Queer Novel Quotes

How in the world can you think a queer is cute? I mean, you can tell he’s a freak. You can just tell.” I advised Zelda that if she didn’t shut up, I’d gouge out her eyes and force her to swallow them.

Do you prefer him or her? Either one's cool-I'm genderfluid.

This is because the caress is not a simple stroking; it is a shaping.

Simon was fighting against being queer; all the social and professional pressures were against it even though homosexual acts between consenting adults in private were about to be decriminalised.

And Ross again knew himself to be happy-in a new and less ephemeral way than before. He was filled with a queer sense of enlightnment. It seemed to him that all his life had moved to this pinpoint of time down the scattered threads of twenty years; from his old childhood running thoughtless and barefoot in the sun on Hendrawna sands, from Demelza's birth in the squarlor of a mining cottage, from the plains of Virginia and the trampled fairgrounds of Redruth, from the complex impulses which had governed Elizabeth's choice of Francis and from the simple philosophies of Demelza's own faith, all had been animated to a common end-and that end a moment of enlightenment and understanding and completion. Someone--a Latin poet--had defined eternity as no more than this: to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come. He thought: if we could only stop here. Not when we get home, not leaving Trenwith, but here, here reaching the top of the hill out of Sawle, dusk wiping out the edges of the land and Demelza walking and humming at my side.

I guess it's true that us queers are starved for stories that mirror our lives. I can't remember a time when I saw a queer person in a movie or TV show or book that I didn't have to actively seek out myself.

Baby, that's so queer I could gag on the beauty of it.

I want to be with someone who, ten years from now, still makes my heart jump when I hear her key in the door. And that someone is you.

It seems to me that an often quiet, but often palpable presiding image here... is the interpretive absorption of the child or adolescent whose sense of personal queerness may or may not (yet?) have resolved... Such a child - if she reads at all - is reading for important news about herself, without knowing what form that news will take; with only the patchiest familiarity with its codes; without, even, more than hungrily hypothesizing to what questions this news may proffer an answer.

So he was queer, E.M. Forster. It wasn't his middle name (that would be 'Morgan'), but it was his orientation, his romping pleasure, his half-secret, his romantic passion. In the long-suppressed novel Maurice the title character blurts out his truth, 'I'm an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.' It must have felt that way when Forster came of sexual age in the last years of the 19th century: seriously risky and dangerously blurt-able. The public cry had caught Wilde, exposed and arrested him, broken him in prison. He was one face of anxiety to Forster; his mother was another. As long as she lived (and they lived together until she died, when he was 66), he couldn't let her know.

What happened was private. I was in it with Rose. She had hurt me grievously and now I was forever attached. I was in it now with all the women in the world. I walked home glad. I will die, I thought with a bounce in my step. I'm whole. Not whole like anyone else, but whole like me. Painful, but simple. It was very simple now.

don’t get into the writer’s personal life thinking if you like the books you’ll like the writer. A writer’s personal life is horrible and lonely. Writers are queer so keep away from them.

The message I've gotten about guys who like guys and girls is that we're faking, that we couldn't possibly be attracted to girls if we're attracted to boys. Bi girls get the same thing, but for them it means they're perceived as straight and for us it means we're perceived as gay.

What I mean is that, if a lot of queer energy, say around adolescence, goes into what Barthes calls “le vouloir-être-intelligent” (as in “If I have to be miserable, at least let me be brainier than everybody else”), accounting in large part for paranoia’s enormous prestige as the very signature of smartness (a smartness that smarts), a lot of queer energy, later on, goes into … practices aimed at taking the terror out of error, at making the making of mistakes sexy, creative, even cognitively powerful. Doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?25

And in what business is there not humbug? “There’s cheating in all trades but ours,” is the prompt reply from the boot-maker with his brown paper soles, the grocer with his floury sugar and chicoried coffee, the butcher with his mysterious sausages and queer veal, the dry goods man with his “damaged goods wet at the great fire” and his “selling at a ruinous loss,” the stock-broker with his brazen assurance that your company is bankrupt and your stock not worth a cent (if he wants to buy it,) the horse jockey with his black arts and spavined brutes, the milkman with his tin aquaria, the land agent with his nice new maps and beautiful descriptions of distant scenery, the newspaper man with his “immense circulation,” the publisher with his “Great American Novel,” the city auctioneer with his “Pictures by the Old Masters”—all and every one protest each his own innocence, and warn you against the deceits of the rest. My inexperienced friend, take it for granted that they all tell the truth—about each other! and then transact your business to the best of your ability on your own judgment.

But I want to kiss you,and I thought you ought to know" "You thought I ought to know." Eddie shrugs. "I'm an honest guy.

Who would ever want to read a novel about a punk and a drunk! Everybody knew a couple or a dozen; they were not to be taken seriously; nuisances and trouble-makers, nothing more; like queers and fairies, people were bell-sick of them; whatever ailed them, that was their funeral; who cared? - life presented a thousand things more important to be written about than misfits and failures.

According to Padilla, remembered Amalfitano, all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual. Poetry, on the other hand, was completely homosexual. Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next.

You know,” said Ahasver, “now and again you meet people unexpectedly on the road.” “Yes, old man.” Their eyes followed the two of them. “Queer,” said Bucher, “how we all go off in different directions.” “You will be off soon, too?” “Yes. But we shouldn’t lose sight of one another like this.” “Oh, yes,” said Berger. “We should.” “We must meet again. After all this here. Some day.” “No.” Bucher looked up. “No,” repeated Berger. “We should not forget it. But we also shouldn’t make a cult out of it. Or we’ll remain forever in the shadow of these cursed towers.

Philip's rise from shop-walker to designer of costumes had a great effect on the department. He realised that he was an object of envy. Harris, the assistant with the queer-shaped head, who was the first person he had known at the shop and had attached himself to Philip, could not conceal his bitterness.

Entertainment in its broadest sense- popular ballads, vaudeville, films, sculptures, plays, paintings, pornography, pulp novels-- has not only been a primary mode of expression of LGBT identity, but one of the most effective means of social change. Ironically, the enormous political power of these forms was often understood by the people who wanted to ban them, not by the people who were simply enjoying them.

Giorno dopo giorno, la sua fiducia in Harold aumentava, e a volte si chiedeva se non stesse commettendo il solito errore. Era meglio fidarsi o essere cauti? Era possibile avere un’amicizia autentica, se ci si aspettava di venire traditi da un momento all’altro? [...] Eppure, era difficile non fidarsi: per l’atteggiamento di Harold, certo, ma soprattutto perché a renderlo difficile era lo stesso Jude: voleva fidarsi di Harold, voleva abbandonarsi, voleva che la creatura dentro di lui scivolasse in un sonno dal quale non si sarebbe più svegliata.

In my past life, there were a number of LGBTQ activists who had criticized the entertainers using their flamboyant sexuality as a selling point on TV. I think their criticism was likely on point. But here’s what else I think: Without going so far as to say it’s the right or wrong thing to do, some people out there can’t live their lives without making light of their problems. Of course these entertainers were contributing to homophobic stereotypes. And of course I’d prefer it if we could eliminate homophobia altogether. But some queer people living in the real world will also, inevitably, act in ways that highlight the prejudices they experience. Maybe they’ll have other reasons for acting the way they do, but I think that need to lampshade their problems is one of them. Some people can’t live with their burdens without cracking wise about them. When you’re queer and you fall in love with someone who can never respond to your feelings in kind, they often still behave more intimately with you than they would with someone of the opposite sex. But after the moment you realize you’re in love with them, that just makes them feel even further away. If you run into this problem again and again, before you realize it, you might become the kind of person who can only helplessly laugh the whole thing off. Not everyone ends up like that, of course. It just so happened that I had.

What did you think of Rebecca on tv? I don’t think it had dated too badly, but some things hit me – and it was silly, the way they made Rebecca hit her head on a block, instead of being shot by Maxim. And they muffed the fancy-dress ball, and the wreck: it was all too hurried, one did not know what was happening. In the book she had to go through the whole Ball without speaking to Maxim, who was on a hard chair beside her, and then it was in early dawn the wreck came. I suppose you thought to yourself, now Peg would have been much better than Olivier, and it would have worked out rather well, imagining Peg thinking of his first wife, and being plunged in deep thoughts ...! Of course it was old-fashioned in 1938 when it was written – I remember critics saying it was a queer throwback to the 19th-century Gothic novel. But I shall never know quite why it seized upon everyone’s imagination, not just teenagers and shop girls, like people try to say now, but every age, and both sexes.

