13 quotes
Anything that liberates is not without risk.
Interpretations are best made with the long view in mind.
A Queer History of the United States (2011)
Shame...is a first rate form of social control. Shame is what keeps us in line, what prevents us from discovering not so much who we are, but what we might become.
History is an ongoing process through which we understand and define ourselves and our lives.
A Queer History of the United States (2011)
Today we routinely use LGBT, a fairly recent, and accepted, amalgamation of identities, each of which has a specific history that often had little to do with the others.
A Queer History of the United States (2011)
Full citizenship was, and to a large degree still is, predicated on keeping 'unacceptable' behavior private. This complicated relationship between the public and private is at the heart of LGBT history and life today.
A Queer History of the United States (2011)
It is impossible to understand American history—including the position of LGBT people—without acknowledging the overwhelming, debilitating effect that slavery has had on this country
A Queer History of the United States (2011)
At its best “art” is subversive and can change the world. Thus, making it not only a viable threat, but a dangerous one.
Interview (2023)
language is both an entryway and a dead end.
A Queer History of the United States (2011)
Pedagogy, like history, will never be able to contain all of America-a great country, an evil country, a place of tremendous generosity and welcome as well as pronounced disdain for foreigners and outsiders. America is not one thing or another. America is queer.
A Queer History of the United States (2011)
in America, equality under the law is a complicated affair. Certainly it is true that while laws are for everyone, they are often enforced mainly against the disenfranchised.
A Queer History of the United States (2011)
Whatever sexuality means today and did not mean before, the word, like others before it, has always attempted to describe something we know is not reducible to a word, an identity, or even a set of behaviors.
A Queer History of the United States (2011)
The second decade of the twenty-first century—just 150 years after Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kurtbeny, early LGBT rights theorists, ignited the idea of same-sex freedom in 1868—we find ourselves in a heady, global maelstrom of unimaginable liberation and continued stark oppression.