Women Singers From The United States

"I know that I stand on the shoulders of the women in the industry that came before me, and my shoulders are broad enough to have the women that come after me to stand on mine … the little kid in me still believes that rock n’ roll can save the world."

"I pushed down the gay part of myself so deep because I was like, that can’t possibly be me."

"I was so desperate to feel understood"

"I encourage people to use your critical thinking skills, use your vote – vote small, vote for what’s going on in your city."

"We want liberty, justice and freedom for all. When you do that, that’s when I’ll come."

"It’s awesome to say no to things, even though they’re offering a lot of money. I have the power to say no."

"Drag is like a spa for my soul."

"Why, I've been lucky all my life. I was even lucky in having typhoid fever. I thought It was most dreadful that I should fall ill and have to give up a leading part... but when a week or two after its New York premiere the piece was sent to the storehouse, I just turned over and thanked my lucky stars that I was saved from all the disappointments that go with such an experience."

"I think that’s mainly because people in Detroit will sit down on you. If you’re not singing like that, they will sit down. Ain’t nobody gonna clap for you. Ain’t nobody gonna feel sorry for you. You will die a slow death. They don’t care. It’s like the Apollo. Detroit will bring out the dog in. That’s the culture of Detroit. Most definitely."

"I’m from Columbus and Toledo, My friends and I used to come up here for concerts because Detroit has the best concert. Everybody would come through to Detroit and ain’t nobody coming to Toledo. Nobody. And so we would get in the car and drive an hour and we were like, “Oh, OMG. The talent here is crazy!”"

"When I was dared to go on and do something funny, the person that dared me told me that the Playmakers are doing funny stuff on YouTube."

"I don’t know if it feeds my soul. The only thing that feeds my soul is God. Entertainment, singing, acting, doing skits, that’s fun stuff. But it doesn’t feed my soul at all. but it’s fun stuff to do. However, people tell me it brings them joy."

"Then I was like, people are watching, and they thought that was funny. So I did another one, and then I did another one. And people would hit me and say, “My mom was dying and we would sit and we would sit around and watch you and it made my mom smile and laugh.”"

"And at that time, Kevin, his brother, Jason, and their friend Anthony were doing stuff on YouTube. So I reached out to them and said, “Man, I love y’all stuff. Y’all are funny.” And we became friends online. Kevin’s brother Jason became Kev’s manager as well as my manager too."

"Having the courage to be with all that we are, even in the face of the disappointment and the anger and resentment that comes with the breaking of the romantic idea around the feminine," she explained, "part of the freedom and part of the empowerment of women is being able to withstand that."

"so that's what I'm really playing with right now. And I love the juxtaposition of going from beauty to rough, the balance of both."

"You cannot make a cake with all sugar. In one lifetime, we've lived about 20...If I had to say what kind of art piece our union is, I would say it is a tapestry."

"A man can CHOOSE to belong to someone. And if he does...he is considered noble. A woman is told she MUST belong to someone or...she is not worthy."

"If you really want to know, I'm thankful for the Hollywood scrutiny, that that's my problem. There are mothers out there losing their sons, their husbands, their daughters. I'm blessed. So scrutinize me. I'll take that any day over what the majority of my people are dealing with on a daily basis. I dare not complain."

"We mere mortal women are worthy simply because we exist!,"

"When you've walked through the darkness of your own heart and mind ... there is no shadow you fear."

"The ego will never fail to strangle the love out of one's heart if we allow it to take center stage in our relationships. Transferring our trust to our hearts from our egos is a painful process in learning HOW to love. BUT… through it all… when we finally get to the place where we can give and receive love in its most pure state… ego free… it is only ever… beauty."

"I've always believed a woman's superpower is how deep she can love, you know? And one of the things growing up in Baltimore, I grew up around a lot of Black women that didn't have, necessarily, resources to give, right? But they had their strength and they had their love to offer."

"if we so CHOOSE to bond with someone from this space … we will erect monumental love and give birth to treasures."

"You gotta trust who you're with, and at the end of the day, I'm not here to be anybody's watcher. I'm not his watcher. He's a grown man. I trust that the man that Will is is a man of integrity. HE's got all the freedom in the world, and as long as Will can look at himself in the mirror and be OK, I'm good."

"I think everybody's life is their own work of art and then we have many pieces within it. I have a lot of ideas around marriage and I think it can be one of the most powerful dynamics."

"I really thought happiness had a lot to do with pleasure, and I realized that happiness is about peace."

"It's more of a life partnership… I don't own him. He doesn't own me. He has to be his own person first, and vice versa… Love is freedom."

"For every woman it's important that we recognize that we have the right to figure out what works for us personally. We don't have to do what everyone else is doing. If we are good, our family is going to be good."

"That was the first interview I did for the project [the interview with Ursula Le Guin]. And talking about what role fiction has within social change. That really opened my eyes. I saw them as very separate activities. And I no longer do, although I also do believe that it’s also easy to go too far the other way and be like, well, I’m doing my part, I sit at home and take no risks! And, you know, I do think that the actual work of making things change in this world involve organization, and they involve direct action, and they involve confronting oppressive powers directly."

"(Q: Do you see all your creative work across the different bands and projects as being connected?)…they’re also just coming in from the same place in terms of how I see the world, in terms of how I see the physical manifestation of different thematic ideas, of what Gods are and aren’t. All that stuff will tie in together. And it’s fun. I totally get now why so many writers that I love are just 50 years into one wild, weird world building thing. Or just declare all their work a multiverse. So they’d be like, yeah, it’s all tied together somehow. I totally get it now."