INTRODUCTION TO GENDER AND SOCIETY The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir A classic analysis of the Western conception of the woman. Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks A primer about the power and potential of feminist action. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Feminism redefined for the twenty-first century. QUEER THEORY AND INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM Gender Trouble by Judith Butler A classic, and groundbreaking, text about gender and the boundaries of identity. Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein A 1990s-era memoir of transition and nonbinary identity. This Bridge Called My Back ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa A collection of essays about the intersections between gender, class, sexuality, and race. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde A landmark collection of essays and speeches by a lauded black lesbian feminist. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston A memoir of growing up as a Chinese American woman. MODERN HISTORY How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor A history of the Combahee River Collective, a group of radical black feminists operating in the 1960s and 1970s. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts Investigative reportage about the beginning of the AIDS crisis. A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski An LGBT history of the United States, from 1492 to the present. CONTEMPORARY QUESTIONS Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus by Vanessa Grigoriadis An exploration of the effects of the sexual revolution in American colleges. The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin A book about the shifting power dynamics between men and women. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay Essays about the author’s experiences as a woman and our cultural understanding of womanhood. All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister An investigation into the lives of twenty-first-century unmarried women. GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN FICTION Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown A groundbreaking lesbian coming-of-age novel, originally published in 1973. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin A classic of morality and desire, set in 1950s Paris, about an American man and his relationship with an Italian bartender. Angels in America by Tony Kushner A Pulitzer Prize–winning play about the Reagan-era AIDS epidemic. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson A coming-of-age and coming-out novel about a woman growing up in an evangelical household.

I set out to write a series of grand stories starring queer people. My vision has always been to let that "queerness" exist organically without it being the focus of the story. Growing up, I got sick of "tragedy porn" slice of life novels being the only LGBT literature in existence. Here I hope that I captured the idea that queer people can own a high fantasy adventure without the story being reliant solely on the characters' "queerness" alone.

Nearly all the battles which are regarded as masterpieces of the military art, from which have been derived the foundation of states and the fame of commanders, have been battles of manœuvre in which very often the enemy has found himself defeated by some novel expedient or device, some queer, swift, unexpected thrust or stratagem. In many such battles the losses of the victors have been small.

That highly complex piece of mechanism under the dry beach, I finally decided, had a great many units, undoubtedly, working away in separate little departments of their own, doing a great variety of things, keeping a clock synchronized with my alarm clock, remembering appointments, writing a novel, keeping lists of things to buy like groceries and bathing suits; and probably these separate departments had their own system of communicating with each other. The idea appealed to me. I could see Department T (in charge of keeping time) flashing a picture of the time on its chart at the appointed minute to Department N (in charge of getting the dry beach out of bed and other navigation). A queer clock, I had to admit, although the chart had a so-so resemblance to a stop watch. Then there was Department L (in charge of keeping Lists of Things to Get) sending up a picture of bathing suits— this picture not seen by the dry beach— to N. “We’re in the shopping section, N. How about that bathing suit? I want to get it off my list.” N, flashing same picture to Department W (in charge of waves) : “W, please send in one wave regarding bathing suit. We’re in shopping section.” W sends in wave and then flashes picture of green oblong with white dollar sign and zero. Translation: “I did. Has no money.

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!

Mom and Dad called me Moonlight, the brightest thing in their sky on their darkest nights. It always sounded so pretty, but the real me is more rough around the edges.

I hoped that reading the novel would give my mother a sense that my life as a queer black feminist is about something more than my choice of partners. It is also about a relationship to time and people and shared space.

I personally think that visual novels should have a place under 'e-books', because in a way that's what they are; A virtual or digital book with multiple routes (usually), and a compelling story accompanied by art and music. I say this as someone who spent some 18+ hours getting my heart destroyed by a queer VN that's end result had me on my office floor crying until 5 in the morning over the course of a weekend. And it is a slap to the face that I cannot add it onto my read-list as there was definitely a lot of reading involved.

This is not a contemporary treatise on gender identity. This is a first person story told by an 8 year old as she grows up in a small southern town during the 80's. The characters know how they feel but back then did not have the language to express it because we did not have the role models, media, social media, or even cell phones to teach us. Please do not expect an 8 year old and a 10 year old to speak like an educated queer and transgender male of today. Admire their strength to live in their truth the best way they knew how back then. Love Wayne for his courage and heart. Trust me, when these two become adults, they will rock the modern world in my next novel.

It’s not about being right. It’s about proving to everyone that there is so much we still don’t know about the deep beautiful forest and about what it means to be people— to be queer people.

Stare nella tua testa dev'essere un'esperienza terribile

All I wanted was to live the life of the mind, and I know it’s a terribly shopworn thing to say, but there you have it. I didn’t stand in any camp, I wasn’t a formalist or a feminist, I didn’t want to call myself a reader-response person or a deconstructionist or a poststructuralist. I wasn’t a Marxist or a proponent of queer theory, or a Freudian, a post colonialist, or God help us! there was a black man in our department, a graduate student like me, who wanted us to start a movement to rename Multiculturalism ‘Slave Studies.’ He believed there was some sort of cleansing, revolutionary power in the ‘ironic distancing,’ that’s what he called it.” Langston took a deep breath, then sighed, remembering it all. “And no one could say anything to him, because we had no authority—that’s the key to the recent developments in the critical tradition: if you’re inside—and believe me, academia is nothing but a cult of expertise, it is the only religion alive and well—only if you’re inside do you have any authority, and if that’s the case, no one can speak to you. Your curriculum vitae becomes your fortress.

