I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.

Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.

I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

...and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago. . . .

Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.

The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation .