Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.

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.

Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.

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

It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.