"I don’t believe the places of friction for a reader should be in the prose. I believe they should be in the ideas that are being presented instead."

"we need to tell stories about ourselves, because others are talking too. Every book and movie out there with a cop as a hero, saving the world from terrorists and thugs hellbent on chaos? We need to counter that. We need books about the oppressed, about the beauty of resistance."

"There’s no other issue more pressing for everyone alive enough to read these words than climate change. Which is saying something, because we’ve also got a fascism problem — but they’re not unrelated problems."

"(Q: what is your favorite part about launching a new thing into the world?) When people indicate to me that something in what I have written has been useful to them, and that they take something from what I’ve written and find their own ways of applying it and make it their own. So, it’s not like when people quote me, but more when I can see that I have been a participant in the great art of shaping the world. And when people leave me alone about how pretentious it is to talk about art."

"On some level, everything I write is about the fact that we are of the earth and we’ll return to it, and I can’t help it and I don’t want to help it because I think that reading should connect us to something grounding whenever possible. And I think that there’s actually nothing more grounding than realizing that we are dirt temporarily taking on a different form."

"I think that story is incredibly good at mitigating suffering. Overall, most people lead fairly hard lives with a lot of physical pain and emotional pain. And being able to step outside oneself every now and then I think is crucial for our mental health."

"(about Leonard Peltier) We always idealize wild rebels who refuse to bow to empire when we read about them in fantasy books, but some of those rebels are alive and imprisoned by the same people who draw their salaries from our taxes."

"when you set magic] in the real world, if you’re honest to the subject, you’re mostly going to write horror because it’s about power and playing with power. I’m interested in understanding how people shape power communally and collectively amongst each other."

"I think the human condition is knowing that you’ll die. And I actually don’t think that books have to be a way to avoid thinking about that. I think instead they can be a way to find peace with that. I think feeling that it’s okay that this is going to happen is necessary for our well-being. But when you imagine the full breadth of what’s possible as a human being, I think you have to come back to an awareness of mortality and to seek out lives of meaning and beauty. And I think that fiction can be a really good way to give us ideas of how we can be in the world to try and accomplish those things."

"I believe that art involves reaching into the sea of possibility, the void, and coming back with ideas in order to then build those ideas into things, so I’m going to use similar tools, similar building blocks, similar themes, regardless of the medium. As I come up with ideas, I have to figure out which format is best for those ideas."

"We need to be inspired and we need to inspire. And fiction offers the chance to explore things deeply in ways that other mediums can't."

"While so much of our other work—theory and direct action protest alike—presents answers to the world, fiction presents questions."

"fiction – not just written fiction, but stories in general – are how we generate what we perceive as possible, as a society and as individuals. And so we need stories that show other ways of living, besides the one that we’re in now that is obviously doing us all a great bit of disservice."

"What I would argue is really useful about studying and understanding history is not just looking for these patterns as they repeat, but to look at trajectories…if you want to hit a ball and you know where the ball is, that’s useful. But unless you also know where the ball was, you can’t tell where the ball is going. In order to understand trajectory, you need more than one point of reference. History provides us a second point of reference. I admit, most of the patterns that I see as they relate to queerness and transness and things like that throughout history—the trajectories that I see are dangerous. They are reasons for us to keep our guard up. There’s this quote that lives in my head by Edward Murrow, “We are not descended from fearful men.” Obviously, he’s very gendered. We can look back at the history of queer and trans stuff and be like, “Oh, we were really repressed and oppressed and now we’re looking like we’re going to be again.” And that’s true. But the other thing we can look back at is be like we were fierce. We took people to task for trying to hurt us. We organized collective defense and self-defense. The fact that Stonewall was a riot is not just a quip. It is a fundamental truth about where we come from and what built our movement. There had been decades of aboveboard, polite, acquiescent, homosexual organizations, and then some people were fucking tired of it and physically fought the police. And that actually catches fire. That actually catches people’s attention. And those are the people that we come from. We come from both, and I’m not embarrassed or mad at the people who tried to make us look polite. I understand why they did it. But yeah, what we can learn from history is that we have claws. Whether we win or lose the fight is not as important as that we fight it. But we can win."

"at some point, you realize that almost all fiction, especially science fiction, is activist fiction. Sometimes it’s an activist fiction for the status quo! But for the most part, it’s not, there’s like people all over the right and left and then weird combinations of both right and left, all over the history of science fiction."

"(do you have any advice for aspiring writers?) MK: Store at least 5 gallons of water per person and a week’s worth of food in your pantry. Connect with your local mutual aid organizations, or start your own. Talk seriously about how you and your friends and family will attempt to interfere with the global resurgence of fascism, utilizing the skill sets and resources available to you. You can’t write fiction on a dead planet. Furthermore, it’s our participation in life that allows us to reflect life with accuracy and beauty on the page. Find inspiration for your characters from people in the world instead of people in books. Find inspiration for conflict and resolution in history and the present instead of what you’ve read in other novels. Live life as fully as you can, feel things as fully as you can. Your life will be better and your books will be better. (2022)"

"(SFP: Where do you think science fiction as a genre is headed?) MK: Well, probably all sci-fi that doesn’t directly address climate change is going to read as nonsensical fantasy soon enough. So I think the future is there. Personally, I hope it heads in the direction of offering alternatives, instead of just saying “here’s some stuff that’s bad.” (2022)"

"survival isn’t about hoarding supplies, and hiding in the basement, but instead about building connections with community and building resilient communities. And sometimes hoarding food in your basement!"

"(SFP: Can you tell us your work’s message in 25 words or less?) MK: We, all of us, need to explore our own agency as individuals and communities in order to fix this dying planet. (2022)"