Lgbt People

"U.S. history and China's history are very, very deeply - and in a complicated way - intertwined with each other over a few hundred years. And so there were times when that relationship was fraught with tension. But there were also times of great friendship…"

"My view is that despite the law being very clear, actually, a few very determined transphobes have crawled their way to the heart of the law like maggots in an apple."

"Look, I can't speak for all trans women, but I just want to live my life the way I always imagined it. I have become the version of myself I wanted to be when I was four."

"Ever since my first novel, people have had quite a snippy vibe about YA, and it’s almost like: ‘Do you think one day you’ll write a real book?’…"

"I have the same choices over my life and body that I would want for every single person on earth. I’m not trying to make a statement about what a woman is, I just want to be one. I don't really care if someone thinks that is biologically impossible; I've got near enough to be wholly satisfied. I am happy."

"I try to give folks the tools and resources to be a part of a movement…I'm a very strong believer in the idea that everybody has a place in the movement."

"I think there are a lot of gay men out there who are gay men as a consolation prize because they couldn't be women. That was certainly true of me."

"I just wanted to get f****d like a woman. That's what it's about. It’s not about what hole it's going in."

"I just haven't experienced a lot of the ridiculousness, you know? I haven't been around that long…I’m constantly shocked. Whenever I'm doing work, a large part of that work is going to be reacting, and I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily — me being surprised but still wanting to change things."

"I always say we’re like doctors, we fashion photographers — we get given problems and we solve them…"

"It’s really challenging that idea of who is a hero, who has made contributions to society, but then also not historicizing it, so we’re really putting it in the present because that’s what modern media is so much about…"

"The publishing world tends to focus more on the “young”, less on the “adult”. But I spend lots of time with teenagers and they’re truly the broadband generation. They’ve been online all their lives and seen things that would make milk curdle: beheadings, graphic violence, hardcore porn. Shielding them is never going to work. What makes this book YA is that it tackles issues in a non-judgmental way. We know these things exist, so let’s talk about them…"

"It really was harmful because it makes it feel for women, for LGBTQ folks, for even white men too, that there are only these tokens and that’s not the case. What it does is reinforce white supremacy, it reinforces patriarchy. It’s harmful to everyone, not just the people who are being erased."

"Fantasy and science fiction novels are metaphors for our world. If a speculative book looks at our world through the eyes of a marginalized person, white readers might not connect with that character, because they haven’t faced racism. They’re not excited by a plot where black and brown characters must fight white oppressors, because they have to see themselves as the villain rather than the hero. They see a main character that doesn’t look like them, and without quite knowing why, they don’t find the story relatable…"

"I think if you are curious you create opportunities, and then if you open the doors, you create possibilities. People close doors all the time, but I look at some pictures I take today and think they are so much better than pictures I took 10 years ago because I haven't stopped growing, and I don't ever want to stop growing."

"People of color face mass incarceration and execution and racism and systematic oppression, taking away so many of our chances to use our talents and abilities as well."

"I've never wanted to call myself any sexuality, because I hate the idea of taking freedom away from you, and I think we all can be everything. I understand that at moments you have to define it, but my sexuality has been so wide and open, and that's what's influenced my way of working. I think it's given me freedom, my sexuality."

"I was desperate to write a trans character for whom it wasn’t really an issue. After you come out, after the initial makeover and being on hormones for a few years, what happens next? That’s a story nobody tells…"

"There are people who would be able to do the same if they’d been given the same privileges as me. I think of how, in our society, so many of us like to consider ourselves the heroes of our own stories. We tell ourselves that we would’ve been better than our ancestors: We would’ve fought slavery, fought internment and concentration camps, stopped genocide. Yet these are all things that are happening in the world right now, and I feel a helplessness and hopelessness…"

"Social media makes photography available to the world so quickly that immediacy has become more important than quality. Not many people appreciate the quality that comes with experience and most are happy with seeing something now. Consumption makes it all come and go very fast, so there’s no need to elevate things."

"Because I write contemporary, magical realism and speculative for both children and adults, I spend a lot of time thinking about real settings for the contemporary books and the pieces that could be taken from those places to create fantasy spaces. But I also like to look for the magic in the real world…"

"The power of art and culture is that it speaks to our heart. It speaks to our emotions, but it also opens up our imagination to show us what’s possible. It takes us to another world, and we can experience that world. What we urgently need in our climate movement is to be able to imagine solutions and see ourselves in a different kind of relationship to nature. In order for us to halt the climate crisis, we have to reimagine our relationship to energy. We have to think about our consumption, especially as Americans. We could tell very different kinds of stories around how we achieve happiness and success. How we do that is by reconnecting to each other and to the natural world."

