To go to bed and to wake up again day afte day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor a...
There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living between pain and suffering. Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named and then used in some way in order for the experie...
The tensions created inside me by the contradictions is another source of energy and learning. I have always known I learn my most lasting lessons about difference by closely attending the ways in whi...
Survival is the greatest gift of love
Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people? Insight must illuminate the particulars of our lives: who labors to make the br...
Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideasl The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are...
[…] your smile has been to war
When you read the words of Langston Hughes you are reading the words of a Black Gay man. When you read the words of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimké, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, you a...
We cannot love ‘our people’ unless we love each of us ourselves, unless I love each piece of myself, those I wish to keep and those I wish to change—for survival is the ability to encompass difference...
Sadomasochism is an institutionalized celebration of dominant/subordinate relationships. And it prepares us either to accept subordination or to enforce dominance. , to affirm that the exertion of pow...
I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty that destroys its own young in passing - not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope...
I cannot recall the words of my first poem but I remember a promise I made my pen never to leave it lying in somebody else's blood.
Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences,...
May I never lose that terror that keeps me brave
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.
When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.
Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets m...
Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a , which each one of us within our hearts knows that is not me. In america, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, het...
I wasn't cute or passive enough to be femme, and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be butch. I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.