We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage.
As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live.
And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.
If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough to love easily nor will you always be brave, although it does not grow any easier. Do not pretend to convenient beliefs, even when they are righteous; you will never be able to defend your city while shouting.
I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.
If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.
I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community.
There are lesbians, God knows... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.
When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. ... poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.
I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use.
I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.
Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
Sadomasochism is an institutionalized celebration of dominant/subordinate relationships. And, it prepares us either to accept subordination or to enforce dominance. Even in play, to affirm that the exertion of power over powerlessness is erotic, is empowering, is to set the emotional and social stage for the continuation of that relationship, politically, socially, and economically.
I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me - to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.
Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else.
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.
I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.
The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . .
The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. . . .
We're supposed to see "universal" love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature.
You will never be able to defend your city while shouting.
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