"I really long for a time when I can look at art and listen to music and watch films that remind me of my relationship to nature, that help connect me to all of the beautiful animals that we share this planet with, the ocean, the forest. That relationship has been broken. It has been altered and severed. That is the effects of white supremacy and colonialism. This is why in so many movements, there is a demand to return land to Indigenous communities and to center Indigenous voices because Indigenous people continue to be the ones who are most protecting our world’s biodiversity. And if you look at culture from an Indigenous perspective, they are very different kinds of stories. They are stories about being stewards of the Earth, stories about protecting the salmon."

"The power of art is that it can help us heal our relationship to nature and help us as human beings understand that we can move away from an extractive relationship toward a regenerative one. Culture can do that, but we have to do it by replacing the old fairy tales. Greta Thunberg called them “fairy tales of endless extraction” because, in reality, they are fairy tales. They are stories. They are a form of culture that has gotten us here—and largely a culture of colonialism that deemed some life could be exploited for the benefit of other life."

"We need to be able to have writers in television rooms write about the Black children who are getting asthma, the Latinx farmworkers who are working in extreme heat. All of these stories exist. They’re happening, but we need to find the bridge so that these stories can be transformed into cultural content that will move audiences."

"I’ve been tremendously inspired by artists like Judy Baca, who is a muralist in Los Angeles who has transformed what murals mean in our communities and has also built her own institution. Artists like Nina Simone and James Baldwin, who were able to create work that really spoke about the conditions facing Black people and work that would remain universal contributions to culture—something that would continue to shape generations. I’m inspired by people like Víctor Jara, who was a musician in Chile during the very oppressive government. He was actually killed by the government, but nevertheless, his music continues to inspire generations today. I was also inspired by Frida Kahlo. She was the only Latina artist I was exposed to in high school, so she was a role model because she was the only one I studied when I was younger."

"I have always been committed to opening doors for other artists of color, and I’ve always been committed to justice. Largely, that’s because I grew up in Oakland during the era of the War on Drugs, and I experienced hip hop. I experienced the remnants of the Black Panthers, so I’ve always been shaped by the idea that culture is not only something very healing, but it is truly what gets us through the hardest time. Art and culture give us the language to talk about what we are experiencing as oppressed people."

"As a movement who cares about climate justice and justice overall, we need to better leverage the power of culture because culture is what transforms the imagination—culture shows us what’s possible. And we can do that by including artists and culture makers in our organizing work. We can train and educate artists on what are the key issues we’re facing in climate. We can pass the mic to artists of color when it comes to climate change. So many people think of white men as the primary spokespeople around climate, but that needs to shift. We need to ensure that it’s BIPOC artists who are speaking about the true impact of the climate crisis. We need people of color and especially culture makers of color to be sharing the stories of what’s happening in our community."

"The narrative we need is to respect all life, including all human beings. How do we build our reconnection to each other as human beings? Because that’s what’s going to transition us away from an extractive economy and solve the climate crisis."

"Favianna Rodriguez is one of the first people I met who brought up sex in a public context with no attempt at mass seduction. She was incredibly matter-of-fact about her truth that, as an artist, as an organizer, her pleasure and her freedom are part of her larger radical creative path."

"Brands have to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to diversity…Don’t hire a black woman or a trans woman or a disabled woman and then get cross if they have opinions about their colour or their gender or their disability. The danger is if you’re hired just to be pretty but then you start having opinions about abortion, then you’re gonna get dropped. And of course you should be able to do both."

"Culture is power. The music we listen to, the social media we consume, the food we eat, the movies and television shows we watch-these all inform our values, behaviors, and worldviews. Culture is in a constant battle for our imagination. It is our most powerful tool to inspire the social change these times demand."

"As the old narrative of capitalism reveals its devastating failures, we urgently need more compelling and relatable stories that show us what a just, sustainable, and healthy world can look like."

