Lgbt People

"In recent days, footage has emerged of the former chancellor and the former chair of the 1922 committee offering their services for £60,000. On top of that, the former health secretary offered his wisdom for £10,000 a day. Can I ask the Deputy Prime Minister, when he is inevitably booted out of office, what will his going rate be?"

"I'm a woman, I'm a lesbian, nobody's cancelling me and I want trans people to be able to live with dignity and happiness and for newspapers and politicians to leave them the hell alone."

"Once upon a time intellectuals made great prolific statements about race, saying "I think you'll find the statistics show more BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) people, crime goes up". They might have been an intellectual, but they were also a racist. The vast majority of people don’t know a lot about the trans community, and why should they? They are less than one per cent of the population."

"You sound if I head to bed, Sajid Javid? Absolutely shattered."

"Ooo I'm back to being a ned this week, what a buzz. I'm sure it'll be back to a middle class liar with a fake accent next week though."

"It takes a true writer to show us what has been missing in our lives. No one can give the writer an assignment that his own impulse has not bespoken but more than his security should inform him. "The pen," said Kafka to Janouch, "is not an instrument but an organ of the writer's.""

"We have the lowest pensions in Europe, the lowest sick pay, we pretend the minimum wage is a living wage when it’s not. We miss our own economic targets time and time again. We’re happy to break international law. We are turning into a country where words hold no value and over the last 12 years I fear we are sleepwalking closer and closer to the f-word and I know everyone is scared to say it for fear of sounding over the top or being accused of going too far. But I say this with all sincerity, when I say the f-word, I’m talking about facism. Fascism wrapped in red, white and blue."

"I've been challenged going into female toilets before, course I have. Are you kidding? I'm the sort of person who can deal with it, but there was one time I didn't even have to and it was one of the most powerful things I've experienced. There was a woman beside me who said [to the person questioning me] "Who the hell do you think you are, who are you to police this?" That is exactly what I needed in that situation, I didn’t have power, but the woman beside me did. In this debate, I'm the person with the power and I'm not leaving trans people behind."

"Anybody ever watch Gilmore Girls? Mind when Paris built herself a fort in the newsroom of the paper so nobody could talk to her? That's the Prime Minister."

"Just seen a stag do floating down the Thames. As their boat went past, they began pointing at Parliament chanting, 'you don't know what you're doing, you don't know what you're doing...' Probably the most accurate commentary yet."

"Now the government, quite rightly, pays for me – through taxpayer's money – to be able live in London whilst I serve my constituents. My housing is subsidised by the taxpayer. Now the Chancellor [then George Osborne] in his budget said, "It is not fair that families earning over £40,000 in London should have their rents paid for by other working people." But it is ok so long as you're an MP? In this budget the Chancellor also abolished any housing benefit for anyone below the age of 21. So we are now in the ridiculous situation whereby, because I am an MP, not only am I the youngest, but I am also the only 2o-year-old in the whole of the UK that the Chancellor is prepared to help with housing."

"Folk don't recognise the difference between being unfairly cancelled and being held accountable, those are two very different things. Criticising someone for what they said in public, in front of an audience, that's criticism - that's not anyone attacking you or denying you because you're a lesbian or whatever. It's nonsense. There are definite bad actors at play, radicalising people who are vulnerable, radicalising people who are too online, and using this small community as a wedge issue to create chaos."

"So after spending weeks running down the clock telling us the EU will never reconsider the backstop, the Prime Minister is now going to head back to Brussels to ask them to reconsider the backstop."

"I was not surprised by the reactions of women following my performance in Bloomington. One woman in the stage crew ran up and exclaimed, "They're standing up; they're giving you a standing ovation." the surprise in her voice told me that she had never seen a poetry performance; she had never felt the energy reverberate through a room with the Audre Lordes, Adrienne Richs, and Judy Grahns of this world. The glow in her face also told me that she would do so in the future."

"In 1973 a lesbian-feminist press collective in Oakland published a long poem by a working-class lesbian, Judy Grahn. In "A Woman Is Talking to Death" Grahn gives chapter and verse to the "death" that is self-denial, accepted disempowerment, passivity, mutual betrayal. ("Death sits on my doorstep/ cleaning his revolver.") Stylistically it transits from a long, open narrative line to dialogue to blocks of prose to invocation, from linear anecdote to surreal images. What's notable is the freedom of line and voice, a colloquial diction with surges of intensity. A great public poem, emerging from a new and vital women's movement, expanding the political imaginary of Whitman and Duncan, enlarging the potentialities of gay and lesbian poetry. In sometimes raw urgency, it locates its voice in the class- and race-inflected lives of everyday "common women"...Grahn herself wrote of the poem: "The particular challenges... for me were ... the criss-cross oppressions which... continually divide us-and how to define a lesbian life within the context of other people in the world. I did not realize at the time that I was also taking up the subject of heroes in a modern life which for many people is more like a war than not, or that I would begin a redefinition for myself of the subject of love."

