Quotes About Queerness

People who pigeonhole us for our queerness are not people I'm interested in knowing. They're so boring. How dare you be so boring? Grow up. Get some Ray-Bans.

We have to look at queerness as a means towards challenging normativity.

We have to start making sure that churches start to talk about... black queerness in a way that's affirming. Because a lot of young black men are in the church, and that's where they start to learn this self-hate behavior.

I thought going in that I had to have this very broad, very palatable sensibility that works for everybody, but then the stuff that I'm the most proud of, and probably even got the most success from, was outwardly an expression of queerness or gayness. That's been a nice surprise.

The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.

It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.

Blake is a ready-made patron saint for those wanting to elevate their marginality, dissent, and queerness into strength. The relative futility of Blake's battle during his lifetime make him all the more attractive. In the intertextual heritage of queer art, Blake has become an honorary icon.

LENINA felt herself entitled, after this day of queerness and horror, to a complete and absolute holiday. As soon as they got back to the rest-house, she swallowed six half-gramme tablets of soma, lay down on her bed, and within ten minutes had embarked for lunar eternity. It would be eighteen hours at the least before she was in time again.

As with Dr. King, and Cleaver was explicit about his discomfort, Baldwin's queerness unsettled him.

We need to tell each other stories of different ways you can live, different ways you can be; predicated not on how close you get to the life you were assumed or expected to have, but on the queer wanderings of a life you live.

Drag is literally so ancient that it predates modern understanding of gender, of transness, of queerness. Drag predates modern ideas of gender, of theater at all. Drag predates the word 'drag' itself.

The way I see queerness now is that, best case scenario, another queer person reflects it back at you. Worst case scenario, which is what happened to me, is having people say, Well, you like Michelle Branch, so you must be gay.'

My Blackness, my queerness, my gayness, my inability to shut the hell up - these are all things that have really worked for me.

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.

Though all the houses of Venice are strange and old, those of the Ghetto seemed particularly so – as if queerness and ancientness were two of the commodities this mercantile people dealt in and they had constructed their houses out of them. Though all the streets of Venice are melancholy, these streets had a melancholy that was quite distinct – as if Jewish sadness and Gentile sadness were made up according to different recipes. Yet

My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.

Rather than writing about my experiences with other people, 'Ugly Cherries' is the first song I've ever written about myself. It's a confrontation: an attempt to unpack my own queerness with humor and self care.

I've been thinking a lot about my relationship to my own queerness, and I think the word pansexual speaks to me more than bi does.

You have to be able to see the world as a whole to bear it—to see the Queerness that moves in every bit of Fairyland, how it threads through every heart and field, how we are all bound together up in the Weird Well of the World.

We Queerfolk are big-picture types. You have to be, to see how the Queerness of the World works itself through everything.

The closet implies a literal, physical boundary dividing one's life before publicly declaring queerness, and after. It's a threshold impossible to recross, two distinct places to live: in the darkness, or in the light of one's self-truth. It doesn't promise stepping into the light will be easy, but it does imply a fundamentally altered human experience.

There were interesting ways that queerness could hide out and get played out pre-Stonewall. It is part of a vast history that is getting forgotten quickly as we trumpet forward into gay marriage and gays in the military and a much different cultural attitude toward gay lives.

Queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life...but it is up to us whether we choose to make good on that promise in a way that makes a detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction.

Queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life...but it is up to us whether we choose to make good on that promise in a way that makes a detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction" (The Queer Art of Failure, "Ending, Fleeing, Surviving")