"Art is uniquely able to speak to our understanding of the world by delivering potent, powerful and empathetic content. People engage with art in a very different way than they engage with a policy paper or a news article or even a protest. This is why I believe in the power of art to shape thoughts, change hearts, and ultimately help shape laws and policy. Art has the potential to distill the most complex social challenges down to their most basic and simplest values. Values like love, family, caring for the other, caring for those in need, and fighting the things that cause human suffering."

"Our current relationship to the Earth is based on a worldview of domination that supports an extractive economy."

"I think that people often think that culture is neutral, but culture is a major battleground. People have to understand that the culture they're seeing is reflective of a power structure that is impeding our progress as a society…"

"We have to be able to connect the dots, that ultimately our problem is the exploitation of the planet, of life on the planet, whether it’s the four-legged or the two-legged"

"The anti-immigrant movement has successfully been able to dominate the immigration debate by pushing out messages about migrants that are inhumane, racist, xenophobic and hateful. But those of us who fight for migrant rights are not only fighting back, we want to reframe the way migrants are viewed, artists especially. We want to expose the tragic losses that have resulted from unjust immigration laws, and we want to inspire and challenge people to reimagine migration as something beautiful and natural — somethign [sic] we all do."

"When it comes to climate change, most of the stories and cultural content that exist to inform and organize people are overwhelmingly pain oriented, outdated, and hella White."

"Judy Baca is one of our great feminist artists...She has not received the kind of attention she should have received over the course of her career. She has been a low and steady and every day practitioner."

"Judy invented a model of public art...Rather than plop down a monument or a sculpture, without accounting for the people around it, Judy really started a model where you have that community engagement early on in the neighborhood. So people in the neighborhood had a sense of connection with the work."

"a great American artist who has always had a strong sense of place, occasion and history."

"Student activism has translated into community activism. In southern California alone, many women exemplify the credo of giving back to your community. Judy Baca is an internationally renowned muralist whose work brings Chicano history to life."

"I think that all art is political. I think that art is always an expression of a human experience, and I very much believe that the arts are central to our society…"

"Where is the pop culture that makes riding public transportation and eating a plant-based diet fun, cool, and accessible to diverse audiences? Imagine the power of being exposed to an abundance of stories, songs, and images that challenge our fundamental consumption culture and expand our perspectives by helping us feel the consequences of our choices. What if we made it uncool to use fossil fuels in the same way smoking became uncool?"

"when we’re thinking about what’s next, we’re saying don’t bail out the fossil fuel industry, don’t bail out the airlines. Bail out people."

"One legacy of muralism is to make the point that we are losing the public commons. We should recognize we need them and fight for them. Parks and schools can be commons. Spaces and arts should not be privatized. Arts should be public..."

"I was trained as a minimal and gestural painter, in color theory, color optics, that's what was popular in the universities. And then I walked into a moment in history when the civil rights movement was in full effect. The Chicano Moratorium against the Viet Nam war, Cesar Chavez, Belvedere Park, I was there. I was in Cal State Northridge when students occupied the administration building. I thought, "Okay, I am perfectly suited to do nothing about any of these issues, I am a color field painter, what good am I?" On the night of my graduation, my grandmother said sweetly in Spanish, "What is it good for, what does it do?" Everything in her life had reason and meaning, even the little plants growing by the water fountain in her yard in South Central were used for healing. She could turn a stick in a coffee can into a beautiful thing, and I thought to myself, "I've got to learn what this is for." I began to systematically unlearn and move away from elitist system of arts. I realized that arts lived in all people. More primitive cultures have a culture of gifts, so the gift grows as it's given. In the potlatch of the Northwest, the tribal chief who gives you the goats expects you to have a big feast. In our culture, the gift giving culture meets capitalist culture, the culture of acquisition, where we value what men acquire instead of what they give away. In old cultures, those who gave the most were the most regarded. I began to see that if art were given away, it would grow. I began to answer my grandmother's questions one by one, and began to change the way I made art. The scale had to be big enough to include others. I had to think about we as opposed to me, the creation of family versus the agency of the individual. As I started to do that, I began to see I was very good at that."

"Some of the young people found in the arts a place to live, but I wasn't intending to make them artists, I wanted to make them citizens, part of the world they lived in."

"It doesn't matter if it's art or digging a ditch, building an airplane or making a sculpture, what matters is that it's a creative, innovative act. That the hands of the group have more power joined together. What really matters is the collaboration and skills young people develop figuring out how to get it done."