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Here are some quotations from many years' readings, bookshelf selections, notes and cross-studies.
They range from very questionable to strongly affirming.
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“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
--E. M. Forster, “Two Cheers for Democracy”
“Love someone and let someone love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?”
--James Baldwin
“The pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians... the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen’.”
--Rev. Jerry Falwell, on the September 11 attacks by terrorists
“Remember, the serpent is still living in the Garden of Eden. Only the heterosexual couple was expelled.”
--Edward Carpenter, CIVILIZATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE
“Those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others.”
--E. M. Forster
“A man who could not seduce men cannot save them either.”
--Soren Kierkegaard
“I’m a high school drop-out from a race--the Poor White Trash race--that has done nothing for ten centuries but pick up rocks, hoe weeds, sweat in factories and march off to war whenever told to; and each generation has begot a smaller potato patch. But I’ve spent some time in libraries, not all of it asleep, and I have learned this: every civilized society in history has discriminated against its abnormal members. ‘Schizophrenia’ is a civilized Western term, and so are ‘witch’ and ‘misfit’ -- terms used to rationalize the cruel and unusual punishments doled out to extraordinary people.”
--Tom Robbins
“We’ve made progress. In my day, the 1920s, the idea that a Negro or Mexican or homosexual was anything but a second-class citizen was just absurd. But the Reagan administration seems to have turned the whole clock back. Too bad Hinckley used a .22 instead of a .44.”
--William Burroughs, Chicago TRIBUNE interview, 10-19-88
“You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray--witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.”
--Seamus Heaney, “The Plantation,” from DOOR INTO THE DARK
“Once we were dissimilar but unseparate. That is what beauty is.”
--Adrienne Rich
“While you’re still in first grade they’ve already turned you into a monster, you spend your whole adult life trying to wipe out all the things they’ve taught you to do, trying not to hate yourself.”
--Gary Indiana, HORSE CRAZY
“He hated the men floating in sleep in the big stone houses. Because their lives were ordered and their rooms tidy. Because they got up every morning and did their public work. Because the weren’t going to dynamite their factories and have naked parties in the fire.”
--Leonard Cohen, THE FAVORITE GAME
“I learned years ago that love could be temporary and still be love.”
--Christopher Bram, GOSSIP
“I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.”
--James Baldwin, 1984
“Pornography is not in the hands of the child who discovers his sexuality by masturbating, but in the heart of the adult who slaps him.”
--Bernardo Bertolucci
“I love gay people. But they are not a minority whose rights have to be protected. They are not like blacks, because black sticks. If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with Saint Bernards and to nail-biters.”
--Anita Bryant
“If God dislikes gays so much, how come he picked Michelangelo, a known homosexual, to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling while assigning Anita Bryant to go on tv and push orange juice?”
--Columnist Mike Royko
“I don’t want realism, I want magic.”
--Blanche Dubois, in Tennessee Williams’ A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
“I might doubt the divinity of Jesus, but I believed absolutely in the naked youth who appears while Christ is being arrested and then runs off into the night. Why would he be mentioned, except that he did appear and run away in just that manner?
--Andrew Holleran, NIGHTS IN ARUBA
“For I realized that so much memory and desire swirl about in the hearts of men on this planet that, just as we can look at Neptune and say it is covered with liquid nitrogen, or Venus and see a mantle of hydrochloric acid, so it seemed to me that were one to look at Earth from afar one would say it is covered completely in Ignorance.”
--Andrew Holleran, NIGHTS IN ARUBA
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