I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.

Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.

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.

It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make the strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

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

I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable. . . .

stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.