reading this, you're part of my family now-who else would want to read these stories? I hope you can use this book in your own life: as a tool to show how drag can be revolution, camp, and art at the same time; as a textbook to learn the queer histories of religion, drama, and costume; at least as a prop for your bookshelf. I suggest using it as a fortune-telling deck-choose a page at random, then channel the image or phrase you land on for the day.

I'd even idly wonder if it was a phase but also wanted to scream from the rooftops that I wasn't just an ally in the LGBTQIA+ community when I was with a man.

While chapter 2 asks how one-dimensional discourses of queerness underpin liberal capitalism, chapter 3 attends to how those discourses undergirded transformations within US cities. More specifically, this chapter examines how the mainstreaming of queerness and the closeting of race have promoted the development of neoliberal urban space. This version of neoliberalization involves the use of queerness as an alibi for an economic and racial cleansing of disfranchised neighborhoods, a move that requires the ideological separation of sexuality from other struggles. Indeed, if single-issue politics have worked to deradicalize homosexuality and separate it from issues of racial, gender, and class justice, then the neoliberal city is the embodiment of that deradicalization. As a result, the chapter looks at gentrifying practices in metropolitan areas as an instance in which queerness helps to define hipness, a hipness that is established by spatially dislocating working-class communities and people of color.

Who makes decisions about data that impact LGBTQ people? Decisions that disproportionately affect LGBTQ communities should be made by LGBTQ people. Where this is not practical, or there is a risk of overburdening a small number of people, decision-makers need queer data competence and the ability to recuse themselves when deliberations stretch beyond their capabilities. Use these instances to make space for people with knowledge and experience of the issues under discussion.

Not queer like gay; queer like escaping definition. Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitlessness all at once. Queer like a freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like, and to pursue it.”14

I’m very thankful and proud to be a part of a community, and I consider myself really lucky to be queer. It’s a special human experience that can bring people together.

Justice is justice. And the denial of justice for any one group of people erodes justice for all people. Attacks on the rights of transgender people to access health care are tied to assaults on abortion rights, as both are grounded in a fight for sexual autonomy, a tug-of-war with the government over control of our own bodies. The fight for immigrant rights is an LGBTQ+ fight, too, because it is a collective demand for human-centered politics that treat people with a basic level of decency. And the work of dismantling systemic racism is ours as well. The queer community includes people of color. And when the state is empowered to defend white supremacy, violently and brutally, all of our lives are on the line. To paraphrase Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Maya Angelou: so long as a single person has not been liberated, none of us has truly been liberated.

It is both of these things, the malleability and the familiarity, that offer a haven for modern queer folk to explore those timeless emotions and experiences that feel so personal, how the LGBTQIA+ community, my community, has found such a profound connection through these tales.

Embedded within these systems of family, friendship, and community, these creepy men may appear harmless, their evil obscured by a benign collective presence, a fog of sorts. This softness swaddles and protect them. This fog abets.

One reason was probably because, as a bisexual person, it always felt like Pride, and identity flags, and fabulous queer communities weren’t for me. I had always felt like an ally, not a community member.

Queerness may be at its most visible when it defines romantic love, but it is also inscribed in our broader communities. Friendship is resistance to Gayle Rubin’s traffic in women and the very structures that built this system of traffic.

Each of us has, in some way, been made outcast for who or what or why we are. Each one of us somehow a misfit for the mold we were told we were built for. Each one of us at some point rejected. Dismissed. Barred from opening the doors. Othering is not limited to queerness. But it is queerness that has taught me to transform that experience of othering into something strong enough to withstand the blows. That has shown me what happens when those that are cast out choose to build a village with open gates and shelter for everyone.

[…] asexuality is defined by a relationship to sex that is atypical to what has been decided on by society at large to be normative, and that atypical nature is marked by varying degrees of sexual attraction and desire. Asexual experiences stand outside what has been accepted and approved of as “normal” sexual experiences for both the queer and the heterosexual communities.

Queering anything is about reclaiming it, making it your own, and subverting it to fit comfortably in your community.

And thus I wonder about so many gay men I’ve met since, pillars of the community, out to everyone else but Mom, who still refer to their lovers as something between a roommate and a valet. Just who is being protected here, and who thinks queer is wrong?

The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history. -Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities

I love that you call me when you are agitated. I am honoured by your trust. I find, too, that I can be imperfect with you. Such a relief."(65)

I fell in love for the first time... I know now what it is to be giddy, laugh at silly things with someone, cook together and look after another person.

Such narratives were recalled in Canada in 2009 amid public-health responses to the H1N1 epidemic, after federal agencies delivered to rural northern Native communities vaccine and face masks accompanied by unmandated body bags. Outraged community health leaders deplored this as a sign that the very agencies charged with protecting them had given up and were being readied for their deaths. Here, an epidemiological reading that public-health measures cannot prevent epidemic in rural northern Native communities appears as the rationalizing logic of a settler colonial biopolitics.

This much is sure: Despite the fact that the “homosexual community” is as diverse as the “heterosexual community,” there is vast agreement among homosexuals that there is no such thing as a gay agenda. In fact, such terminology is to be studiously avoided, as noted by GLAAD (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) in its informational posting “Offensive Terminology to Avoid”: OFFENSIVE: “gay agenda” or “homosexual agenda” PREFERRED: “lesbian and gay civil rights movement” or “lesbian and gay movement

Makeup was always a dicey topic in the lesbian community, where any trace of femininity could be a betrayal of dykiness.

In some parts of the world, being gay is a punishable act. And in a way, living out and speaking out for gay rights, for other gay people, and for other people in the LGBTQ+ community, is a political act in itself. But for me and for a lot of other people, it’s our daily life.

The queer community here is small, and this bunch are all kinds of queer.

If we have to worry about following any prescribed path in order to be ourselves — no matter who prescribes it: the trans community, the medical establishment, or the non-trans assumptions of stereotypical (and therefore socially validated) gender behavior—we are only setting ourselves up to be judged by an arbitrary standard that can be changed at any time by those to whom we've delegated authority over our own authenticity.

the use of those two words together—queer community—may be more aspirational than actual. A community is not a utopia, but it should be a space where outside prejudices are unwelcome, and where solidarity is a default. Unfortunately, that is not yet a reality.

queer communities often function in ways that mimic my grandmother’s generation, or my great-grandmother’s before it: with a group of people, not always related by blood, working together communally to take care of one another. For those generations, it meant people who didn’t have a lot giving what they could. It was collective more than it was insular,

Fear of a Black man, boy, or gender queer teen simply for existing isn’t about actual threat; it’s about the internalized racism and anti-blackness that permeates our culture, and making light of that dangerous ideology normalizes the violence against marginalized communities.