I assure you it made me feel quite quaint and queer.

It will be evident to the experienced reader that by omitting certain speculative and metaphysical elements and by elaborating incident, this book might have been reduced to a straightforward story. But I did not want to omit as much on this occasion. I do not see why I should always pander to the vulgar appetite for stark stories. And in short, I made it this. I explain all this in order to make it clear to the reader that, however queer this book appears at the first examination, it is the outcome of trial and deliberation, it is intended to be as it is. I am aiming throughout at a sort of shot-silk texture between philosophical discussion on the one hand and imaginative narrative on the other.

It isn't just that you fall in love with someone—you each allow yourself new identities with each other, new skins, almost like a cocoon to who you'll be next.

Spectacles are queerly expressive things-almost more expressive, indeed, than eyes.

All six children disappointed their father [Edward White Benson]. Martin, the eldest, was a paragon: brilliant at school, quiet, pious - his father's dream, He stuttered, which may reflect the strain of such perfection under such parents. His death at age seventeen tore a hole in his father that never healed. Nellie tried to be the perfect daughter - working with the poor, caring for her parents, gentle, but always willing to go for a hard gallop with her father for morning exercise. Her death at a young age, unmarried, was for the whole family an afterthought to the awfulness of Martin's loss. Arthur, Fred, and Hugh all found the Anglican religion of their father impossible. Arthur went to church, appreciated the music, the ceremony and its role in social order, but struggled with belief, even when he called out to God in the despair of his blackest depression. Fred was flippant and disengaged, and his first novel, Dodo, the hit of the season in 1893, outraged his father's sense of seriousness. Fred represented Britain at figure skating - a hobby that was as far as he could get from his father's ideals of social and religious commitment, the epitome of a 'waste of time.' Hugh's turn to the Roman Catholic Church was after his father's death - but like all the children, the fight with paternal authority never ceased. While his father was alive, Hugh muffed exams, wanted to go into the Indian Civil Service against his father's wished - he failed those exams too 0 and argued with everyone in the family petulantly. Maggie, too, was 'difficult': 'her friendships were seldom leisurely or refreshing things,' commented Arthur; Nellie more acerbic, added, 'If Maggie would only have an intimate relationship even with a cat, it would be a relief.' Her Oxford tutors found her 'remorseless.' At age twenty-five, still single, she did not know the facts of life. Over the years, her jealousy of her mother's companion Lucy Tait became more and more pronounced, as did her adoption of her father's expressions of strict disapproval. Her depressions turned to madness and violence, leading to her eventual hospitalization. There is another dramatic narrative, then, of the six children, all differently and profoundly scarred by their home life, which they wrote about and thought about repeatedly. Cross-currents of competition between the children, marked by a desperate need for intimacy, in tension with a restraint born of fear of violent emotion and profound distrust (at best) of sexual feeling, produced a fervid and damaging family dynamic. There is a story her of what it is like to grow up with a hugely successful, domineering, morally certain father, a mother who embodied the joys of intimacy but with other women - and of what the costs of public success from such a complex background are.

It is a strange distortion, fostered by the biases of modern literary genealogy, that the novel is so often seen these days as the dominant and privileged genre of the nineteenth century. The Victorian novel, as a new, and of course, modern exploration of the self through narrative, has become an integral part of our story of modernity's culture... Novelists were indeed lions of literary society and creators of narratives by which the world was understood and lived... Yet such literary history distorts and diminishes the cultural significance of at least two other forms of genres. which in the nineteenth century were no less fundamental as narratives of the self, and which the novel is in constant dialogue with. The first... is poetry. ... Poetry as a narrative of self-formation - reading it, writing it, learning it so that it is inside you - is fundamental to nineteenth century Bildung... ... The second flourishing genre...biography is a fundamental way in which the process of 'writing down the self' was expressed. ... New theoretical models of psychological development, however, are equally influential in this changing sense of self-construction. Scientists and theoreticians of the mind - of which Freud is only the most starry example - were producing instrumental and wide ranging paradigms of psychological development as models of individual growth or as models of social transformation. How the child would or should become an adult - sexually, morally, socially - was becoming the question argued through at a particularly heated juncture between social science, educational theory, and medicine. Life-writing became the test cases of such intellectually explosive theorizing. Theories of psychology duly became systems of upbringing, which stimulated in turn a literature of resistance and questioning.