As a writer, I must be free to say what is in all the diversity I can command. I regret the distorting prejudices that surround me..., whether they affect homosexuals or men or the physically handicapped and I can't alone defeat them. They will not defeat me, either as a lesbian or a writer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Charity is a cop-out so traditionally female in its apparent self-effacement that there seems resonant comfort in it. We're no lon...ger supposed to serve the imaginations of men who have dominated us. We are to give up ourselves instead to those whose suffering is greater than our own. Looking down is just as distorting as looking up and as dangerous in perpetuating hierarchies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The terrifying message of gay liberation is that men are capable of loving their brothers. It should be sweet news to every woman ...in the world, for, if the capacity of men to love whom they have been taught to treat as competitors and enemies can transcend their education, the world can begin to heal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perha...ps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now that our sexual experience is increasingly available to us as a subject for contemplation, we have to extend our language to e...xpress our new consciousness until we have as many words for sexuality as the Eskimo has for snow, that pervasive, beautiful, and mortal climate in which we all live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression. The argument goes that, if peop...le could see just how many of us there are, some in very important places, the negative stereotype would vanish overnight. ...It is far more realistic to suppose that, if the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a sort that would shock even the pessimists among us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »