When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

For within livin structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

...my experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

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