"poetry readings were incredible. I mean, people like Judy Grahn could bring 500 people to a reading."

"In the women's consciousness-raising groups I belonged to in the early 1970s, we shared personal and very emotional stories of what it had really been like for us to live as women, examining our experiences with men and with other women in our families, sexual relationships, workplaces and schools, in the health care system and in surviving the general societal contempt and violence toward women. As we told our stories we found validation that our experiences and our reactions to them were common to many women, that our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings made sense to other women. We then used that shared experience as a source of authority. Where our lives did not match official knowledge, we trusted our lives and used the collective and mutually validated body of stories to critique those official versions of reality. This was theory born of an activist need, and the feminist literature we read, from articles like "The Politics of Housework" and "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" to the poetry of Susan Griffin, Marge Piercy, Alta, Judy Grahn, and others, rose out of the same mass phenomenon of truth-telling from personal knowledge."

"The texts themselves must be addressed, and now that the ancient mythology that directly impacted the Abrahamic texts is available, it is clear that initially women had sacred place/office, with numerous goddesses who were powerful creation deities. Inanna has a female goddess companion who is as close to her as the male lover of King Gilgamesh was to him. The research of Will Roscoe and others has made clear that homosexual and transgender people held sacred office and participated in her rituals. And Inanna is both immanent within, and protective of, nature. Her radiant powers are erotic and interactive, accessible and creative. Her stories are richly psychological."

"In particular, I’m occupied by addressing the roots of oppressive conditions, the origins of outdated and harmful ideas and practices."

"Among them the most important single influence on my work at present-and for the last couple of years-has been Judy Grahn. In her poetry she works for clarity and she works for ease of comprehensibility so that anybody walking into your reading can understand what you're saying and anybody who picks up the book can understand what you're saying. She's taught me a great deal about doing that and simplifying the structures that are so ridiculously obscure. Some of the changes you've noticed in my work come directly from studying her work as well as living with her. I wrote "Recuerdo," and "Los Angeles 1980" and "Laguna Ladies Luncheon" before I met her, so I was moving in that direction. But it's like she jumped it up."

"The burning questions of my life have been to discern what obstacles prevent me and the people I love—“wounded communities” I sometimes say, though they are also vibrantly alive and creative—from living fully engaged, accepted, lives. This has meant changing attitudes and practices in psychiatry, the military, police, families, the public, the law—toward women, LGBTQI, BIPOC people, and nature. What can I do to further these changes?"

"I came into civil rights and feminist consciousness in the middle of the American war on Vietnam, and the police and FBI war on the Black Power and nonviolent civil rights movements. I experienced the violence at People’s Park and at Altamont, and the news reports of the assassination of Harvey Milk in San Francisco, and the mass murder of nine hundred mostly African American men women and children by a trusted white man at Jonestown. The Left seemed paralyzed, while the Right moved into more overt white supremacy and homophobia. And religious fundamentalism, already excluding and punishing LGBT+ people, became more aggressive and threatening. Meanwhile Rachel Carson told us we faced a “silent spring” if we did not change our economic and philosophical habits. The world, my friends and I decided, was lacking in mother love, at both the local, personal level, and the macro, religious and ethical level. A large number of us went looking for the goddess, among other things, any goddess who might give us a handle on establishing love, compassion and a maternal way of solving problems, as guiding principles."

"I found out that Santa Teresa was sent to the convent by her father because they caught her kissing a woman cousin. I had been reading Judy Grahn's poem "I Have Come to Claim Marilyn Monroe's Body," and at the same time I was reading about what happened to Teresa's body: how they dug her up, how people had taken different pieces of her, and how her body did not really belong to her but to the Church. I started making the connection with what happens to women's bodies now."

"purple is of the spirit and denotes a change from one world or life position to another. In recent times, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marked the greatest single change in the American economic and political viewpoint since the time of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt fifty years earlier. And the fashion industry responded in kind, reflecting 1981 as a year of change by coming out with racks of clothes for men and women that featured every shade and hue of purple."

"Judy Grahn traced the probable origin of the word "dyke" in the English language to Boudica, the warrior queen of the Celtic tribes who led a fierce uprising against the Roman conquest of the British Isles in 61 C.E."

"In her study of gay culture, Another Mother Tongue, Judy Grahn envisions the women warriors in the lesbian tradition from antiquity to the persecution of lesbians in the U.S. armed forces since World War II. Grahn begins her odyssey of the lesbian warrior with the Celtic queen Boudica. Grahn disclosed details of the Amazon peoples on the European and African continents, who lived circa 3000 B.C.E. The oldest of these peoples were Libyan in northwest Africa who "were known not only as warriors but as founders of cities," most of which were named after their female generals, such as Myrine, Mytilene, Elaia, Anaia, Gryneia, Kyme. "At the city of Ephesus the Amazons established a shrine and magnificent statue to the Goddess Artemis." Included in this section of Grahn's book is a description of one of the many horrific witch-hunts of lesbians in the U.S. army in modern times. This ended in Grahn's discharge in 1960. "Military authority," she writes, "rules by the breaking of pride and dignity as much as by any threat of bodily harm. Nor can anyone humiliate you as deeply as your own." Describing this period in her life, Grahn continues: "Discharged into a poor area of Washington, D.C., with $80 and utter demoralization... I found that despair has no bottom; it can multiply itself indefinitely, inside the mind and outside. . . . I thrashed about at the bottom of the well of degradation among the more demoralized of America's people.... But I had to put the pieces of my life back together somehow." Grahn emerged from this time "fighting, studying, making notes on my own about Gay people I knew," embodying the warrior legacy she was soon to uncover in her search and make available to us."

"Buzzing to be baptised tonight!! My faith is such a massive part of my life and so now I’m ready to be dunked (yep it’s a full immersion baptism) and say publicly that Jesus is my Saviour."

"Bella felt so real. It was like Ellie realized in live action. It didn’t feel like watching an actor."

"We were looking for a specific combination of contradictions: Someone that can be funny and quirky, and violent and rough. I didn’t see Bella acting like Ellie — I saw Ellie."

"I seriously considered that maybe I don’t want to be famous so I’m not going to do this show [The Last of Us] because it’s going propel me to a place I don’t want to go to in terms of being seen and being known. I like to blend in and hide."

"It’s only recently that I’ve accepted I am Ellie, and I can do it, and I am a good actor. But this will last for a few weeks and then I’ll think I’m terrible again. That’s just the process."

"I guess my gender has always been very fluid. Someone would call me ‘she’ or ‘her’ and I wouldn’t think about it, but I knew that if someone called me ‘he’ it was a bit exciting. … I’m very much just a person. Being gendered isn’t something that I particularly like, but in terms of pronouns, I really couldn’t care less."

"There isn’t always an answer but let me tell you this — there’s always a way out. There’s always light at the end of the tunnel no matter how dim it might seem. I am fortunate to have reached that light, at moments it felt non existent. But it was always there. For me that light was Jesus. My faith played a huge part in my recovery [from anorexia] and so did my family. I don’t know your stories but I felt compelled to share mine. Keep on speaking, do not be silent. Let’s continue to break the silence around mental health."

"Good luck when you wake up / And realize all that you've lost / Shining lies are what you're made of / I hope it's worth the price that it cost"

"As my closest friends and I have now begun to really grow into ourselves, it can feel heart-wrenching to witness people you love fall for a moment, or lose sight of the goodness they have within themselves when they're struggling. As a friend we just want to pick them up and show them who we really know them to be — to try to cheer so hard on the sidelines over how incredible they are, and how much they mean to us, but at the end of the day of course it's only them who can discover their own light on their own."

"So cherry chaotic, the taste of losing control / I'm chasing down the drip sip down the rabbit hole / Now I'm staring down the metal barrel of your gun / I surrender on a bender, you're the drug."

"As I enter this new moment, I wanted to explore the vulnerability I've felt in finding balance with submission, dominance, and sexuality. I've had to dive into my own body to feel the deeply powerful but also dangerous feelings of relinquishing control."

"Feeling pretty cute until I ran into you/ Chewed me up and spit me out like gum on your shoe/ And if you’re free and you’ve got nothing better to do/ Go ahead, destroy me, destroy me."

"Why would I want to stay here? To hell with this place."

"The future is endless, you just never know. You can do whatever you want next, and I’m just going to do whatever I want."

"He’s disgraced the House of Representatives, and we do not consider him one of our congresspeople. Today, on behalf of the Nassau County Republican Committee, I am calling for his immediate resignation."

"Well guess what? Rosa Parks didn't sit in the back and neither am I going to sit in the back."

"No, I was not a drag queen in Brazil, guys. I was young and I had fun at a festival. Sue me for having a life."

"The most recent obsession from the media claiming that I am a drag Queen or "performed" as a drag Queen is categorically false. The media continues to make outrageous claims about my life while I am working to deliver results. I will not be distracted nor fazed by this."

"He's a terrible human being. He does not deserve to be in the House of Representatives. He deserves to be in a federal prison. And I think the issue of expulsion is going to be something that a lot of my colleagues are going to talk about."

"All of us in this room can agree that when we look at slavery, it was barbaric. Fifty years from now, we’re going to look back at what we’re doing in this country and we are going to say ‘we killed babies out of the womb? We aborted our own? That is barbaric.'"

"I'm a gay married man, I am openly gay, have never had an issue with my sexual identity in the past decade, and I can tell you and assure you, I will always be an advocate for LGBTQ folks."

"My grandfather fleeing Ukraine in 1920s to Belgium, and fleeing Belgium to Brazil in 1940. It's a story of survival, of tenacity, of grit, as we like to call it. My mother migrated to the United States in search of the American Dream, as I said today, I am her American Dream."

"I was at the Ellipse on January 6th. That was the most amazing crowd, and the president was at his full awesomeness that day, it was a front row spectacle for me."

"I'm not a fraud. I'm not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up this fictional character and ran for Congress."